Within‐person longitudinal associations between depressive symptoms and interpersonal problems in adolescent girls

BACKGROUND: Adolescence, particularly for girls, is a period of heightened risk for depressive symptoms and increased interpersonal stress. Although depressive symptoms and interpersonal problems are known to co-occur, prior work has predominantly examined between-person associations, leaving within-person processes unclear. This study addressed this gap by testing longitudinal within-person associations between depressive symptoms and interpersonal problems in adolescent girls over 4 years, evaluating whether links were reciprocal or unidirectional. METHODS: Participants included 543 adolescent girls from the Pittsburgh Girls Study. Across four waves (mean ages = 16.5-19.3 years), girls self-reported depressive symptoms and eight types of interpersonal problems: domineering, vindictive, cold, socially avoidant, nonassertive, exploitable, overly nurturant, and intrusive. For each interpersonal problem, we fit both constrained and unconstrained random intercept cross-lagged panel models and selected the constrained model unless it demonstrated a significantly poorer fit than the unconstrained model, prioritizing parsimony. RESULTS: The selected models demonstrated good fit for all eight interpersonal problems. Within-person increases in depressive symptoms predicted subsequent within-person increases in overly nurturant and socially avoidant problems, whereas these interpersonal problems did not predict subsequent within-person increases in depressive symptoms. By contrast, depressive symptoms and domineering problems reciprocally predicted one another over time. CONCLUSIONS: This study clarifies how depressive symptoms and interpersonal problems influence one another over time within individuals in adolescent girls. Findings highlight domineering problems as a potential intervention target for breaking cycles of mutual reinforcement with depressive symptoms. Moreover, addressing depressive symptoms may yield social benefits by reducing subsequent overly nurturant and socially avoidant problems.