2024-25 Virtual Colloquium Series – Friendships in Adolescence: A Lifeline or a Load?

Friendships are crucial relationships during adolescence, affording youth many socioemotional benefits, including mitigating risk for the development of mental health challenges. Ironically, however, youth in distress who may benefit most from supportive friendships tend to experience the erosion of these social supports over time, triggering a problematic cycle of distress and rejection. Moreover, those friends who do stay close with distressed youth are actually at increased risk for developing mental health problems themselves. This talk will review the protective benefits of adolescent friendships, as well as the risks associated with certain types of friendships.

Attendees will be able to:

* Identify the protective benefits of close friendships in adolescence
* Understand mechanisms at work in the depression-rejection cycle
* Explore processes that help to explain the socialization (or “contagion”) of distress
* Examine the socioemotional tradeoffs of unique friendship processes in adolescence