Resilience Factors and Their Association with Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms: An Intergenerational Perspective

Characterizing variability in youth mental health trajectories from risk to resilience is crucial for elucidating the heterogeneity present within clinical populations. Limited knowledge exists regarding the intergenerational associations of resilience factors. The present study aimed to examine the associations between resilience factors and psychopathology in youth referred for outpatient psychiatric evaluation and their parents.

Dyads of children and their parents (N=99; 99 children and 99 parents) treated in a child and adolescent psychiatry outpatient clinic completed assessments for resilience factors and internalizing psychopathology. Internalizing symptoms were assessed using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale (GAD-7); resilience factors were measured using the Risk and Resilience (R&R) battery, focusing on self-reliance and emotion regulation.

Youth's emotion regulation and self-reliance demonstrated inverse associations with their anxiety and depressive composite score, derived by averaging standardized PHQ-9 and GAD-7 scores to represent internalizing symptoms (β=-0.5, p <0.0001; β=-0.27, p = 0.001 respectively). Parental emotion regulation was inversely associated with parental anxiety and depressive symptoms (β=-0.70, p <0.0001), but parental self-reliance was not (β=0.04, p=0.67). No intergenerational correlation was identified between parent-child anxiety and depressive symptoms (P-values>0.38) nor between resilience factors (P-values>0.47). Lastly, multivariate analyses revealed no association for parental anxiety and depressive symptoms or resilience factors with child symptoms.

These findings contribute to the growing body of evidence on the relationship between the resilience factors of emotional regulation and self-reliance and anxiety-depression symptoms in youth. However, no intergenerational associations were observed between of resilience factors and internalizing psychopathology in both parents and youth.