Decision Making & Emotional Regulation

What the research tells us about decision making and navigating strong emotions during adolescence:

• We’re more sensitive to social feedback during adolescence, which helps us adapt to social situations but can also make rejection and exclusion feel particularly painful during these years. We’re also experiencing strong emotions like falling in love or heartbreak for the first time.
  
  
• Our sensitivity to peer acceptance can make us more likely to make risky decisions when our emotions are high–including positive decisions like advocating for a cause or sticking up for a friend.
  
  
• Our abilities to think abstractly and understand the perspectives of others increase rapidly throughout adolescence. These help us solve problems and reason as well as (and sometimes better than) adults when we have the time and space to consider our options.
  
  
• Adults can help youth learn to manage emotions and make good decisions by modeling positive coping skills and providing real-world practice to make decisions and experience the outcomes.

The most significant changes to the brain during adolescence affect some of the networks involved in processing emotions, understanding other people, and guiding our behavior.

The amygdala—the part of the brain involved in processing and recognizing positive and negative emotion—is highly sensitive to social cues during adolescence. This sensitivity helps drive the tremendous amount of social learning that happens during adolescence, helping us adapt to new environments and novel situations by tuning in and responding to social and emotional cues, like facial expressions, faster than an adult might. We’re able to quickly learn the nuances of social contexts in ways that help prepare us for the complexities of the adult world.

The flip side of this increased sensitivity is greater attention to the pain of social rejection and exclusion during adolescence. Making even a small social mistake can feel painful. This sensitivity, combined with the fact that we’re having many intense experiences for the first time (like falling in love or going through a breakup), contribute to emotions that can be more intense compared to adults.

Our heightened sensitivity to emotions associated with peer acceptance or rejection can influence our decision making during adolescence. On the one hand, we’re more likely to make risky decisions when we’re in situations that are emotionally charged, particularly in the presence of peers, which can sometimes be unhealthy. On the other hand, our friends can also motivate us to do good and to make prosocial choices, like sticking up for a friend.

Brain development in the second decade of life also increases other cognitive abilities, including our capability to navigate our emotions, plan for the future to achieve a goal, and solve problems. Our brains are quickly forming and strengthening neural connections based on our experiences, and eliminating connections we no longer use, enabling us to process and react more quickly and to think more flexibly and abstractly than earlier in life.

By the time we transition to adulthood, we have the cognitive and emotional abilities to consider the needs and perspectives of others and to assess complex issues. Many of us as adolescents are capable of reasoning as well as adults when we make decisions with the time and space to deliberately weigh different options.

Adolescence is a key window for developing the skills to manage our emotions, control our behavior, and make good decisions. To help young people learn and refine these skills, adults can model healthy expressions of emotions and communication and teach positive coping skills for navigating strong emotions. Adults also need to provide real-world opportunities for youth to practice decision making and to learn from the outcomes, such as assuming responsibility in the family, taking leadership roles at school or in the community, and making choices about personal aspects of our lives.

What the research says about programs to support our need to take positive risks during adolescence:

• Learning to regulate our emotions is a key developmental task of our adolescent years, involving becoming aware of our emotions and adapting our emotional responses to best fit the situation.
  
  
• Interventions that help young people become aware of their emotions and adapt their responses to the situation–including mindfulness and music-based programs–have been shown to support positive development, increasing life satisfaction and decreasing symptoms of anxiety and depression.
  
  
• Emotional regulation supports decision making skills–young people who work to build their emotional regulation skills are less likely to engage in unhealthy risk taking.
  
  
• Interventions to help youth regulate their emotions appear to have the strongest results for those who need extra emotional support.

During adolescence, we are developing our decision-making skills and learning how to regulate our emotions. To build these skills, we need opportunities to learn how to respond during emotional situations and make smart decisions. Guidance from parents, teachers, and other adults can help us process complex emotions and make decisions that can support our health and wellbeing. Programs and interventions that help us build emotion regulation skills and reduce impulsive decision making can support us during this dynamic window of growth and learning.

Managing Emotions

Research suggests that adolescents’ ability to regulate their emotions in emotional situations increases throughout the adolescent years. Emotion regulation involves being aware of one’s emotions and being able to adapt emotional responses in a way that is appropriate to the situation. Interventions that help adolescents develop emotion regulation skills can promote emotional competence and support youth’s ability to make good decisions during highly charged situations.

One technique that can be effective for building adolescents’ emotion regulation skills is mindfulness. Mindfulness involves training to sustain purposeful attention and to be present in the moment. The Learning to BREATHE program (L2B) employed a mindfulness-based curriculum at a high school to help students process their thoughts and emotions and regulate emotional responses. Youth participating in the program showed improvements in their perceived stress levels, emotional awareness, and use of emotion regulation strategies.

