Do everyday stress, anxiety and low mood feed each other?
In students' daily lives, feeling anxious or low predicted feeling more stressed a few hours later, which in turn predicted still more anxiety or low mood, and anxiety and low mood also fuelled each other.
Source
Tracking perceived stress, anxiety, and depression in daily life: a double-downward spiral process
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Intensive longitudinal experience-sampling study: three phone surveys a day for 12 days, analysed with lagged multilevel mediation models.
- N
- N=141 · 141 college students retained after excluding 31 of 172 recruits with under 75% completion; 4,015 momentary reports analysed.
- Population
- Healthy Chinese university students with no reported history of mental disorder
- Outcome
- Momentary perceived stress, anxiety and depression ratings (0-100) at successive time points
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Students received a link on their phones three times a day (morning, afternoon and late evening) for 12 consecutive days and rated how stressed, anxious and depressed they felt right then. The researchers used multilevel models that tested lagged chains: whether a feeling at one survey predicted a second feeling at the next survey, which then predicted the first feeling at the survey after that.
What they found
Anxiety or low mood at one moment predicted higher stress at the next moment, and that stress partly carried the link to more anxiety or low mood at the following moment; stress likewise predicted later stress via intervening anxiety and low mood. Anxiety and depressed mood also mediated each other's persistence over time. The authors call these two interlocking loops a double-downward spiral. The lagged effects were modest in size, meaning each moment nudged the next rather than determining it.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The data are correlational, so the lagged links show temporal prediction, not proof that one feeling causes the next; unmeasured daily events could drive all three. Anxiety and depression were each measured with a single self-report item, so they capture momentary feelings, not clinical disorders, and no physiological or behavioural measures were taken. The sample was healthy Chinese college students, and the excluded low-completers reported higher depression, so the most distressed people may be under-represented.
Key terms
- Experience sampling method (ESM)
- Repeatedly asking people to report their current feelings or experiences in real time during everyday life, usually via phone prompts.
- Downward spiral
- A self-reinforcing loop in which a negative state raises another negative state, which then feeds back to worsen the first.
- Hierarchical linear model
- A multilevel regression that separates variation within a person across time from differences between people.
- Lagged mediation
- Testing whether variable X at one time predicts Y at a later time through a mediator M measured in between.
- Intraclass correlation (ICC)
- The share of total variance in a measure that is due to stable differences between people rather than fluctuation within people.
Flashcards
0 of 10 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
Which method did the study use to collect data?
Common questions
Does this show that stress causes depression?
No. It shows that stress at one moment predicts later low mood (and vice versa) within the same person, which fits a causal loop, but the study did not manipulate stress and cannot rule out other daily events driving both.
Why use repeated phone surveys instead of one questionnaire?
Retrospective questionnaires average over weeks and are prone to memory bias; momentary reports let researchers see how feelings change and follow one another over hours.
Were the participants clinically depressed?
No. They were healthy students who reported no history of mental disorder, and the ratings reflect everyday fluctuations in mood.
More on Stress