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Mapping the Psychological Currents of Teenage Friendships

Sarah Borowski leverages behavioral and physiological data to understand adolescent emotional development.

Friendships during adolescence are widely understood to be critical for emotional and social development. Yet, as developmental psychologist Sarah Borowski’s research underscores, these relationships can simultaneously confer significant benefits and potential risks to adolescent well-being. Her work offers a nuanced understanding of how supportive interactions among peers can foster resilience—or, under certain conditions, exacerbate emotional difficulties.

Borowski’s research focuses on the ways in which adolescents seek and provide emotional support within peer relationships, particularly during a developmental period characterized by increasing autonomy from parents. She identifies close friendships as strongly associated with improved emotional competence, reduced depressive symptoms, and the development of healthier romantic relationships later in life. However, the nature of peer support is complex. Adolescents, lacking the emotional maturity of adults, may engage in behaviors that inadvertently reinforce negative emotional patterns.

One such behavior, co-rumination, is a central focus of Borowski’s work. Co-rumination involves repetitive, negative discussions of problems, and while it fosters a sense of closeness, it also intensifies emotional distress. Notably, findings from Borowski’s lab and other research labs reveal that this behavior not only intensifies individual depressive symptoms but can also facilitate contagious depression, where emotional states are transmitted between friends.

“If you have a friend who has higher levels of depressive symptoms, over time, you look more like your friend in terms of their depressive symptoms, says Borowski, assistant professor of psychology. “It's almost like catching a cold if you're talking about your problems [in a co-ruminative way].”

As director of Lehigh’s Peer Relations Lab, Borowski and her team examine how these behavioral, physiological, and emotional mechanisms affect adolescents’ development and well-being. Her longitudinal study, Teens Talking, follows friend pairs over time, allowing for the identification of behavioral and physiological patterns predictive of future emotional health.

Adolescents initially come into the lab with their friends and answer a battery of questions about their friendship and how they’ve been feeling, how they manage emotions on their own, and different stressors that they’re currently experiencing. Borowski’s team applies three heart rate sensors, a respiration belt, and skin conductance sensors to measure participants’ physiological responses. Then they sit in a room with their friend for 16 minutes while researchers record their physiological responses, as well as video and audio record their conversations while they talk about the problem. Researchers study their "micro-social" behaviors — how friends respond to each other's emotional disclosures — and how their physiological responses are linked during supportive interactions. 

Cate Coffino in Sarah Borowski's lab at Lehigh University.
Cate Coffino '25 working in developmental psychologist Sarah Borowski's Peer Relations Lab.

The goal is to understand if supportive friendships and physiological co-regulation lead to better emotional regulation, improved relationship quality, and reduced depressive symptoms over time. Participants return after a year for follow-up assessments. Adolescent friendships are seen as crucial because they are voluntary, foster conflict resolution skills, support intimacy and emotional disclosure, and are deeply rewarding neurologically, laying the foundation for future relationships.

Preliminary findings from this research suggest that individual differences in emotional regulation moderate the effects of co-rumination. Adolescents who exhibit adaptive physiological regulations in response to stress appear protected against the depressive consequences of co-rumination. This is shown evidenced by appropriate respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) decreases during a mirrored star-tracing task, a test of motor learning and procedural memory, where participants trace a star by looking at their reflection in a mirror, not their hand directly. Conversely, those who display heightened physiological stress during peer conversations demonstrate a positive association between co-rumination and greater depressive symptoms. The effects of friendship interactions on depression are contingent upon adolescents’ capacities for emotion regulation across contexts, Borowski explains.

Building upon this foundation, Borowski’s future research extends into the domain of digital social interaction. In collaboration with Dominic DiFranzo, assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the PC Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, she is adapting a social media simulator called the Truman Platform for adolescents to investigate the physiological and emotional impacts of online peer interactions. The platform creates a custom social media site on which every participant can post, like, reply, and receive notifications, and these interactions can be created, curated, and controlled by the research team. 

Given evidence suggesting that negative online experiences may have more enduring emotional consequences than offline ones, this work seeks to understand how digital social stressors intersect with face-to-face friendship processes. Her integrative approach will assess physiological responses to both online rejection (e.g., receiving few likes) and subsequent offline discussions with peers, providing new insights into the interplay between adolescents’ virtual and embodied social worlds.

“This involves making it look a bit more like Instagram, and I'm trying to hire actors from the community to create content for the social media simulator,” Borowski says. “We're going to be measuring the physiological and emotional reactions to social media experiences that friends have. So that's the individual online social media experience and how they manage emotions in response to that. Then we're going to see how [the friends] provide support for those experiences within their conversations. So, it's integrating the individual physiological regulation with that online experience, and with their offline friendships and how they provide support.”

Borowski’s work is exemplified by its methodological sophistication and practical relevance. Supported by a small team of graduate and undergraduate researchers, her lab exemplifies the intensive labor behind high-quality developmental science. Ultimately, her research offers critical contributions to our understanding of adolescent emotional development. By identifying the conditions under which friendships promote resilience versus risk, Borowski’s work holds important implications for interventions aimed at fostering healthier peer relationships during this formative period.