For Girls Only? Conditioning the Mediated Relationship between Depression, Cognitive Impulsivity, and Delinquency on Sex

Abstract

The objective of this study was to determine whether sex moderates the indirect effect of depression on delinquency via cognitive impulsivity and if so, whether the effect is stronger in girls than in boys. Participants for this study were 845 (406 boys, 439 girls) middle school students who completed surveys annually between the sixth and eighth grades. A moderated mediation analysis revealed that the depression → cognitive impulsivity → delinquency pathway was moderated by sex, whereas the direct effect of depression on delinquency was not. Simple mediation analyses performed on male and female youth separately revealed that the pathway running from depression to cognitive impulsivity to delinquency was significant only in girls. The results of this study demonstrate how mediation and moderation can be used to integrate concepts from different theories, which in the current case included Beck’s cognitive theory of depression and gendered pathways perspective from feminist criminology.