Abstract
Many longitudinal studies have investigated whether self‐esteem predicts depressive symptoms (vulnerability model) or the other way around (scar model) in adolescents. The most common method of analysis has been the cross‐lagged panel model (CLPM). The CLPM does not separate between‐person effects from within‐person effects, making it unclear whether the results from previous studies actually reflect the within‐person effects or whether they reflect differences between people. We investigated the associations between self‐esteem and depressive symptoms at the within‐person level, using random intercept cross‐lagged panel models (RI‐CLPMs). To get an impression of the magnitude of possible differences between the RI‐CLPM and the CLPM, we compared the results of both models. We used data from three longitudinal adolescent samples (age range: 7–18 years; study 1: N = 1948; study 2: N = 1455; study 3: N = 316). Intervals between the measurements were 1–1.5 years. Single‐paper meta‐analyses showed support for small within‐person associations from self‐esteem to depressive symptoms, but not the other way around, thus only providing some support for the vulnerability model. The cross‐lagged associations in the aggregated RI‐CLPM and CLPM showed similar effect sizes. Overall, our results show that over 1‐ to 1.5‐year time intervals, low self‐esteem may negatively influence depressive symptoms over time within adolescents, but only weakly so. © 2018 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology
Highlights
Adolescence is a period marked by many social, physical, and emotional changes, and going through these transitions has its effects on adolescents’ self-esteem and depressive symptoms (Hankin, 2006)
The intraclass correlations (ICCs) for self-esteem and depressive symptoms indicated that 37% of the variance of self-esteem could be explained by between-person differences (63% by fluctuations within persons) and 53% of variance of depressive symptoms could be explained by between-person differences (47% by fluctuations within persons)
Participants who scored higher or lower than their expected self-esteem score tended to score higher or lower than their expected depressive symptoms score on T1; and at T2 and T3, participants whose self-esteem changed from one wave to the other tended to change in depressive symptoms but in the opposite direction
Summary
Adolescence is a period marked by many social, physical, and emotional changes, and going through these transitions has its effects on adolescents’ self-esteem and depressive symptoms (Hankin, 2006). Strong support has been found for the vulnerability model, such that low self-esteem seems to make adolescents vulnerable to developing depressive symptoms (Sowislo & Orth, 2013). This effect has been shown to be very robust, to occur in boys as well as girls, and to remain present after controlling for content overlap between self-esteem and depression and for Big Five personality traits (Masselink et al, 2017; Sowislo, Orth, & Meier, 2014). Support has been found for the scar model as well (e.g. Schiller, Hammen, & Shahar, 2016; Shahar & Davidson, 2003), but scar effects have been found less often than vulnerability effects and seem to be smaller (about half the effect size; Sowislo & Orth, 2013)
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