Chapter 3 100 datasets), even though the datasets had somewhat different sample characteristics and instruments. Overall, this pattern of findings suggests that adolescents experience more depressive symptoms at times they perceive their own parents as less supportive than they typically are. This concurrent effect may reflect a negative bias on interpersonal relationships that goes hand in hand with increased depressive symptoms (Rudolph, 2009). Of course, it should be noted that this concurrent association, in which more depressive feelings co-exist with the perception of receiving less parental support, may only be true for a subset of adolescents (L. H. C. Janssen, Elzinga et al., 2021). Yet, an important question in our study pertained the direction of effects. In other words, does diminished perceived support by parents trigger depressive symptoms in adolescents, or vice versa, does elevated adolescent depressive symptoms evoke more perceived parental support in the short term, but erode the perception of the parent-adolescent relationship later on? Based on the emotional insecurity perspective (Cummings & Davies, 1995) and the IPARTheory (Rohner, 2016), we hypothesized that adolescents would report a within-family increase in depressive symptoms when they experienced their parents to be less supportive than before. However, in most datasets we did not find such lagged effect from parental support to adolescent depressive symptoms within families. Only when we ran additional analyses to explore biennial within-family lagged effects with the annual dataset (but not with the preregistered biennial dataset which had a smaller sample), we found that increases in perceived parental support predicted fewer depressive symptoms in adolescents within families 2 years later. Together, our findings seem to suggest that increases in perceived parental support may not directly contribute to subsequent changes in adolescents’ depressive symptoms in the short term, but possibly only at a much longer timescale. Nonetheless, a recent ESM study found that increased perceived parental support predicted a decrease in negative affect 3 hours later (Bülow, Van Roekel, et al., 2022). Intriguingly, this ESM study also demonstrated that this lagged effect of perceived parental support on negative affect differed from adolescent to adolescent, not only in size but also in direction. Hence, as an average (null) effect can be misleading when the effect is in fact heterogenous (Bolger et al., 2019; Keijsers & Van Roekel, 2018), future studies that also assess potential effect heterogeneity at other timescales can provide more detailed insights of the role of parental support in adolescents’ depressive symptoms. As interpersonal theories of depression highlight the transactional nature between depressive symptoms and interpersonal functioning (Coyne, 1976; Hammen, 2006; Rudolph, 2009), we also assessed the lagged effect from adolescent depressive
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