Share-the-load vs bring-your-own-judge: The effects of friends on social evaluative stress in early adolescence
Filetti and colleagues asked whether a friend reduces stress or adds to it, and found that the answer depends on what the friend is doing there. Young parents reliably buffer a child's stress hormone response to a social evaluation task, and that buffering weakens in adolescence as young people turn to friends instead. An earlier study had found something odd: when a friend played the supportive role a parent would have played, the stress response went up rather than down. This pre-registered experiment tested why, with more than two hundred young people aged eleven to fifteen randomly assigned to face the task alone, with an unfamiliar peer also being tested, with a friend present purely as support, or with a friend who was also being tested. The prediction held. A friend going through the same ordeal lowered the initial stress response; a friend watching from safety raised it. Recovery afterwards did not differ. The useful conclusion is that shared exposure, not company, is what helps, and an audience of any kind is still an audience.
Filetti and colleagues asked whether a friend reduces stress or adds to it, and found that the answer depends on what the friend is doing there. Young parents reliably buffer a child's stress hormone response to a social evaluation task, and that buffering weakens in adolescence as young people turn to friends instead. An earlier study had found something odd: when a friend played the supportive role a parent would have played, the stress response went up rather than down. This pre-registered experiment tested why, with more than two hundred young people aged eleven to fifteen randomly assigned to face the task alone, with an unfamiliar peer also being tested, with a friend present purely as support, or with a friend who was also being tested. The prediction held. A friend going through the same ordeal lowered the initial stress response; a friend watching from safety raised it. Recovery afterwards did not differ. The useful conclusion is that shared exposure, not company, is what helps, and an audience of any kind is still an audience.
Written from the abstract, Europe PMC.
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Filetti, C. R., Tsakonas, N. C., Donzella, B., Thomas, K. M., & Gunnar, M. R. (2025). “Share-the-load vs bring-your-own-judge: The effects of friends on social evaluative stress in early adolescence.” Psychoneuroendocrinology.
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- Cliques Are a Stress Response, Why We Belong
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The source
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2024.107254
DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2024.107254