Self-referential processing interacted with subjective social status in school to predict internalizing psychopathology in early adolescence: Distinct patterns for social anxiety and depressive symptoms

During the transition into adolescence, internalizing symptoms become increasingly prevalent. One identified risk factor for internalizing psychopathology is youths’ subjective social status (SSS) in school, which refers to youths’ subjective perception of their position relative to peers in school. However, it remains unclear to what extent the SSS-symptom association may be moderated by self-referential processing – another construct that undergoes significant development during early adolescence. We examined the interaction between school-based SSS and self-referential processing (indexed by behavioral and neurophysiological measures) in predicting social anxiety and depressive symptoms among emerging adolescents. A community sample of 115 nine-to-12-year-old children (66 girls, Mean/SD=11.00/1.16 years) completed an EEG self-referent encoding task (SRET) and completed questionnaires on school-based SSS and symptoms of social anxiety and depression. We found an interaction between self-referential processing and school-based SSS in predicting social anxiety: higher school-based SSS predicted greater social anxiety symptoms for those with lower positive SRET scores. There were no significant effects for depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that school-based SSS and self-referential processing may be differentially associated with social anxiety and depressive symptoms in early adolescents. Future longitudinal work is warranted to better understand the underlying mechanisms of these associations.