Anxiety and depression disorders are the biggest mental health hazards of our time and in many ways closely related. The first anxiety disorder episodes emerge during childhood, while the first depression episodes more typically emerge in adolescence. Such early episodes are highly predictive for lifespan developments. This chapter reviews literature on dynamic system perspectives on anxiety and depression across scales of temporal resolution, from affect and highly contextualized emotion episodes to more persistent moods that evaluate the world as a whole, and the personality traits anxiety and depression that capture thematic recurrences of feelings, thoughts and behavior along the lifespan and how people talk about themselves. These various processes are intimately connected via their self-organizing and dynamic nature and circular causality, which demonstrates how dynamic system perspectives can help us to understand anxiety and depression across the lifespan.
The great review on the connection between neuroticism and psychopathology by Brandes and Tackett (2019) was read by me with interest, approval, and surprise, because a time dimension was missing. A developmental perspective may provide this Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) with mechanistic substance via the intricate interconnections between emotions, symptoms and personality processes as they evolve within each of us over the life span. Additionally, we disagree about neuroticism being the most difficult personality dimension to measure and the absence of frustration as a key element of neuroticism in youth. Also the most recent meta-analytic review of the prospective associations between neuroticism and the common mental disorders was missing. Finally, a strictly dimensional approach leaves me with many questions including why some people with high neuroticism scores do not develop disorders and are healthy and happy.
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