Late positive potentials elicited by negative self-referential processing predict increases in social anxiety, but not depressive, symptoms from age 11 to age 12.

Social anxiety and depression exacerbate in early adolescence. Maladaptive self-referential processing confers risk for both conditions and can be assessed by the Self-Referent Encoding Task (SRET). Our cross-sectional findings indicated that the SRET-elicited anterior late positive potential (LPP) was uniquely associated with social anxiety symptoms, whereas behavioral SRET scores were uniquely associated with depressive symptoms. Expanding this work, this study investigated whether the SRET-generated behavioral and LPP indices differentially predicted changes of social anxiety or depressive symptoms over time. At baseline, 115 community-dwelling youths (66 girls; Mean age/SD = 11.00/1.16 years) completed an SRET with EEG. Youths reported social anxiety and depressive symptoms at baseline and ∼six and ∼ 12 months later, based on which the intercept and slope of symptoms were estimated as a function of time. A larger anterior LPP in the negative SRET condition uniquely predicted a larger slope (faster increase) of social anxiety (but not depressive) symptoms. Greater positive behavioral SRET scores marginally predicted a smaller slope (slower increase) of depressive (but not social anxiety) symptoms. We provided novel evidence concerning the differential, prospective associations between self-referential processing and changes of social anxiety and depressive symptoms in early adolescence.