key: cord-0940443-0tkvo7p5
authors: Branje, Susan; Morris, Amanda Sheffield
title: The Impact of the COVID‐19 Pandemic on Adolescent Emotional, Social, and Academic Adjustment
date: 2021-08-26
journal: J Res Adolesc
DOI: 10.1111/jora.12668
sha: f06d003c3d72670d1ebabc89cf92892200ad42a9
doc_id: 940443
cord_uid: 0tkvo7p5

The COVID‐19 pandemic has had a strong impact on adolescents worldwide. This special issue aimed to increase our understanding of the factors that explain interindividual differences in how adolescents are affected by the pandemic. The special issue includes 21 empirical articles from four continents on the role of the pandemic in changes in emotional, social, and academic adjustment during adolescence. The studies demonstrate that many adolescents experienced increased depressive symptoms, negative affect, and loneliness, and lower academic adjustment during the pandemic, particularly those that were already at risk before the pandemic. At the same time, many adolescents had individual, family, and community resources that made them resilient and helped them to continue to function well despite the adverse circumstances.

Since the end of 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic and the preventive measures to suppress the spread of the virus have had a strong impact on the daily life of young people worldwide. Although teenagers are less likely to get seriously ill from the virus than adults, they might worry about the health of their relatives or the financial impact of the distancing measures. Also, the lockdown and distancing measures have resulted in drastic changes in their daily activities. Many adolescents have not been able to attend school for shorter or longer periods, and many had to transition to online and distance learning during lockdown or had no schooling at all. Structured leisure activities, such as sports or hobbies, were often canceled during lockdown periods, and adolescents had less opportunities to hang out with their peers and friends. Although adolescence provides a window of opportunity for the development of identity, autonomy, and relationships with peers and romantic partners, it is also a period in which some adolescents develop behavioral or mental health problems (Hollenstein & Lougheed, 2013) . Pandemics such as COVID-19, which might interfere with the developmental tasks of adolescence, might constitute the "perfect storm" for difficulties to emerge in some adolescents.

Although the pandemic-related changes have indeed led to serious concerns about the well-being and psychosocial adjustment of young people around the world since early on in the pandemic (e.g., Clemens et al., 2020; Guessoum et al., 2020) , research is needed to understand the pandemic's short-and long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown measures on the adjustment of adolescents. Therefore, the current special issue brings together research on the impact of the pandemic on adolescent emotional, social, and academic adjustment. It includes 21 studies using data from four continents, with two contributions from Asia, nine from Europe, nine from North America, and one from South America. Together these contributions cover the entire period of adolescence, with ages ranging from 9 to 22, and examined changes in four key domains of functioning: emotional adjustment and psychopathology, family processes, peer processes, and academic functioning. Table 1 presents an overview of the studies, including information on the study design, main conclusions, and implications.

An important strength of many of the papers in this special issue is that they use longitudinal data to compare the functioning of adolescents during the pandemic to their functioning before the pandemic, and as such go beyond reports of perceived . These studies allow us to examine how the changing circumstances during the pandemic relate to adolescent adjustment and wellbeing and examine the effects of changes in pandemic-related experiences across time.

