Dynamic system perspectives on anxiety and depression

Abstract

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.

Inter-Individual Differences in Multivariate Time-Series

“…Emotional blunting processes seem slightly pronounced over lag 2 and 3 ( Figure 2). Given these results cluster 4 people are likely to be characterised by high neuroticism scores (Jeronimus, 2019).…”

Studying Behaviour Change Mechanisms under Complexity

“…In clinical psychology, intensive monitoring of psychopathological symptoms has allowed researchers to examine symptoms’ variability, autocorrelations and other indicators of dynamics during interventions. This has yielded considerable advances in the prediction of phase transitions between adaptive and maladaptive psychological states [ 58 , 126 , 127 , 128 ]. A conceptual replication in a population undergoing a weight loss intervention [ 129 ] recently found that sudden drops in physical activity levels could be predicted by the emergence of erratic fluctuations in day-to-day physical activity.…”

Social Interaction Processes and Personality

“…A number of dynamic system approaches focusing on the closely related fields of personality dynamics (Cervone, 2005;Fajkowska, 2015;Jeronimus, 2019;Nowak, Vallacher, & Zochowski, 2005;Pervin, 2001;Read et al, 2010;Richardson, Dale, & Marsh, 2014;Sosnowska, Kuppens, De Fruyt, & Hofmans, 2019;Vallacher, Michaels, & Nowak, this volume), affective dynamics (Hollenstein et al, 2013;Kuppens, Oravecz, & Tuerlinckx, 2010;Kuppens, & Verduyn, 2017), and social interaction dynamics (Hollenstein & Lewis, 2006;Gottman, Murray, Swanson, Tyson, & Swanson, 2003;Pennings et al, 2014) have been introduced in recent years. Some of these approaches already provide mathematically formalized generic models of how personality systems stabilize and change and that show clear links to the social interaction dynamics outlined in this chapter.…”