Chapter 3 76 INTRODUCTION Depressive symptoms emerge from a complex interplay of biological and psychosocial risk factors (Rudolph, 2009). Depressive symptoms include feelings of sadness, irritability and worthlessness or guilt, loss of pleasure and energy, and problems with sleep, weight, and concentration (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). An important theorized risk factor is the lack of (emotional) support from parents (Cummings & Davies, 1995; Rohner et al., 2005), which includes the provision of affection, intimacy, comfort, and guidance (Furman & Buhrmester, 1985; Rohner, 2016). As experiencing depressive symptoms in adolescence increases the risk for later depressive disorders in adulthood (Pine et al., 1999), unraveling the role of parental support in their etiology warrants attention. Much research has focused on understanding risk factors for adolescent depression at the population level by assessing differences between families, demonstrating that adolescents who perceive lower levels of parental support experience more depressive symptoms compared to adolescents who perceive higher levels of parental support (Pinquart, 2017b). However, theoretically, parental support and depressive symptoms impact each other at the within-family level: between an adolescent and his or her own parents (Hamaker, 2012; Keijsers, 2016; Molenaar, 2004). For example, an adolescent might start to experience more depressive symptoms because he or she perceived a drop in his or her parents’ supportive behavior (Cummings & Davies, 1995; Rohner, 2016). Hence, when studying the transactional links from parenting to adolescent depressive symptoms, and vice versa, over-time associations within the same families should be assessed (i.e., within-family association). Extending a small body of empirical studies at the within-family level (Boele et al., 2020; L. H. C. Janssen, Elzinga, et al., 2021; Vaughan et al., 2010), we tested how the potential transactional processes (i.e., bidirectional effects) between perceived parental support and depressive symptoms of adolescents unfold within families at micro- (daily), meso- (bi-weekly and three-monthly), and macro-timescales (annual and biennial). Additionally, we tested whether these potential transactional processes varied due to stable individual differences, that is, adolescents’ sex and neuroticism. Transactional Processes Between Parental Support and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms There is a strong theoretical basis to assume that parental support affects adolescents’ depressive symptoms. For example, the experience of diminished parental support may
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw