Within- and across-day patterns of interplay between depressive symptoms and related psychopathological processes: a dynamic network approach during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Background In order to understand the intricate patterns of interplay connected to the formation and maintenance of depressive symptomatology, repeated measures investigations focusing on within-person relationships between psychopathological mechanisms and depressive components are required. Methods This large-scale preregistered intensive longitudinal study conducted 68,240 observations of 1706 individuals in the general adult population across a 40-day period during the COVID-19 pandemic to identify the detrimental processes involved in depressive states. Daily responses were modeled using multi-level dynamic network analysis to investigate the temporal associations across days, in addition to contemporaneous relationships between depressive components within a daily window. Results Among the investigated psychopathological mechanisms, helplessness predicted the strongest across-day influence on depressive symptoms, while emotion regulation difficulties displayed more proximal interactions with symptomatology. Helplessness was further involved in the amplification of other theorized psychopathological mechanisms including rumination, the latter of which to a greater extent was susceptible toward being influenced rather than temporally influencing other components of depressive states. Distinctive symptoms of depression behaved differently, with depressed mood and anhedonia most prone to being impacted, while lethargy and worthlessness were more strongly associated with outgoing activity in the network. Conclusions The main mechanism predicting the amplifications of detrimental symptomatology was helplessness. Lethargy and worthlessness revealed greater within-person carry-over effects across days, providing preliminary indications that these symptoms may be more strongly associated with pushing individuals toward prolonged depressive state experiences. The psychopathological processes of rumination, helplessness, and emotion regulation only exhibited interactions with the depressed mood and worthlessness component of depression, being unrelated to lethargy and anhedonia. The findings have implications for the impediment of depressive symptomatology during and beyond the pandemic period. They further outline the gaps in the literature concerning the identification of psychopathological processes intertwined with lethargy and anhedonia on the within-person level.

A critical period for pandemic adaptation: The evolution of depressive symptomatology in a representative sample of adults across a 17-month period during COVID-19.

“…Longer periods of strictly implemented SDPs were tied to longer periods of deleterious depressive symptom expression after the SDPs were lightened. This finding is in line with the etiological explanations of depressive problems, describing how prolonged constellation of symptoms for longer periods carry over across time through increased connectivity between symptoms (e.g., American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Ebrahimi, Burger, et al, 2021). The findings point toward additive risk of long-term exposure to such socially isolating and mobility restricting protocols.…”

COVID protection behaviours, mental health, risk perceptions and control beliefs: A dynamic temporal network analysis of daily diary data

“…One previous temporal dynamic network study (26) suggested that connectedness and inperson social contact were key resources for lower depressive symptomatology, and that loneliness was a key factor in predicting depression. Our data replicates the strong contemporaneous and between-person relationship between loneliness and depressive symptoms, and we also found a (small) contemporaneous relationship between momentary adherence to social distancing behaviours and loneliness -but not depressive symptoms.…”

“…Only few studies have employed temporal dynamic network analysis in the context of mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Ebrahimi et al (26) show that experiences of helplessness during the pandemic increase depressive symptoms and identified particular risk factors for carry-over effects. Haucke et al (27) compared networks between lockdown and non-lockdown periods in Germany and found increases in loneliness during lockdown periods, which in turn predicted worse mental health.…”

Mental health and environmental factors in adults: A population-based network analysis

“…This quantifies the magnitude of a specific node's direct connections to all other nodes, to yield the overall importance of each node in the network. Strength centrality was visualised using radar plots, as previously recommended in the literature (Ebrahimi et al, 2021).…”

“…Symptoms of anxiety and depression have high prevalence in the general population and represent a considerable burden to societies worldwide (GBD 2019 Diseases andInjuries Collaborators, 2020). The prolonged constellation and long-term stability of such symptoms may emerge into mental health disorders (e.g., Ebrahimi et al, 2021), and while efficacious treatments are available, many individuals do not respond to current treatments (Barth et al, 2016;Cipriani et al, 2009). In response, there have been calls highlighting the importance of efforts to prevent depression and anxiety in the population (Bienvenu & Ginsburg, 2007;Cuijpers et al, 2012).…”