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Emerging adulthood is an important developmental phase often accompanied by peaks in loneliness, social anxiety, and depression. However, knowledge is lacking on how the relationships between emotional loneliness, social loneliness, social isolation, social anxiety and depression evolve over time. Gaining insight in these temporal relations is crucial for our understanding of how these problems arise and maintain each other across time. Young adults from a university sample (N = 1,357; M = 23.60 years, SD = 6.30) filled out questionnaires on emotional and social loneliness, social isolation, depressive and social anxiety symptoms at three time points within a 3‐year period. Random intercept cross‐lagged panel models were used to disentangle reciprocal and prospective associations of loneliness subtypes, social isolation, depressive and social anxiety symptoms across time. Results showed that on the within‐person level, increases in emotional and social loneliness as well as social isolation predicted higher depression levels on later timepoints. Increases in depressive symptoms also predicted increases in subsequent social loneliness, but not in emotional loneliness. Finally, increases in depressive symptoms predicted increases in social isolation. There were no significant temporal relations between loneliness and social isolation on the one hand and social anxiety symptoms on the other hand. Social distancing imposed by COVID‐19 related government restrictions may have impacted the current results. The findings suggest that emotional and social loneliness precede development of depressive symptoms, which in turn precedes development of social loneliness and social isolation, indicating a potential vicious cycle of social loneliness, social isolation and depressive symptoms in emerging adulthood. Social anxiety did not precede nor follow loneliness, depressive symptoms, or social isolation. The current study sheds more light on the temporal order of loneliness and psychopathological symptoms and hereby assists in identifying times where prevention and intervention efforts may be especially helpful to counter development of depression and loneliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study examined the content-specificity of dysfunctional social beliefs to Social Anxiety Disorder (SoAD) in a large, clinically referred sample of children with a variety of anxiety, mood and externalizing disorders. The effects of comorbidity on the content-specificity of dysfunctional social beliefs were examined. Method: Participants included 912 children aged 7–12 years (Mage = 9.15; 45.5% female) who presented at a specialized clinic for assessment and treatment of anxiety disorders. Children with SoAD were compared to children with nonsocial anxiety disorders, children with SoAD and mood disorders, and children with SoAD and externalizing disorders, on self-reported dysfunctional social threat beliefs, physical threat, hostility, and personal failure beliefs. Results: Children with SoAD endorsed significantly higher levels of dysfunctional social threat beliefs when compared to children with nonsocial anxiety disorders. However, children with SoAD and mood comorbidity scored significantly higher on dysfunctional social beliefs than all other groups. Conclusions: Results suggest that within childhood anxiety disorders, dysfunctional social beliefs are content-specific for SoAD. Externalizing comorbidity does not seem to change the level of dysfunctional social beliefs in this group. However, mood comorbidity leads to endorsement of higher levels of dysfunctional social beliefs. These results provide support for, and refine, the content-specificity hypothesis and highlight the importance of taking comorbidity into account when examining and treating dysfunctional beliefs in youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]