In terms of emotional adjustment and psychopathology, the impact of the pandemic was found to differ across the type of problems: From before to during the first 6 months of the pandemic, adolescent depression and negative affect increased (Hollenstein, Colasante, & Lougheed, 2021 ; Romm, Park, Hughes, & Gentzler, 2021), but anxiety symptoms (Hollenstein et al., 2021) , dailylife irritability (Janssens et al., 2021) , and selfreported internalizing problems decreased (Bernasco, Nelemans, van der Graaff, & Branje, 2021). Among Swiss young adults, the prevalence of selfinjury did not change between the first lockdown and post-lockdown, yet domestic violence increased in males (Steinhoff et al., 2021) . Also, in a clinical group, maladjustment decreased since the pandemic started (Di Giunta et al., 2021). These findings might show that for some adolescents, the sudden lockdown-induced changes went together with a reduction of daily stress and social pressure that might play a role in the development and persistence of their mental health symptoms (Bruining et al., 2021) . The papers in this special issue also focused on the factors that explain heterogeneity in the effects of the pandemic on adjustment. Some of this heterogeneity can be explained by differences in the impact of the pandemic on emotional, social, and academic adjustment during adolescence across countries, regions, and individuals. Although the pandemic is thought to affect the mental health and well-being of adolescents, large individual differences exist in how adolescents are affected. Many adolescents could continue to do their school work online from home and could reach out and connect to friends through virtual platforms. Those adolescents might show resilience or might even experience positive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, adolescents from more disadvantaged and lower-income environments particularly experienced a negative impact of the pandemic-they experienced the loss of family income, higher rates of illness and death among community members, and problems in virtual connectivity. The levels of stress and trauma in those adolescents are likely to be higher, and this has been consistently linked to adverse development, academic achievement, health outcomes, and risk for exposure to violence (Sapienza & Masten, 2011) . Indeed, adolescents who reported more negative changes reported stronger increases in depressive symptoms (Hollenstein et al., 2021) , and specific living arrangements, pandemic-related stressor accumulation, and a lack of adaptive coping strategies were associated with duringpandemic self-injury and domestic violence (Steinhoff et al., 2021) . Also, experiences of discrimination and marginalization and lack of resources were related to mental health problems during the pandemic (Miconi et al., 2021) . Preexisting risk and vulnerability factors might also explain the heterogeneity in effects of the pandemic. Teenagers living in lower-income families might experience the most serious effects. Indeed, several studies in the special issue showed that those adolescents who were more vulnerable before the pandemic reported the largest negative changes during the pandemic. For example, adolescents that had specific vulnerabilities such as higher stress, maladaptive coping, or internalizing problems before the pandemic, experienced more COVID-19-related concerns during the pandemic (van Loon et al., 2021) . Comparably, adolescents who used more pre-existing savoring and less dampening emotion regulation strategies reported higher positive affect while adolescents who used more rumination reported increased negative affect during the pandemic, although these effects tended to be stronger for adolescents experiencing less COVID-19-related worries and more COVID-19 isolation (Deng et al., 2021) . Also, pre-pandemic selfinjury was a major risk factor for during-pandemic self-injury (Steinhoff et al., 2021) , and prepandemic neural response to anticipated social reward was associated with reduced odds of suicidal ideation (Hutchinson et al., 2021) . Interestingly, how adolescents deal with the pandemic might depend on their life-history strategy: Adolescents with a slow life-history strategy, characterized by effortful control, parent-child relationship quality, family and friends' social contact and support, and altruism, revealed reduced COVID-related increases in externalizing problems, and slow life strategies buffered the relation between early life adversity and COVID-related increases in internalizing problems (Chang et al., 2021) .

Family relationships played a particularly important role in the adjustment of adolescents during the pandemic (e.g., Miconi et al., 2021) . Positive relationships with parents were associated with better adjustment during the pandemic (Campione-Barr, Rote, Killoren, & Rose, 2021), and paternal attachment insecurity strengthened the increase in loneliness during the pandemic (Janssens et al., 2021). Emotion socialization was particularly found to be important for adolescent adjustment: Unsupportive parental emotion socialization predicted youths' maladjustment and emotion dysregulation (Di Giunta et al., 2021; Shi & Wang, 2021) , and this effect was mediated by greater use of avoidance coping (Shi & Wang, 2021) . These findings confirm that family relationships can offer comfort and support that might buffer the effects of the pandemic (see also Weeland et al., 2021) . However, the pandemic may disrupt the family system as well, and these disrupted family processes might strengthen the effects of the pandemic and related lockdown measures on adolescent adjustment and well-being (Masten & Motti-Stefanidi, 2020; Prime, Wade, & Browne, 2020) .

