(PS5-72) Emotional Rigidity Prospectively Predicts Future Depressive Symptoms in Adolescence

Background: Adolescents are known to be at elevated risk to develop Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), a severe emotional disorder that carries substantial personal and social consequences, including an elevated risk of suicide. Despite effective psychological and pharmacological interventions for MDD, about 50% of all depressed adolescents do not respond to treatment. To prevent the onset of MDD and to enhance treatment efficacy for this highly prevalent and debilitating disorder, it is crucial to address risk factors predicting its onset. One potential risk factor is maladaptive and rigid emotion dynamics, which findings suggest is linked with current depressive symptoms. Prominent theories propose that emotional rigidity not only characterizes depression but also functions as an "early warning signal" preceding its onset, implying that timely intervention targeting rigidity could potentially prevent the onset of future depression. The current study aimed to extend previous studies by examining whether emotional rigidity is a risk factor predicting future depressive symptoms in adolescence. 

Methods: Participants (n=117) were adolescents aged 12-15 with no history of MDD. They rated their positive and negative emotions in four daily ecological momentary assessment (EMA) surveys over 30 consecutive days (total observations = 10,712). Depressive symptoms were assessed using self-report (the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale; CES-D) at baseline and every 6 months during the 24-month follow-up. Personalized emotional networks were constructed for each participant, and emotional rigidity was quantified as the strength of the emotion network connectivity.

Results: Emotional rigidity predicted both concurrent depressive symptoms (r=0.22, p=0.04) and levels of depressive symptoms in a 1-year follow-up (r=0.32, p=0.02). It remained a significant predictor of future depression, even after controlling for other risk factors such as baseline depression, gender, and risk group (i.e., individuals having a parent with history or current depression) (b=1.60, p=0.02).

Conclusions: These results indicate that emotional rigidity may be a robust prospective risk factor for the onset of depressive disorder in adolescence, which could be targeted in a preventative intervention to reduce depression risk.