The roles of emotional responding and regulation in adolescent friendship stability: A multimethod functional magnetic resonance imaging study

This study examined longitudinal associations between early adolescents' emotional responding and use of cognitive reappraisal and the stability of their friendships with grade-mate peers. The sample consisted of 152 early adolescents (53.29% female) in the sixth and seventh grades from three rural southeastern middle schools who provided school-based peer nominations of their friendships. A stability index of adolescents' close friendships was computed from in-school peer nominations collected at two time points, approximately 1 year apart. Adolescents self-reported their levels of emotional responding, habitual use of cognitive reappraisal, and peer relationship quality during assessments. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we also examined the behavioral and neural correlates of emotional responding to negatively and positively valenced stimuli in an affective pictures task. We found that greater self-reported emotional responding predicted less close school-based friendship stability across 1 year, even controlling for adolescents' characterizations of global peer relationship quality. Self-reported reappraisal use did not predict friendship stability. However, reappraisal use interacted with neural reactivity to negative stimuli in regions of visual cortex (ventral occipitotemporal cortex) to predict friendship stability; among adolescents reporting moderate to high reappraisal use, greater neural activation in ventral occipitotemporal cortex was associated with more stable friendships across 1 year, whereas among those reporting markedly low reappraisal use, greater activation was associated with fewer stable friendships. These findings provide valuable-albeit preliminary-insights about affective predictors of friendship stability during a life stage critical to social development.