About this session

Saturday, 12:10 PM - 1:40 PM

Pathways to Adolescent Well-being: The Role of Digital Experiences in Identity and Emotion Regulation Development

Adolescence is a period of important developmental acquisitions, such as identity development and emotion regulation skills, that underlie outcomes of well-being. Now, in the digital age, these normative developmental processes are transpiring through digital means, yet we still understand very little about how they unfold across the adolescent years. The presentations in this symposium each describe robust research aimed at revealing how and for whom digital experiences are related to variations in well-being.

Presentation 1 is a novel investigation of how social media’s association with well-being is positive for those adolescents in an in-depth exploration phase of identity development, but negative for those reconsidering their identity.

Presentation 2 compares LGBT+/non-LGBT+ identifying adolescents across 6 longitudinal waves in a preregistered study showing no group differences in the concurrent or lagged associations between screentime and well-being after adding random slopes to account for within-person fluctuations over time.

Presentation 3 shows how adolescents increased their reliance on digital means to regulate their emotions from before the pandemic and across 4 years, and these digital emotion regulation habits were associated with multiple dimensions of well-being by late adolescence.

Taken together, these studies are part of a growing trend to better situate a more nuanced understanding of youth digital experiences and how relations to well-being vary by individuals, contexts, and types of digital activities. Our discussant is a globally recognized expert in adolescent emotion development and digital experiences, who will provide deep context and exploration of implications for theory and research.

Paper #1
Title	Longstanding identity development processes account for differential associations between adolescents’ social media use and well-being
Presenting author	Dr. Tyler John Colasante, Ph.D., Humboldt Science Center for Child Development (HumanKind), Leipzig University, Germany

Paper #2
Title	The Role of LGBT+ Identity in the Relationship Between Social Media Use and Adolescent Well-Being
Presenting author	Dr. Y. Anthony Chen, Ph. D., United States, University of California, Irvine

Paper #3
Title	Adolescent Emotion Regulation Through Digital Means Across the Pandemic: Trajectories and Links to Well-being
Presenting author	Katie Faulkner, MSc., Queen's University, Canada

View all paper details

Session chair
Katie Faulkner, Queen's University, Canada

Discussant
Nicholas Allen, Ph.D., University of Oregon, United States

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