Dynamic Associations Among Symptoms of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression During the First Year Following Entry into Junior High School: Evidence from a Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model and Network Analysis

Abstract

This study examined dynamic associations among stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms during the first year of junior high school, a developmental period in early adolescence characterized by heightened vulnerability to psychological problems. A total of 503 students who had recently entered junior high school completed the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 (DASS-21) at three time points, six months apart. Random-intercept cross-lagged panel modeling and network analysis were used to examine longitudinal symptom associations. Results revealed that, at the between-person level, symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression were highly correlated (rs = 0.86–0.94), with their shared variance largely captured by a general factor. At the within-person level, anxiety showed significant autoregressive effects, and higher-than-usual anxiety at one time point was prospectively associated with higher-than-usual stress at the subsequent time point (ps ≤ 0.001). Among boys, breathing difficulty and worry about panic or embarrassment showed the highest out-expected influence values, whereas scared without any good reason and over-reacting to situations showed the highest values among girls. These findings suggest that, in the current study sample, anxiety may represent a potentially important focus for future intervention research and that the exploratory sex-stratified symptom patterns warrant further investigation.