A thought experiment: Imagine your best friend just said something hurtful to you. How do you feel?

Now, imagine you are 13 again, and your best friend just said something hurtful to you. How do you feel?

Chances are your “adolescent self” felt that interaction much more strongly than your current self, and research would back you up. Adolescents experience more variability – or bigger swings – in their emotions than children and adults, and adolescent brains appear especially sensitive to negative feedback, like rejection or criticism, from peers. On top of being more emotionally reactive, adolescents are still developing cognitively, and do not always have skills ready to hand for dealing with such strong emotions.

Figuring out how to cope with – or regulate – emotional turbulence is important for adolescents’ daily wellbeing. It’s also important because greater emotional volatility has been shown to be associated with depression and other forms of psychological disorder in adolescence. These tasks are especially important for adolescent girls, since research shows girls are especially sensitive to peer feedback and at higher risk for depression and anxiety.

Our lab was interested in understanding how a phenomenon that had been observed in social psychology, social baseline theory, might apply to adolescent girls ages 11-13 while they attempt to regulate after negative interactions with their peers in their daily lives. Social baseline theory suggests that because we, as humans, are fundamentally social creatures, we have evolved to be most well-regulated when we are in physical proximity to people we care about and feel close to. In a recent study published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, we examined this question.

We sent surveys to girls’ cellphones several times a day, collecting information on their most recent negative interaction with a peer, as well as asking whom they were currently with and how connected they felt to those people. We then looked to see if girls who felt more connected to those in their immediate physical environments were more successful in coming down from – or regulating – their negative emotions from those negative interactions with peers. We found that when girls felt more connected to those around them, they showed greater emotion regulation across the board.

But then we dug even deeper, examining the type of person the girl was around, in order to discover who was the best support to help girls regulate emotions. We found that girls did not benefit quite as much when they were with family members compared to being solely with peers and others. It wasn’t that being with parents or siblings hurt or didn’t help, but rather that girls benefited more when they were with non-family members. We think this may be because teens often take support from families for granted, while their brains are wired to be especially responsive to feedback from others like peers.

How should we think about these results? Well, one primary takeaway is simply that humans need other humans. Adolescent girls benefitted emotionally from being in the physical presence of close others– feeling socially connected in real life – and especially when they were connecting emotionally with people who were not ‘just’ family. For young people who are increasingly functioning in online spaces and digital landscapes, it is notable that this study highlighted the benefits of spending time, in person, with people that adolescents care about when it comes to adolescents' emotional health. We spend a lot of time talking about the potential harms of online activity; we spend much less time talking about the benefits to adolescents’ emotional health of spending time, in person, with people they care about.

Another important takeaway is that adolescent girls do not need to be explicitly asking others for their support to get help feeling better. That’s part of the magic of social baseline theory: Just having a person we feel close to in our physical presence – IRL, ‘touching grass’ with us – it relieves part of our cognitive and emotional load. It makes it lighter. It frees us up to focus on other things. Sometimes we can just be with others, feel close and connected to them, and it will help us feel better. Finding ways to simply be physically present and connected with adolescent girls, and allowing girls opportunities to feel connected in person with peers and others, can be a powerful tool for parents, teachers, and caregivers to support adolescent girls’ emotion regulation and wellbeing.

The Hollywood trope of a teenage girl in distress is a girl with eyes filling with tears, shouting that she “doesn’t want to talk about it” before storming off up to her room. Her parent is left standing at the bottom of the stairs, desperate to help, but not sure how. Imagine you are that Hollywood parent, and you just watched your daughter storm up the stairs. What can you do to help her feel better? Our study is kind of a cheat code for these moments. You don’t need to worry about finding the right thing to say, or encouraging her to talk. But if she asks to have a friend over, plan to say yes. And if not, just be there for her, physically close, and maybe take her and her best friend out for pizza.

Do, Q. B., McKone, K. M., Hofman, S. J., Morrow, K. E., Brehm, M. V., Ladouceur, C. D., & Silk, J. S. (2025). Feeling socially connected to others is linked to better emotion regulation in adolescent girls' daily lives: An ecological momentary assessment study. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 35(1), e70009.

doi.org/10.1111/jora.70009