Daily Links Between Helping Behaviors and Emotional Well‐Being During Late Adolescence

Abstract

We investigated daily associations between helping behaviors and emotional well‐being during late adolescence, examining whether these links depend on the recipient of help (i.e., friend vs. roommate), type of help (i.e., instrumental vs. emotional), and individual differences in the helper (i.e., gender and empathy). First‐year college students (N = 411, 63.5% women, Mage = 18.62 years) completed diary checklists for eight days, reporting whether they provided instrumental and emotional support to a friend or roommate, and positive and negative emotions. On days that adolescents provided instrumental assistance to friends they felt more positive affect, but men also felt more negative affect. Providing instrumental and emotional support to roommates and providing emotional support to friends did not predict daily emotions.

Psychological Well-Being and Social Competence During Adolescence: Longitudinal Association Between the Two Phenomena

“…Shin et al (2011) found that the expression of positive affect predicted peer acceptance and greater initiation of positive interactions, and Agbaria (2020) showed that adolescents with a high level of satisfaction with life were more capable of establishing meaningful friendships, giving help, understanding and cooperating with other people, and resolving conflicts more efficiently. In particular, other studies have shown that high levels of positive affect and low levels of negative affect predict high levels of prosocial behaviour, although they also established that this relationship can be bidirectional (Armstrong-Carter et al, 2020;Chen et al, 2020).…”

Daily provision of instrumental and emotional support to friends is associated with diurnal cortisol during adolescence

“…Supporting this idea, one study found that providing instrumental support to friends was not associated with positive emotions the same day (Morelli et al., 2015). Another study found that although providing instrumental support to friends was linked with positive emotions the same day, it also was simultaneously associated with negative emotions among young men (Armstrong‐Carter, Guassi Moreira, et al., 2020). Thus, helping friends with instrumental tasks might be linked to flatter diurnal slopes—a physical health risk factor— if it is experienced as stressful or taxing.…”

“…Consistent with this interpretation is the theory of “skin deep resilience,” whereby youth can show positive adaptation on behavioral and emotional measures while simultaneously experiencing risk factors via markers of stress‐physiology that predict poor physical health and allostatic load (Hostinar & Miller, 2019). Providing instrumental support may be psychologically rewarding (Armstrong‐Carter, Guassi Moreira, et al., 2020), while simultaneously physiologically taxing.…”

“…Prior research demonstrates that helping friends is a meaningful and rewarding experience (Armstrong‐Carter, Guassi Moreira, et al., 2020; Morelli et al., 2015), but can also be taxing for some youth (Armstrong‐Carter, Guassi Moreira, et al., 2020), and associated with biological markers of physical risk, as indexed by heightened raw cortisol levels (Alink et al., 2012; Catherine et al., 2012; Oberle, 2018). Our study extends this work.…”

“…Emotional support involves adolescents' awareness and response to their friends' challenges or worries (Tsai et al., 2016), and may impact adolescents' own well‐being in ways that are not apparent by their provision of instrumental assistance (Tsai et al., 2016). For example, one study found that providing instrumental support to a close friend, but not emotional support, was associated with greater emotional well‐being during older adolescence (Armstrong‐Carter et al., 2020). This work suggests that providing instrumental and emotional support to friends should be examined separately, because they may each have unique associations with adolescents' outcomes.…”