A study of young adolescents in the Netherlands found that having more reciprocated friendships among classmates might be protective against internalizing mental health symptoms. Adolescents with more unreciprocated friendships, on the other hand, tended to be more anxious and to have a stronger desire for more friends. The paper was published in Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
Adolescence is a critical period of transition from childhood to adulthood, characterized by rapid physical, cognitive, emotional, and social changes. One of the most important developmental tasks in this period is the formation of a coherent identity. To achieve this, adolescents explore different roles and integrate various aspects of themselves.
They also strive for autonomy and independence, seeking to establish their own values and make decisions separate from their parents. Adolescents also face the challenge of developing a sense of purpose and direction in life, which can involve exploring career options and making decisions about their future.
Peer relationships become increasingly important in adolescence compared to childhood and instrumental for most of the other developmental goals. These relationships provide social support and critical opportunities for developing social skills. While executive functions and social cognition continue to mature, adolescents become particularly sensitive to social rewards.
However, social experiences are not always rewarding. In this sensitive period, social experiences can dramatically influence adolescents’ vulnerability to internalizing mental health symptoms (psychological issues that are directed inward, such as anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal).
Study author Reubs J. Walsh and his colleagues wanted to better explore the links between the number of school friends an adolescent has and the severity of internalizing mental health symptoms. Internalizing mental health symptoms refer to psychological issues that are directed inward, such as anxiety and depression. Previous studies already indicated that adolescents with more friends in their school environment tended to have a much lower risk of developing internalizing symptoms and disorders.
However, the authors of this study believed that this link depended on the adolescent’s emotional and cognitive response to the number of friends, not on the objective number of friends. They hypothesized that if an adolescent has a stronger desire to have more classroom friends than he/she has, he/she would adopt social goals and behaviors that would undermine the protective effects of the existing friendships.
The study involved 423 first- and second-year high-school students from the Netherlands, aged between 11 and 15, including 209 girls from 19 different classes. Initially, a larger pool of participants was considered, but the methodology for mapping friendship links required the inclusion of most class members in the study. Consequently, classes with less than 70% of students consenting to participate were excluded, resulting in the current participant count.
Participants were asked to complete sociometric nomination questions, identifying classmates they preferred for various activities, and to list up to 15 classmates they considered friends. The researchers compared responses to identify reciprocated friendships (where pairs of adolescents listed each other as friends) and unreciprocated friendships (where one adolescent listed another as a friend without reciprocation).
Participants also completed assessments on social goals, perception of their social network (including the desire to have more friends, be more popular, and be liked more), social anxiety (using the Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Adolescents), and depression (using the Beck Youth Inventory Depression Scale).
Results showed that adolescents with more reciprocated friendships tended to have a lower desire for more friends, lower anxiety, and lower depression symptoms. In contrast to that, a higher number of unreciprocated friendships was associated with a higher desire to have more friends and more severe symptoms of anxiety and depression.
The study authors tested a statistical model suggesting that a higher number of reciprocated friendships leads to a reduced desire to make more friends. This reduced desire then leads to stronger social goals (such as developing social skills, demonstrating them to others, or avoiding situations where one’s social incompetence would be exposed), which, in turn, lead to higher levels of depression and anxiety. The results supported the possibility of this relationship model.
However, of the social goals, only the desire to avoid situations where one’s social incompetence would become visible was associated with anxiety and depression symptom severity. On the other hand, the social goals were associated with each other, so the more an adolescent felt the need to avoid situations where his/her social incompetence would show, the more likely he/she was to also seek situations where others would see his/her social skills and to develop these skills.
The authors concluded, “As predicted, the link between numbers of friendships and internalizing symptoms was mediated in two steps. First, adolescents with fewer reciprocated classmate friendships expressed a stronger desire for more classmate friendships. Second, adolescents who expressed a stronger desire for more friendships endorsed more demonstration-avoidance goals, which in turn predicted more internalizing symptoms.”
“This may reflect a tendency toward status-oriented social behavior in adolescents with a strong desire for more friends, and increased attention to social status may come at the expense of cultivating interpersonal intimacy in extant friendships, and promote psychosocially maladaptive attention allocation in social situations. However, not all predictions were supported; no beneficial effect of development goals was observed, and number of unreciprocated friendship nominations was positively associated with desire for more friendships and social anxiety.”
The study makes a valuable contribution to the scientific understanding of the links between mental health and one’s social network. However, the study design does not allow any cause-and-effect inferences to be made from the results. While it is indeed possible that the number of mutual or unreciprocated friendships affects the symptoms of social anxiety and depression through the proposed mechanism, it is also possible that adolescents with higher social anxiety and more depressive symptoms experience more difficulty in making friends (the reverse direction of the causal chain). These are not the only possibilities.
The paper, “A Few Close Friends? Adolescent Friendships’ Effect on Internalizing Symptoms Is Serially Mediated by Desire for More Friends and Social Goal Orientation,” was authored by Reubs J. Walsh, Nikki C. Lee, Imke L. J. Lemmers-Jensen, Miriam Hollarek, Hester Sijtsma, Mariët van Buuren, and Lzdia Karbbendam.