Curiosity might not help after all: Predicted trajectories for need for cognition and anxiety and depression symptoms based on findings by Zainal and Newman (2022)

In a recent article, Zainal and Newman (2022) reported that need for cognition (NFC) predicted anxiety and depression symptoms (ADS) across 10 years in a large (N = 6750) sample of community-dwelling adults, and furthermore that a within-person decrease in NFC was associated with an increase in ADS. Here, we analyze the modeling approaches used in that paper, and show that the two different modeling strategies employed give contradictory results, suggesting that the results are influenced by statistical artifacts and should be interpreted with caution.