Investigating the Associations among Core Cognitive Vulnerability, Internalizing Symptoms, and Negative Situational Experiences: A Longitudinal Network Analysis

Purpose: The goal of the present research was to investigate the temporal dynamics of the core cognitive vulnerability and individual internalizing symptom characteristics and to explore the role of negative events in relation to the core cognitive vulnerability and symptoms.Methods: Adopting a network approach, we fitted a multilevel vector autoregressive model to ecological momentary assessment data from 223 university students collected over 21 days – modelling associations between the core cognitive vulnerability, perceived event negativity, and 12 internalizing symptoms.Results: In the between-person network, core cognitive vulnerability was positively associated with the avoidance of anxiety-provoking situations, indicating that those with higher levels of core cognitive vulnerability on average tended to avoid anxiety-provoking situations more severely on average. In the contemporaneous network, momentary core cognitive vulnerability was associated with various momentary symptoms. In the temporal network, increases in momentary core cognitive vulnerability predicted subsequent increases in the severity of three specific symptoms – anxious mood, fear, and feeling like a failure. Interestingly, momentary core cognitive vulnerability predicted subsequent increases in the perceived event negativity, but perceived event negativity did not predict subsequent increases in momentary core cognitive vulnerability.Conclusions: Our findings show that the core cognitive vulnerability is differentially associated with symptoms at the between-person and within-person levels of analysis. On a moment-to-moment basis, core cognitive vulnerability temporally precedes and influences the severity of emotional symptoms and perceived event negativity. We discuss study implications and outline directions for future research to clarify the etiology of internalizing psychopathology.