Back to Normal? Harnessing Long Short-term Memory Network to Examine the Associations Between Adolescent Social Interactions and Depressive Symptoms During Different Stages of COVID-19

Adolescence is a developmental period in which social interactions are critical for mental health. While the onset of COVID-19 significantly disrupted adolescents’ social environments and mental health, it remains unclear how adolescents have adapted to later stages of the pandemic. We harnessed a machine learning architecture of Long Short-Term Memory recurrent networks (LSTM) with gradient-based feature importance, to model the association among daily social interactions and depressive symptoms during three stages of the pandemic. A year before COVID-19, 148 adolescents reported social interactions and depressive symptoms, every day for 21 days. One hundred sixteen of these youths completed a 28-day diary after schools closed due to COVID-19. Seventy-nine of these youths and additional 116 new participants completed a 28-day diary approximately a year into the pandemic. Our results show that LSTM successfully predicted depressive symptoms from at least a week of social interactions for all three waves (r² > .70). Our study shows the utility of using an analytic approach that can identify temporal and nonlinear pathways through which social interactions may confer risk for depression. Our unique analysis of the importance of input features enabled us to interpret the association between social interactions and depressive symptoms. Collectively, we observed a return to pre-pandemic patterns a year into the pandemic, with reduced gender and age differences during the pandemic closures. This pattern suggests that the system of social influences in adolescence was affected by COVID-19, and that this effect was attenuated in more chronic stages of the pandemic.