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"Happiness in adolescence."
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Well-Being and Romantic Relationships: A Systematic Review in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood
Adolescence and emerging adulthood are both stages in which romantic relationships play a key role in development and can be a source of both well-being and negative outcomes. However, the limited number of studies prior to adulthood, along with the multiplicity of variables involved in the romantic context and the considerable ambiguity surrounding the construct of well-being, make it difficult to reach conclusions about the relationship between the two phenomena. This systematic review synthesizes the results produced into this topic over the last three decades. A total of 112 studies were included, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) guidelines. On the one hand, these works revealed the terminological heterogeneity in research on well-being and the way the absence of symptoms of illness are commonly used to measure it, while on the other hand, they also showed that romantic relationships can be an important source of well-being for both adolescents and emerging adults. The findings underline the importance of providing a better definition of well-being, as well as to attribute greater value to the significance of romantic relationships. Devoting greater empirical, educational, and community efforts to romantic development in the stages leading up to adulthood are considered necessary actions in promoting the well-being of young people.
Journal Article
Sparking Virtuous Cycles: A Longitudinal Study of Subjective Well-Being and Grit During Early Adolescence
In cross-sectional research, subjective well-being and grit are found to be positively correlated. Their mutually reinforcing effects are particularly relevant for youth entering early adolescence because, during this developmental period, both well-being and grit have been shown to predict consequential outcomes later in life. However, their mutual relation has not yet been investigated in early adolescence. This study, therefore, examined the possibility of a virtuous cycle linking subjective well-being and grit during early adolescence. Self-report questionnaires of grit and subjective well-being were completed by N = 5291 children in China (47.6% girls; initial Mage = 9.69, SDage = 0.59) on six occasions over 3 academic years. In random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs), within-person changes in grit predicted within-person changes in subjective well-being 6 months later, and vice versa. Notably, analyses revealed an asymmetry in this cycle: paths from subjective well-being to grit were stronger and more reliable than the converse. Likewise, facet-level analyses showed that the predictive power of the perseverance component (of grit) and the affective component (of subjective well-being), respectively, was greater than the passion and cognitive components, respectively. These findings highlight the potential of boosting happiness for catalyzing positive youth development and, in addition, foreground the utility of studying these composite constructs at the facet level.
Journal Article
Emotion recognition links to reactive and proactive aggression across childhood: A multi-study design
Difficulty recognizing negative emotions is linked to aggression in children. However, it remains unclear how certain types of emotion recognition (insensitivities vs. biases) are associated with functions of aggression and whether these relations change across childhood. We addressed these gaps in two diverse community samples (study 1: aged 4 and 8; N = 300; study 2: aged 5 to 13, N = 374). Across studies, children performed a behavioral task to assess emotion recognition (sad, fear, angry, and happy facial expressions) while caregivers reported children’s overt proactive and reactive aggression. Difficulty recognizing fear (especially in early childhood) and sadness was associated with greater proactive aggression. Insensitivity to anger – perceiving angry faces as showing no emotion – was associated with increased proactive aggression, especially in middle-to-late childhood. Additionally, greater happiness bias – mistaking negative emotions as being happy – was consistently related to higher reactive aggression only in early childhood. Together, difficulty recognizing negative emotions was related to proactive aggression, however, the strength of these relations varied based on the type of emotion and developmental period assessed. Alternately, difficulty determining emotion valence was related to reactive aggression in early childhood. These findings demonstrate that distinct forms of emotion recognition are important for understanding functions of aggression across development.
Journal Article
Changes with Age in Subjective Well-Being Through the Adolescent Years: Differences by Gender
A one-year follow up study was conducted on a sample of 940 Spanish adolescents aged mostly from 10 to 15 in order to explore the extent to which their subjective well-being (SWB) changes from one year to the next, and whether these changes are the same for both genders regardless of the instrument used to measure SWB. Participants responded to the same four SWB scales twice, with an interval of a year in between. A decrease in the levels of SWB is identified from the years 11–12 onwards, the decrease in girls being more marked. Multiple-item, domain-based scales (Brief Multidimensional Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale and Personal Well-Being Index) are more sensitive than single-item scales (Overall Life Satisfaction and Happiness Taking into Account Overall Life) in detecting this decrease. Implications for the study of SWB are discussed from a developmental perspective.
