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Category: Project

Description: The COVID-19 pandemic has substantially affected adolescents‘ emotional life. Emerging research documents changes in adolescent loneliness and negative feelings during times of pandemic (Alt, Reim, & Walper, 2021; Entringer & Gosling, 2022), but further work is needed to identify the reciprocal links between loneliness and negative feelings across longer time intervals. Moreover, changes in adolescents' feelings may be associated with the specific conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic on the one hand, but also with normative changes in the course of adolescents’ individuation processes. The present three-wave longitudinal study (representative data based on the German pairfam panel) from mid- to late adolescence (15 to 18 years at T1) aime to examine the direction of the effect between loneliness and depressive symptoms, using bivariate dual change score models (e.g., Kievit et al., 2018; Klopack & Wickrama). Besides specifying local (i.e., changes between two adjacent measurement time points) and general changes (i.e., change across all measurement time points), the aime is to model the reciprocal effects (i.e., cross-lagged paths) between loneliness and negative affect. In addition, the robustness of these associations will be tested by examining the role of extraversion and neuroticism as explaining factors and moderators.