Unraveling the longitudinal reciprocal associations between anxiety, delinquency, and depression from early to middle adolescence

Research that simultaneously tests developmental associations between anxiety, depression, and delinquency is limited. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that anxiety would inhibit involvement in delinquency, whilst involvement in delinquency would be a risk factor for later depression. During middle school, a large sample of Greek Cypriot adolescents completed measures of anxiety, depression, and delinquency across four waves (N = 1451 in wave 1: 50.1% girls, Mage = 12.12, SD = 0.55; N = 1224 in wave 4). Analyses of longitudinal data supported the study's hypotheses after controlling for the common variance among the variables at each point of measurement. Altogether, the current results showcase that anxiety and depression are inversely related to delinquency, in that depression positively predicted later delinquency, whereas anxiety negatively predicted delinquent behaviors. Further, delinquency was a risk factor for future depression, but not anxiety, pointing to a bidirectional association between delinquency and depression. A multi-group path model showed that findings held across sex, with one exception, being that the relation between delinquency and depression during early adolescence was only significant for girls. The present study demonstrates that future research must consider uni- and bi-directional effects when disentangling longitudinal associations between anxiety, depression, and delinquency