Journal Article
The Role of Perceived Stress and Self-Efficacy in Young People’s Life Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Study
Life satisfaction is an important indicator of successful development. However, adolescents’ life satisfaction tends to be relatively unsteady, and environmental influences play a critical role in shaping life satisfaction among adolescents in the transition to young adulthood. Given the paramount importance that education plays in adolescents’ lives, adolescents’ life satisfaction may vary as a function of school-related stress experience. At the same time, coping resources may help reduce adverse effects of stress on life satisfaction. With this in mind, we examined whether, and to what extent, perceived stress in education and general self-efficacy (a resource that facilitates coping) affect the life satisfaction of adolescents in transition to young adulthood. We distinguished between baseline levels of stress and self-efficacy and within-person change in stress and self-efficacy to determine whether life satisfaction is sensitive to fluctuations in stress and self-efficacy when person-specific levels of stress and self-efficacy are taken into account. Estimating growth curve models on data from a panel study on the life trajectories of compulsory-school leavers (
n
= 5126, 55.3 % female), we found that baseline levels of stress and self-efficacy, as well as within-person change in stress and self-efficacy, affected adolescents’ life satisfaction. Moreover, our results showed that baseline self-efficacy mitigated the negative effect of baseline stress on life satisfaction. These findings improve our understanding of two major psychological determinants of adolescents’ life satisfaction and extend our knowledge of life satisfaction trajectories during the transition to young adulthood.
Journal Article
Understanding anhedonia: a qualitative study exploring loss of interest and pleasure in adolescent depression
Anhedonia (or loss of interest and pleasure) is a core symptom of depression and may predict poor treatment outcome. However, little is known about the subjective experience of anhedonia, and it is rarely targeted in psychological treatment for depression. The aim of this study is to examine how young people experience anhedonia in the context of depression. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 adolescents with a primary diagnosis of depression (N = 12) or elevated depressive symptoms (N = 22). Thematic analysis was used to identify important aspects of adolescents’ experiences. Four main themes were identified: (1) experiencing a loss of joy and a flattening of emotion; (2) struggling with motivation and active engagement; (3) losing a sense of connection and belonging; and (4) questioning sense of self, purpose, and the bigger picture. The results challenge the framing of anhedonia as simply the loss of interest and pleasure. Adolescents reported a range of experiences that mapped closely onto the cluster of negative symptoms associated with schizophrenia and were similar to the sense of ‘apathy’ characteristic in Parkinson’s disease. This highlights the potential benefit of taking a trans-diagnostic approach to understanding and treating reward deficits associated with mental health problems.
Journal Article
How does emotional intelligence predict happiness, optimism, and pessimism in adolescence? Investigating the relationship from the bifactor model
Emotional intelligence (EI) plays a key role in the adjustment of adolescents during this transitional life period. The accumulated evidences suggest that EI is associated with happiness, considered the affective component of subjective well-being and optimism and pessimism, considered cognitive mechanisms to expect either a brighter or darker future. In spite of the relevance of the relationship between EI, happiness, optimism, and pessimism, the majority of the research falls behind findings with adult samples, accumulating little knowledge in the context of adolescence. Furthermore, the measurement of EI has been recently challenged by the introduction of the bifactor model into the study of EI. The goal of the current study was to explore the association of EI with happiness, optimism, and pessimism in adolescence by introducing the bifactor EI model. The participants were 493 Spanish high-school students ranging from 14 to 18 years old (52.7% females) who completed self-report questionnaires. The results demonstrated that the bifactor EI model with an e-factor (general EI factor) and three emotional dimensions (emotional attention, emotional clarity, and emotional regulation) also represented the best well-fitted structure in adolescence. Most remarkably, results suggested that general EI and emotional regulation predicted positively happiness and optimism, while emotional attention predicted positively pessimism and negatively happiness. These results highlight the importance of the measurement of EI in the study of associated outcomes that are considered relevant during the period of adolescence. Hence, the specific role of the EI dimensions are important when explaining the relationship of EI with happiness, optimism, and pessimism.
Journal Article
A Global Decline in Adolescents’ Subjective Well-Being: a Comparative Study Exploring Patterns of Change in the Life Satisfaction of 15-Year-Old Students in 46 Countries
There is a growing body of research that demonstrates declines in subjective well-being and increases in mental health problems among children and young people in recent decades. However, there is little comparative research examining changes in adolescents’ life satisfaction (LS) across a large number of countries, and critically, how this differs across sociodemographic groups. This study addresses this question by investigating changes in the LS of 15-year-old students between 2015 and 2018, with particular attention given to differences by gender, socio-economic status, immigrant background and urbanity. Data for this study come from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Due to the skewed nature of LS scale variables, the current study includes both mean levels of LS in a 0 to 10 scale, and the proportion of students reporting low LS (5 points or less). Linear regression models were used. Results demonstrate a global decline in mean levels of LS in 39 out of the 46 countries. In most countries, mean LS declined more among girls than among boys. Mean LS declined more, and the proportion of students reporting low LS increased more, among non-immigrant students and those of higher SES in the majority of countries. Findings regarding rural or urban communities were mixed. We advise that heterogeneity across all sociodemographic groups needs to be accounted for in public policy efforts to increase LS among young people.
Journal Article