Are Short-Term Temporal Relationships between Depressive and Anxious Symptoms Moderated by Sex?

Abstract

The chief goal of the present study was to elucidate whether the short-term temporal relationships between depressive and anxious symptoms vary by sex. Three hundred and fifty-seven undergraduate students self-reported depressive and anxious symptomatology with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) and the Beck Anxiety Index (BAI) two times 11 weeks apart. A latent variable path model analysis found support for a bi-directional relationship between depressive symptoms and anxious symptoms for the overall sample. An equality constraint analysis revealed that depressive symptoms predicted anxious symptoms over time to a similar extent as anxious symptoms predicted depressive symptoms over time. However, several temporal relationships significantly varied by sex, namely, females demonstrated greater stability of depressive symptoms over time, and evidenced a stronger cross-lag relationship from depressive symptoms at Time 1 to anxious symptoms at Time 2, and males, on the other hand, exhibited a marginally more stable anxious symptoms test-retest relationship over time. The results supported the existence of a bi-directional relationship between depressive and anxious symptoms over a short-term period of time for emerging adults. We conclude that current states of depressive symptoms may be more influential for females’ subsequent negative affective states, whereas anxious symptoms may be more important for males’ subsequent negative affective states.