Friendship Influence Across Transitions: Predicting Early Adult Mental Health From Friends’ Mental Health in Adolescence

• In Event: 1-095 - Peer Influence: New Methods for Unpacking Longitudinal Effects

Integrative Statement

Adolescents continuously influence each other in their behavior by reinforcing or modeling certain behaviors and norms (Laursen, 2018). This influence has also been found for mental health, underscoring that peers are influential players for adolescents’ well-being. For example, Schwartz-Mette and Rose (2012) found that adolescents’ depression and anxiety predicted depression and anxiety in their friend six months later, which was mediated by co-rumination, a conversation style with excessive focus on the negative.

Importantly, not all friends may exert the same amount of influence on others. Characteristics of the friend or friendship may influence how impactful a peer is for an adolescent’s mental health. A central variable may be the stability of the friendship – friendships may need to last to provide the intimacy that allows for extensive co-rumination and the transfer of depressive symptoms (Poulin & Chan, 2010). Thus, our main hypothesis was that the association between friends’ depression and own later-life depression would be stronger for adolescents who had more stable friendships.

Moreover, gender is often considered in both peer relations and mental health research. For example, girls were found to be more likely to be impacted by their friends’ depressive symptoms than boys (Giletta et al., 2012). Thus, gender differences were explored.

First, we tested our hypothesis within a larger set of hypotheses in a structural equation model (SEM). The results were inconclusive regarding gender differences, and the power to detect potential effects may have been diminished due to many non-significant paths. Therefore, we tested our hypothesis again separately. The sample consisted of 491 students for whom we had data on their friendship stability and their friends’ depressive symptoms over the course of four high school years as well as depressive symptoms at least one year after they left high school. Correlations are presented in Table 1. SEMs indicated that the stability of students’ friendships did not influence the extent to which they were influenced by their friends’ mental health (Figure 1). A direct peer influence effect emerged for boys as friends’ depressive symptoms positively predicted their depressive symptoms later on.

The results from this research are informative of both the reach and limits of peer influence. The significant effect of friends’ depression on young men’s own mental health underscores that friendships in high school can have lasting impact, even after the transition into a vastly different context. Interestingly, young women were not similarly impacted, which is at odds with other research (Giletta et al., 2012). Girls might be more likely to be influenced by concurrent rather than former friends’ depressive symptoms, a distinction that will need to be tested in future research.

Additionally, our results did not support the hypotheses that adolescents with more stable friends would be more influenced by their mental health. This indicates that peer influence is a powerful process independent of the length of a friendship. Further research needs to be conducted to establish whether other characteristics of a friendship may moderate its effect, and which processes underlie gender differences.

Authors

• Anna Nishen, Radboud University
  Presenting Author

• William Burk, Radboud University Nijmegen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Toon Cillessen, Radboud University
  Non-Presenting Author