Music has also been used to promote adolescents’ emotion regulation skills. “Tuned In” is a music program that helps youth identify, label, and become aware of their emotions through music. For 14- to 17-year-olds who were considered “at risk”–those who had dropped out or were otherwise excluded from school or who were receiving psychological treatment–the program improved emotional awareness, emotion identification, and use of healthy emotion management strategies.

Additionally, early research suggests that even video games might present opportunities for adolescents to practice emotion regulation skills. Video games often require working through frustrating or emotional situations and regulating emotions to achieve a goal. However, research on the potential use of video games to promote emotion regulation is still limited.

Scientific review of interventions focused on emotion regulation suggests that these programs appear to be effective overall, though the benefits can vary for different youth. Results seem to be strongest for adolescents who may need extra support with emotion regulation, such as those experiencing depression or anxiety or adolescents living in residential treatment centers. Additional research on emotion-regulation programs can help us understand specific program components and delivery methods that may best support adolescents’ emotional development.

Building Decision Making Skills

Importantly, developing adolescents’ emotional competence can also help support their decision making skills. For example, Dr. Konstanze Schoeps and colleagues conducted a social and emotional learning (SEL) program to reduce cyberbullying in middle school youth. Youth discussed their thoughts and emotional experiences with a trained psychologist. They learned ways to process and regulate emotional experiences that could help them communicate with peers more effectively and reduce conflict. Compared to a control group of adolescents, youth who took part in the SEL program demonstrated lower rates of both receiving and engaging in cyberbullying. Their emotion perception and regulation skills also improved, and they reported greater life satisfaction, highlighting the importance of emotional competence for youth wellbeing.

Education in emotion regulation may also promote adolescents’ health-related decision making. Dr. Christopher Houck and colleagues developed an emotion regulation intervention designed to reduced sexual health risks for middle-school age adolescents. Youth were selected for the program based on potential mental health symptoms and participated in a six-week course where they learned how to recognize, label, and regulate their emotions to make healthier decisions. The intervention was successful in reducing sexual health risk–that is, youth in the program waited longer before having sex and used condoms if they did engage in sexual activity. Findings from this program suggest that supporting adolescents’ emotional development may be an important step in promoting healthy decision making.

Learning to BREATHE (L2B)

Learning to BREATHE (L2B) is a mindfulness curriculum for adolescents based on six key themes: Body, Reflection, Emotion, Attention, Tenderness, Habits, and Empowerment (BREATHE). The L2B curriculum involves 12 class sessions where youth learn how to stay present in the moment and identify and process emotions. Typical lessons include a short topic introduction, followed by group activities, discussion, and in-class mindfulness meditation practice.

The L2B curriculum has been tested in various groups of high school students around the world and demonstrated success in reducing negative affect, improving emotion regulation, and increasing use of cognitive reappraisal strategies. While the L2B program has not always had consistent impacts on adolescents’ emotion regulation skills across schools, it provides promising evidence for mindfulness as a tool for developing youths’ emotional competence.

Working on Womanhood (WOW)

Working on Womanhood (WOW) is a community-developed, middle- and high-school-based intervention serving primarily ethnic minority girls living in underserved urban communities. WOW is delivered using a group intervention format, where groups of 10 to 12 girls work with a counselor on specific modules focused on building emotional intelligence. Skills include learning to label and identify emotions and use coping skills to manage stress. Post-intervention, youth were better able to regulate their emotions and their depression and anxiety symptoms decreased. The WOW program offers evidence that school-based interventions targeting emotion regulation may offer mental health benefits for underserved youth.

PREDEMA

A social and emotional learning program based in Spain, “Programa de educación emocional para adolescentes (PREDEMA)”, or in English, “Emotional Education Program for Adolescents,” incorporated emotion regulation to reduce cyberbullying in middle school youth. This study was a randomized controlled trial (RCT) where youth were either assigned to the emotion regulation intervention group or a control group. Over the course of 11 sessions delivered during school, youth worked through activities with a psychologist and their teachers on emotional skills such as perceiving, understanding, and regulating emotion with the goal of promoting adolescents’ emotional competence to improve communication with peers and reduce cyberbullying.

Six months after the program, participants in PREDEMA were better able to perceive and manage their emotions. They also showed lower rates of experiencing and participating in cyberbullying and reported greater life satisfaction. RCTs examining emotion regulation during adolescence, like PREDEMA, provide strong evidence that intervening to support positive emotional development can promote better decision making and increase wellbeing in adolescents.