Development of symptoms of emotional problems from childhood to adolescence: a longitudinal network analysis

Background: Epidemiological studies document increasing incident rates of mental disorders across childhood and adolescence, with mood and anxiety disorders particularly increasing among adolescent females. Research also indicates that these emotional problems have become more prevalent in recent decades. Yet, there is still a lack of understanding of the interrelated development of distinct emotional symptoms from childhood to adolescence. Methods: Here, we investigate and compare symptom dynamics in males and females. To accomplish this, we leveraged longitudinal data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) study (N = 9338, 50.1% males at baseline). We used five items (worries, unhappy, nervous, fearful, somatic complaints) derived from the parent-reported Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) emotional problems scale, measured at seven timepoints (mean age = 9.52, range = 4.0-18.3 years old, N observations = 15,443). We estimated a panel Graphical Vector Autoregressive network model (GVAR) and statistically compared the networks of males and females. Results: The temporal network, reflecting how temporal fluctuations predict one another, showed that almost all symptoms predicted future values and were reciprocally associated over time, with the strongest edges between fearful-nervous and unhappy-worries. Somatic complaints were however only predicted by fearful across time. The contemporaneous network, reflecting within-person associations between symptoms within the same measurement window, and the between-person network, showed similar structures, although with fewer and stronger associations in the latter, highlighting trait-like differences across development. The networks of males and females were not statistically different, indicating similar symptom associations across development for both sexes.Conclusions: the study delineates the developmental dynamics of emotional problem symptoms across childhood and adolescence, highlighting bidirectional influences between core symptoms of depression and anxiety, but did not find support for sex differences in their developmental interrelatedness.