Our multivariate growth-curve analyses showed that young adult romantic relationship quality moderated the effect of early caregiving to predict anxious-depressed symptom intercepts. There were no main effects for early caregiving or romantic quality, as is often the case in the presence of fan-shaped interactions (Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003). There was also a significant slope interaction in the model containing gender as the only covariate; however, probing this effect revealed no significant simple slopes. Thus, there was no support for the hypotheses that symptom levels may change over time for the low early caregiving/low adult romantic quality configuration or the low early caregiving/high adult romantic quality configuration. Instead, the initial differences in anxiety-depression symptoms (described in more detail below) were sustained over the nine-year period.
