The transition from adolescence to adulthood is marked by heightened vulnerability to depressive symptoms, particularly among females. Depression can be conceptualized as a complex system of interacting symptoms and has long been linked to life satisfaction. However, little is known about the prospective relations among individual symptoms as a network or their temporal associations with life satisfaction in females and males. Using data from the nationally representative China Family Panel Study (CFPS), we applied panel network analysis to assess depression networks and its associations with life satisfaction among 2,186 females and 2,151 males, aged 18–25, across three waves (2016, 2018, and 2020). This approach distinguished within- and between-person effects and employed a panel graphical vector autoregression model to estimate three types of networks. In the within-person temporal network, the key predictive symptoms for females were not getting going (most stable and outgoing) and effortfulness (ingoing), while for males, depressiveness (most stable and outgoing) and sadness (ingoing) were central. Life satisfaction had prospective and reciprocal associations with loneliness in females and with depressiveness in males. In the within-person contemporaneous network, sadness, depressiveness, and loneliness were strongly covaried with other symptoms for both genders.These findings highlight gender difference in the complex network of depressive symptoms and their prospective pathways with life satisfaction. These underscore the importance of gender-specific interventions to reduce psychopathology and promote well-being during the transition to adulthood.

Authors:
Xiaofang Weng, Beijing Normal University, China
Yuxuan Liang, Beijing Normal University, China
Wei Cui, Beijing Normal University, China
Zhuo Rachel Han, Beijing Normal University, China

About the Presenter(s)
Xiaofang Weng is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University. Her major research interests include emotion regulation, the parenting process, and child and adolescent development.

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