Does regulating your emotions make you a better friend?: Examining the correlation between teen’s self-reported emotional regulation and peer conflict. (2024)

Undergraduate: Spoorthi Marada

Faculty Advisor: Eva Telzer
Department: Psychology and Neuroscience

---

Friendship is a critical component of teens’ lives and conflicts within their friendships may impact their mental wellbeing. Emotional regulation is also key to an individual’s social and emotional development. Improper emotional regulation can have adverse effects on mental well-being by exacerbating interpersonal stress (Wang et al., 2024). Uncontrolled emotional reactivity also has the potential to induce stress as it increases risk of social rejection (Calkins et al., 2001). Previous research has described the impact of emotional regulation and reactivity on social, emotional, and behavioral development, but in this study, we examined the effect of regulation and reactivity on friendships. We used self-reported questionnaire data from a longitudinal study on adolescents to find the correlation between emotional regulation and emotional reactivity and peer conflict. We found no significant correlation between emotional regulation and peer conflict, which does not follow our hypothesis. However, there was a negative correlation between emotional reactivity and peer conflict, as hypothesized. Our findings suggest that the outward expression of emotions may be more prevalent in fostering friendship than controlling emotion.