Peer facilitation of emotion regulation in adolescence

Abstract

Emotion regulation is particularly important for adolescents as they undergo normative developmental changes in affective systems and experience heightened risk for psychopathology. Despite a high need for emotion regulation during adolescence, commonly studied emotion regulation strategies like cognitive reappraisal are less beneficial for adolescents than adults because they rely on neural regions that are still developing during this period (i.e., lateral prefrontal cortex). However, adolescence is also marked by increased valuation of peer relationships and sensitivity to social information and cues. In the present review, we synthesize research examining emotion regulation and peer influence across development to suggest that sensitivity to peers during adolescence could be leveraged to improve emotion regulation for this population. We first discuss developmental trends related to emotion regulation at the level of behavior and brain in adolescents, using cognitive reappraisal as an exemplar emotion regulation strategy. Next, we discuss social influences on adolescent brain development, describing caregiver influence and increasing susceptibility to peer influence, to describe how adolescent sensitivity to social inputs represents both a window of vulnerability and opportunity. Finally, we conclude by describing the promise of social (i.e., peer-based) interventions for enhancing emotion regulation in adolescence.

Keywords: Adolescence; Emotion regulation; Friendships; Peer influence; Reappraisal.

Fig. 1

Functional maturity of VS, VMPFC, and LPFC across age. The above figure builds on existing figures showing the neurodevelopmental imbalance between prefrontal and limbic functional maturity (Casey et al., 2008) to specifically highlight and include the relative functional maturity of brain regions we propose may be involved in social emotion regulation: lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and ventral striatum (VS).

Fig. 2

Reappraising with help from a friend was more effective than reappraising alone in adults. The above figure exhibits the “solo” and “social” emotion regulation (ER) tasks conducted in studies of healthy adult friend pairs (Sahi et al., 2021, Sahi et al., 2023). The solo task began with a 2 s cue to “look” or “reinterpret” followed by an image presentation for 8 s, and a rating screen for 3 s. The social task followed a similar procedure, except that instead of seeing a cue to “reinterpret” they saw a cue to “listen” to their friend reinterpret the image. The image was presented for 1 s before the audio clip played (9 s total). Across three studies (figure pictured here is from study presented in Sahi et al., 2023), reappraising with help from a friend was associated with lower negative affect than reappraising independently. * ** = p < .001.