How state and trait versions of self-esteem and depressive symptoms affect their interplay: A longitudinal experimental investigation.

= 1,087) with samples of university students, designed as a 2 × 2 longitudinal experiment with 4 time points spanning 1 semester. Our results indicated that first, consistently across the 2 studies, trait time frames revealed higher proportions of trait variance than state time frames. Second, across the 2 studies, the well-researched vulnerability effect, which postulates that low self-esteem predicts depressive symptoms, only held when trait time frames for self-esteem were applied and traditional cross-lagged models were used. Third, when controlling for stable trait differences, cross-lagged results were least consistent when trait time frames were used, which highlighted the interdependency involved in measuring and modeling states and traits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).