Promoting the emotional strength of young people

Can you still remember situations in which you argued with friends as a teenager? And how you then took your frustration out on a family member? Relationships and emotions are closely linked - especially during adolescence.

Although relationships can sometimes trigger negative emotions, they can also support our optimism and positive interactions with others. A surprise birthday party, for example, can be a joyful experience that creates positive memories with friends and strengthens peer relationships.

In the long run, the interplay of emotions and relationships can affect mental health in both positive and negative ways. The ability to process emotions and maintain healthy relationships can prevent teens from getting caught up in negative spirals that can trigger or exacerbate mental health problems.

Breaking the negative spiral

The good news is that there are strategies that can help young people to break through such negative spirals. My colleagues and I use the terms «ego strategies» and «we strategies» for this.

«Ego strategies» can help young people to process their emotions and change their feelings about a situation. The following strategies are all associated with positive effects on mental health:

• Looking for positive rather than negative emotions in other people's facial expressions trains emotional perception. With this approach, teenagers learn to identify positive emotions in the other person. This helps them to overcome their natural tendency to judge facial expressions as more negative than they actually are.
• Those who engage in (positive) self-talk have the opportunity to distance themselves from a situation or evaluate it less negatively. This is how we train emotion regulation. Self-talk like this helps young people to put a situation into perspective and adjust their emotions.
• By perceiving physical changes such as an increased pulse rate, teenagers can recognise emotions. This trains their interoceptive perception - in other words, their understanding of their body's signals.

Practising such emotion processing strategies can improve mental health. To my knowledge, there is no study that specifically focuses on helping young people apply these skills in everyday life. Instead, researchers are trying to train these skills in a laboratory setting. They do not take into account how these strategies could be used in real life.

The techniques we call «we strategies» help teenagers to resolve relationship conflicts. Many of these strategies may sound familiar. They include empathising with others, cutting someone some slack and using «I» messages when talking about your feelings. However, we often forget these strategies in the heat of the moment - just when they would be particularly helpful.

Engage constructively with the other person

My colleagues and I encourage teenagers to think about how they would use these strategies in an argument. This can empower them to avoid further conflict. By using «we strategies», they think about the reasons for a problem and how they can constructively engage with the other person to resolve the issue. For example, a young person might use «I» messages to explain to a friend why they have felt ignored recently.

In the past, researchers tended to focus on either social skills or the ability to process emotions - but not both. However, addressing both skills simultaneously could be the key to preventing mental health problems from developing or worsening during adolescence. People with mental health problems often struggle with their emotions and find it difficult to relate to those around them.

Giving young people the skills to process their emotions in a healthy way can prevent the onset of mental health problems.

With this in mind, we are testing new types of interventions at schools in which we teach young people these «I» and «we» strategies in group sessions. The aim of the ReSET project (Building Resilience through socio-emotional Training) is to reduce negative spirals. At the same time, skills are taught that support positive spirals. These are intended to prevent the development or escalation of mental problems.

Puberty is a critical phase in social and emotional development. Giving teenagers the skills to process their emotions in a healthy way and communicate with those around them can prevent the onset or worsening of mental health problems. I hope that our experiments will help young people to master this often difficult phase in their lives.

This text first appeared in English on BOLD - Blog on Learning and Development.