The peer context is another crucial domain to consider in understanding the effects of the pandemic on youth adjustment and well-being. Adolescents, unlike any other age group, rely heavily on friendships and social contacts, and peer interactions play an important role in the development of their identity, personality, and perspective taking (Berndt, 2002; Brechwald & Prinstein, 2011) . As the lockdown and distancing measures have resulted in a drastic reduction of possibilities for adolescents to meet and hang out with friends at school, at organized activities, and at home and in the neighborhood, important functions of friends and peers in terms of affiliation and support might have considerably declined. Indeed, several studies in the special issue documented that a subgroup of adolescents felt more lonely during the pandemic (e.g., Romm et al., 2021) and that loneliness explained the decline in early adolescents' emotional adjustment during the pandemic (Sabato, Abraham, & Kogut, 2021) . During the early period of the lockdown, levels of loneliness remained constant (Magis-Weinberg et al., 2021) . Particularly highly extraverted adolescents reported increases in loneliness, which subsequently were related to increased levels of depressive symptoms (Alt, Reim, & Walper, 2021) , showing that whereas extraversion might help to establish and maintain social connection in normal circumstances, under conditions of restricted access to others, extraversion might put youth at risk for developing problems and lower well-being. A number of studies in the special issue also showed that high-quality peer relations-both before and during the pandemic-might buffer the negative effects of the pandemic on adolescents' functioning. Greater peer connectedness during the pandemic was associated with a reduced odds of suicidal ideation during the pandemic among girls (Hutchinson et al., 2021) , and while the higher quality of peer relationships, but not parent-child relationships, were related to lower levels of social disconnection during the pandemic, fear of missing out was related to higher levels of social disconnection (Parent, Dadgar, Xiao, Hesse, & Shapka, 2021) . Also, higher pre-pandemic friend support predicted less self-reported and parent-reported internalizing problems during the pandemic, regardless of time spent with friends during the pandemic (Bernasco et al., 2021) . Supportive friendships may thus protect against developing internalizing symptoms in times of crisis. Importantly, internalizing problems before the pandemic were also found to be predictive of less friend support during the pandemic (Bernasco et al., 2021) , suggesting that it is easier for adolescents with higher levels of adjustment to maintain their friendships when this is challenged by circumstances. Moreover, friendships can also increase the negative impact of the pandemic: For best friends, higher relationship positivity in the context of high levels of COVID-related stress was associated with greater adolescent problem behavior (Campione-Barr et al., 2021) , which might be attributed to peer deviancy training processes.

As many adolescents meet their peers online through social media, some of the negative effects of the pandemic might have been alleviated by the possibility to stay connected with peers and friends online. Indeed, adolescents with higher levels of loneliness reported fewer virtual and face to face social connections, and adolescents with fewer social connections were less willing to help lonely peers (Sabato et al., 2021) . Particularly positive online experiences might reduce loneliness during physical isolation, as more positive online experiences were related to less loneliness, and more negative online experiences were related to more loneliness (Magis-Weinberg et al., 2021) . Some adolescents seem to be better able to profit from online interactions than others, as adolescents with higher levels of gratitude had increased importance of social media for meaningful conversations, but not the frequency of social media use (Maheux, Nesi, Galla, Roberts, & Choukas -Bradley, 2021) . Thus, gratitude might motivate adolescents to use social media to foster social connections. It is important to realize that particularly adolescents from more disadvantaged and lower-income environments, who might have problems in virtual connectivity, might not have the opportunity to maintain social connectedness during the pandemic. As such, the pandemic might increase the effects of the digital divide (Hassan & Daniel, 2020) .

One of the main concerns has been the impact of the pandemic on youth's academic progress (Mahapatra, & Sharma, 2020) . The lockdowns and movement restrictions required schools around the world to close their doors for prolonged periods of time, and schools had to revert to remote teaching and home-schooling. The implications of these changes for adolescent academic functioning and motivation were high on the political agenda in many countries. Findings from this special issue indicate that adolescents' school bonding decreased from before to during the pandemic (Maiya, Dotterer, & Whiteman, 2021) , and a substantial group of about 15% of adolescents reported a steeper decrease in academic well-being, characterized by lower school engagement and higher burnout, than would be developmentally expected (Salmela-Aro, Upadyaya, Vinni-Laakso, & Hietaj€ arvi, 2021). Moreover, adolescents' academic motivation was lower on online compared to physical school days during the pandemic (Klootwijk et al., 2021) , suggesting that the effects could be attributed to the restrictive measures rather than the pandemic more broadly.

