Dynamic System Perspectives on Anxiety and Depression

Anxiety and depression disorders are the biggest mental health hazards of our time and in many ways closely related. The first anxiety disorder episodes emerge during childhood, while the first depression episodes more typically emerge in adolescence. Such early episodes are highly predictive for lifespan developments. This chapter reviews literature on dynamic system perspectives on anxiety and depression across scales of temporal resolution, from affect and highly contextualized emotion episodes to more persistent moods that evaluate the world as a whole, and the personality traits anxiety and depression that capture thematic recurrences of feelings, thoughts and behavior along the lifespan and how people talk about themselves. These various processes are intimately connected via their self-organizing and dynamic nature and circular causality, which demonstrates how dynamic system perspectives can help us to understand anxiety and depression across the lifespan.