Abstract
Emotional support from friends is a crucial source of social support for adolescents, significantly influencing their psychological development. However, previous research has primarily focused on how this support correlates with general levels of socioemotional problems among adolescents, neglecting the significance of daily fluctuations in these problems. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between friend emotional support and both the average and dynamic indicators of daily emotional and peer problems in adolescents. These dynamic indicators include within-domain dynamics—such as inertia, which reflects the temporal dependence of experiences, and volatility, which indicates within-person variance—and cross-domain dynamics, such as transactional effects, which measure the strength of concurrent or lagged associations between daily emotional and peer problems. Participants were 315 seventh-grade Chinese adolescents (Mage = 13.05 years, SD = 0.77 years; 48.3% girls). Adolescents reported on their friends’ emotional support at baseline and then completed measures of daily emotion and peer problems over a 10-day period. Using dynamic structural equation models, the results revealed that higher levels of friend emotional support were associated with fewer daily socioemotional problems. This was evident both in terms of average levels and dynamic aspects, characterized by lower mean levels of daily emotional and peer problems, reduced inertia and volatility of these problems, and a weaker spillover effect from daily emotional issues to peer problems. These findings highlight the significant role of friend-emotional support in mitigating adolescents’ daily socioemotional challenges.
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The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Funding
This study was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (23ASH014), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32300891), and Guangdong Province Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project (GD24YXL04).
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HW participated in the design and coordination of the study and drafted the manuscript; JX participated in the design of the study, performed the statistical analysis, and drafted the manuscript; SF participated in the design of the study and interpretation of the data; UKT performed the statistical analysis; HR participated in the interpretation of the data; SZ participated in the interpretation of the data; YH performed the statistical analysis and participated in the interpretation of the data; JLZ conceived of the study, and helped to draft the manuscript; ZRH conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Wang, H., Xu, J., Fu, S. et al. Friend Emotional Support and Dynamics of Adolescent Socioemotional Problems. J. Youth Adolescence (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-024-02025-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-024-02025-3