Comorbidity in Context: Patterns of Depressive and Anxious Symptoms in Black Adolescents

Anxious and depressive symptoms often co-occur and are associated with difficulties in academic, social, and emotional areas of functioning. The current study identified the factor structure and profiles of symptoms of anxiety and depression among 169 Black early adolescents in sixth through eighth grade (M age = 12.6 years; 50% female) using confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) and latent profile analyses (LPA), respectively. CFAs supported a six-factor model for depressive symptoms (i.e., dysphoria, social problems, externalizing, self-deprecation, biological dysregulation, and school problems) and a four-factor model for anxiety symptoms (i.e., social evaluation, worry, affective response, and physiological symptoms/sleep problems). These factors formed the profiles for the LPA analyses, and results supported a three-profile solution that included: (a) a low-severity group who reported few anxious or depressive symptoms, (b) a group who reported high levels of externalizing behaviors and moderate levels of school and social evaluation problems, and (c) a group who reported high levels of social evaluation problems and physiological/sleep anxiety. The three groups differed significantly in their ratings of anger regulation difficulties (i.e., anger emotion regulation coping, anger inhibition, and anger dysregulated expression) and their perceptions of the quality of school interpersonal relationships (i.e., student-teacher relationships and student-student relationships). These findings add to our knowledge about how patterns of depressive and anxious symptoms present for Black youth during adolescence and have important implications for the conceptualization, treatment, and prevention of anxiety and depression using culturally sensitive approaches.