Social Facilitation of Emotion Regulation in Adolescence

Emotion Regulation

The goal of this project is to test whether regulating emotions with help from a friend is more effective and long-lasting in adolescents than regulating alone, and to characterize age-related differences in the neural mechanisms supporting social versus cognitive emotion regulation. Participants will complete a psychology experiment while undergoing fMRI scanning.

Participants will complete a novel paradigm during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine whether adolescents (N = 50) and adults (N = 50) are more effective at down-regulating negative affect when a friend provides them with reinterpretations of negative stimuli (i.e. social reappraisal), as compared to when they reinterpret stimuli alone (i.e., cognitive reappraisal). Specifically, participants will look at pictures of upsetting events while undergoing fMRI scanning. For some pictures, they will be instructed to just look at the image. For other pictures, they will be told to listen to their friend's voice as their friend helps them to regulate their emotions. For other pictures, they will be told to regulate their emotions on their own. The primary comparison of interest is how participants regulate emotion on their own versus when their friend helps them.

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