Journal of Research on Adolescence最新文献

Emotion contagion between parents and adolescents is crucial for understanding adolescents' emotional experiences. However, little is known about how emotion contagion unfolds in daily life and the unique contributions of parent-adolescent relationships. This study examines the associations between parent and adolescent positive and negative emotions, and the moderating role of daily parent-adolescent connectedness. Participants were 191 Taiwanese adolescents (M_age = 12.93; SD_age = 0.75; 53% female) and their parents who completed 10-day diary reports of emotions and parent-adolescent connectedness. Results indicate that higher daily parent negative emotions were associated with more adolescent negative emotions, and higher average parent negative emotions were associated with greater average negative emotions and fewer positive emotions in adolescents. Similar bidirectional effects were also found in adolescent-to-parent emotion contagion. Moreover, on days when connectedness was high, parent negative emotions were not associated with adolescent negative emotions but were related to increased positive emotions. Parent positive emotions were related to more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions when connectedness was low. The findings provide important insights into daily parent-adolescent emotion contagion and highlight parent-adolescent connectedness as a modifying factor in shaping dyadic emotional processes.

This study examined the relation between schools' color-evasive versus multicultural diversity ideologies, school characteristics, and adolescent development. Across two datasets linking individual-level survey data (N = 1692) and administrative records (N = 300,063; M_age = 12.4, 52% female, 48% male), schools' stated support for diversity (via a pro-diversity mission statement) was related to adolescent mental health and academic achievement, but in nuanced ways depending on individual racial/ethnic backgrounds, the racial/ethnic diversity of the student body and teachers, and the extent of racial disparities in discipline and gifted education. Findings suggest that communicating support for diversity without redressing systemic inequities in school discipline and academic tracking will not reduce racism-related achievement gaps and may instead exacerbate mental health disparities.

Adolescence is the peak period for the occurrence of mental health issues, particularly in the stage of junior high school. Depressive symptoms are among the most frequently experienced psychological problems. However, little is known about the symptom-level interaction features of depressive symptoms and the roles of different symptoms across the junior high school stage. To address these gaps, this study conducted a three-year longitudinal study that recruited 1301 Chinese junior high school adolescents (48.2% females; mean age = 12.46 ± 0.62, ranging from 11 to 14 in the first year). The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale was used to assess depressive symptoms. The regularized partial correlation network and the cross-lagged panel network models were used to explore the symptom-level interaction pattern. In regularized partial correlation networks, "I felt depressed" was a stable central symptom throughout the junior high school stage. Besides, "I felt lonely" and "I felt that people disliked me" were the other central symptoms in grade 7 and grade 8, and "I felt everything I did was an effort" played a central role in grade 9. Within cross-lagged panel networks, "I felt that people disliked me" and "I felt hopeless about the future" had important effects on predicting other depressive symptoms from grade 7 to 8 and from grade 8 to 9. By investigating the longitudinal interaction patterns of depressive symptoms among junior high school adolescents, the current study identifies core symptoms that could be potential prevention or intervention targets and provides a novel insight for understanding depressive symptoms during adolescence in depth.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents were extensive, touching aspects of their lives such as those reviewed in this Special Section : school experiences, family relationships, peer relationships, and civic engagement. In parallel with these effects on individuals, the fields of developmental and psychological science were shaken up by this global crisis. The accelerated transition to online data collection and collaboration presented opportunities to expand research on adolescence, breaking down many physical and social barriers to participation and sparking methodological innovation. Yet, this crisis also shed light on the global digital divides and the uneven impacts of the pandemic across the research community. This commentary reflects on the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the methods and methodologies of developmental science, the challenges and opportunities it surfaced, and the populations included and omitted in this period of research. We integrate reflections on how the pandemic shaped our own research and on how the pandemic has shaped the future of developmental science.

The pandemic lockdowns interrupted critical developmental experiences especially for adolescents and emerging adults engaged in the challenge of constructing identities. This commentary focuses on four review articles that document both negative and positive consequences of the pandemic on family, peer, school, and community interactions. I argue that worldwide experiences of these interruptions led to a shared generational experience of disconnection and isolation, that, paradoxically, creates a shared generational identity. The COVID-19 generation shares a view of the world as unsafe, unpredictable, and unfair; yet, at the same time, they are perhaps more oriented toward social justice. Generational identities formed at pivotal developmental moments continue to reverberate across the life course. How these formative experiences of the pandemic will continue to influence the life course of the COVID-19 generation remains to be seen.

