Questionable prospective associations between internalizing problems and aggression: A comment on Wei et al. (2026)

Wei et al. analyzed longitudinal data on internalizing problems (anxiety and depressive symptoms) and aggression with cross-lagged panel network (CLPN) models. Based on statistically significant cross-lagged effects, Wei et al. concluded a negative feedback loop between internalizing problems and aggression. However, just like the traditional cross-lagged panel model (CLPM), the CLPN model is susceptible to spurious findings. We fitted alternative models to data generated to resemble the data used by Wei et al. and found discrepant positive and negative prospective effects between symptoms of internalizing problems and aggression, depending on the analyzed model, and meta-analytic aggregations of these discrepant effects did not tend to differ significantly from zero. Hence, the findings by Wei et al. may have been spurious and their conclusions premature. It is important for researchers to bear in mind that correlations, including adjusted cross-lagged effects, in observational (i.e., non-experimental) data may be spurious in order not to overinterpret findings. We recommend researchers to scrutinize, as we did here, cross-lagged effects by fitting alternative models to data and to base conclusions on a juxtaposition of findings.