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Stress

Do everyday stress, anxiety and low mood feed each other?

Feng G, Xu X, Lei J · Frontiers in psychology · 2023

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

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.

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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

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Key findings

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.

Methodology

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.

Limitations

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.

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