A Change Would Do You Good…or Would It? The Role of Emotion Variability in Female Adolescents’ Depressive Symptoms

Depressive symptoms increase in adolescence, especially for female adolescents at risk for depression due to dispositional factors, such as temperament. Emotion dynamics, or change in emotional experience over time, may serve as a mutable mechanistic factor for depression. In a sample of 117 adolescents assigned female at birth ages 11-13 (M[SD] = 12.22[0.81], 68% white, 21% Black, 10% Hispanic/Latino, 9% biracial), oversampled for temperamental risk for the development of depression, this study examined emotion variability in association with depressive symptoms, both concurrently and longitudinally over an 18-month period. Further, this study extends the literature by examining associations between emotion variability and depressive symptoms by accounting for individuals' typical levels of positive/negative emotion using two distinct methods: set-points or most frequent emotional state (i.e., mode adjustment) and average levels (i.e., mean adjustment). Results of mode-adjusted longitudinal growth curve models indicated that modal negative emotion, negative emotion variability, and positive emotion variability were all positively associated with adolescent females' depressive symptoms at baseline but were not associated with change in depressive symptoms over time. By contrast, in mean-adjusted models, mean negative emotion was associated with baseline depressive symptoms, whereas variability in negative emotion was not. By contrast, only positive emotion variability was associated with depressive symptoms at baseline, whereas mean positive emotion was not. Neither was associated with change in depressive symptoms over time. Findings suggest that the putative difficulties with reactivity and regulation captured by emotion variability measures are related to adolescent females' depressive symptoms - at least at non-clinical levels.