Despite the well-established link between mothers' depressive symptoms and youth behavioral problems, it remains unclear whether the mechanism by which mothers' depressive symptoms promote behavioral problems may also be related to individual differences in this relation. Following the three-variable system integrating mediation and moderation, this study used an integrative model to simultaneously examine the mediating and moderating role of emotional reactivity in the longitudinal associations between maternal depressive symptoms and internalizing and externalizing problems in youth. Participants were 1060 youth and their mothers from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (49.7% boys, 81.6% white). Mothers reported their own depressive symptoms at nine waves from infancy through the fifth grade. They also rated adolescents' emotional reactivity in the fifth grade and behavioral problems in the fifth and sixth grades. The results showed that emotional reactivity mediated the longitudinal relations between maternal depressive symptoms and internalizing and externalizing problems in youth. The results also supported the moderation of emotional reactivity. That is, mothers' depressive symptoms were associated with high levels of internalizing and externalizing problems, particularly among youth who were high in emotional reactivity. The findings highlight the dual role of emotional reactivity to better understand the associations between mothers' depressive symptoms and offspring behavioral problems, and emphasize the need to target emotional reactivity to alleviate the adverse impacts of maternal depressive symptoms on behavioral adjustment in early adolescence.

Adolescence involves extensive brain maturation, characterized by social sensitivity and emotional lability, that co-occurs with increased independence. Mid-adolescence is also a hallmark developmental stage when youths become motivated to reflect on the broader personal, ethical, and systems-level implications of happenings, a process we term transcendent thinking. Here, we examine the confluence of these developmental processes to ask, from a transdisciplinary perspective, how might community violence exposure (CVE) impact brain development during mid-adolescence, and how might youths' dispositions for transcendent thinking be protective? Fifty-five low-SES urban youth with no history of delinquency (32 female; 27 Latinx, 28 East Asian) reported their CVE and underwent structural MRI first at age 14-18, and again 2 years later. At the study's start, participants also discussed their feelings about 40 minidocumentaries featuring other teens' compelling situations in a 2-h private interview that was transcribed and coded for transcendent thinking. Controlling for CVE and brain structure at the start: (1) New CVE during the 2-year inter-scan interval was associated with greater gray matter volume (GMV) reduction over that interval in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a central network hub whose reduced volume has been associated with posttraumatic stress disorder, and across multiple additional cortical and subcortical regions; (2) participants' transcendent thinking in the interview independently predicted greater GMV increase during the 2-year inter-scan interval in the ACC. Findings highlight the continued vulnerability of mid-adolescents to community violence and the importance of supporting teens' dispositions to reflect on the complex personal and systems-level implications and affordances of their civic landscape.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of adolescents and young adults across the globe. In response to the pandemic onset, educational institutions were forced to pivot to online learning, a new teaching and learning format for most secondary and university students. This systematic narrative review summarizes findings from 168 publications spanning 56 countries on students' educational outcomes and school climate as well as the internal assets and contextual supports that promoted academic well-being during the pandemic. Our findings suggest that young people commonly reported declines in their academic-related outcomes and school-based relationships due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Internal assets (e.g., intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy) and contextual supports (i.e., relationships with teachers, peers, and parents) promoted academic well-being during the pandemic. Next steps for research on young people's academic well-being during the pandemic are suggested.

In past decades, the positive role of self-control in students' academic success has attracted plenty of scholarly attention. However, fewer studies have examined the link between adolescents' neural development of the inhibitory control system and their academic achievement, especially using a longitudinal approach. Moreover, less is known about the role of parents in this link. Using large-scale longitudinal data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study (N = 9574; mean age = 9.94 years at baseline, SD = .63; 50% girls), the current study took an integrative biopsychosocial approach to explore the longitudinal link between early adolescents' fronto-striatal connectivity and their academic achievement, with attention to the moderating role of parental warmth. Results showed that weaker intrinsic connectivity between the frontoparietal network and the striatum was associated with early adolescents' worse academic achievement over 2 years during early adolescence. Notably, parental warmth moderated the association between fronto-striatal connectivity and academic achievement, such that weaker fronto-striatal connectivity was only predictive of worse academic achievement among early adolescents who experienced low levels of parental warmth. Taken together, the findings demonstrate weaker fronto-striatal connectivity as a risk factor for early adolescents' academic development and highlight parental warmth as a protective factor for academic development among those with weaker connectivity within the inhibitory control system.