Again, results showed that not all adolescents were affected equally by the pandemic (Salmela-Aro et al., 2021) . Adolescents who experienced more stress or whose family experienced more pandemic-related financial need were at higher risk for declined school bonding, whereas adolescents with better coping or whose parents were more involved in education reported weaker declines in school bonding (Maiya et al., 2021) . Comparably, parental support and positive mood buffered the effect of online education on adolescents' academic motivation during the pandemic (Klootwijk et al., 2021) . Surprisingly, there were also adolescents with increasing academic well-being (Salmela-Aro et al., 2021) . The groups with increasing academic wellbeing showed simultaneous increases in intrapersonal socio-emotional competencies such as grit, curiosity, and academic buoyancy as well as an increase in social engagement. The groups with decreasing study wellbeing reported decreases in intrapersonal socioemotional competencies, combined with increased loneliness and decreased belongingness. These findings further confirm the need for tailored interventions targeting those adolescents most at risk, as well as the need to also consider the potential positive effects of the pandemic on some youth and the way we could implement the lessons learned in an after-pandemic world.

The findings of the studies in this special issue show the wide-reaching implications of the pandemic for adolescent emotional, social, and academic adjustment. Many adolescents experienced more depressive symptoms and negative affect, increased loneliness, and higher levels of burnout and lower school bonding and engagement during the pandemic. These findings confirm the perspective that pandemics like the COVID-19 pandemic confront youth with multisystem challenges and threats that often have cascading effects (Masten & Motti-Stefanidi, 2020) . Adolescents experiencing the negative effects of the pandemic often were already more at risk before the pandemic, because of individual characteristics such as ineffective coping or emotion regulation strategies, relational factors such as low family or peer support, or contextual factors such as low SES or minority status. Of concern is that for a substantial group of adolescents, risk factors might cluster (Fegert, Vitiello, Plener, & Clemens, 2020) , resulting in cumulating and cascading effects of the pandemic across multiple interrelated aspects of adolescents' lives (Miconi et al., 2021) . As these adolescents are also less likely to have individual, family, or community resources to deal with these negative consequences, they might be more likely to experience negative outcomes across multiple domains of functioning.

It is therefore crucial to increase policy efforts to identify and support those youth, to prevent further and long-lasting negative consequences resulting in increasing inequalities (Hussong et al., 2021) .

At the same time, the findings reveal a tremendous heterogeneity in effects. Although a select group of adolescents is at risk for negative consequences, many adolescents show resilience and continued to function well or even showed increases in emotional, social, or academic adjustment despite the many changes in their personal lives. Those adolescents often had individual, family, and community resources that made them resilient and helped them to deal with the adverse circumstances. These findings might also suggest that the circumstances of the pandemic alleviate some of the factors that contribute to lower wellbeing and mental health issues under normal circumstances. Some adolescents might experience a reduction of stress, improved sleep and relaxation, less academic and social pressure, and more (online) time with friends, changes that might produce developmental benefits (Bruining et al., 2021) . Understanding why some adolescents do better during the pandemic offers a unique opportunity to increase our knowledge of factors in current day society that impact youth adjustment and wellbeing.

The results of the studies in this special issue point toward three important avenues for prevention and intervention of maladjustment during crises such as the current pandemic (see also  Table 1 ). First, interventions should target youth with higher mental health problems such as depression and self-harm before the pandemic, as these youth are consistently found to be at increased risk for mental health problems during a pandemic. Second, policy makers should be aware of the risks of social isolation and the benefits of in-person interactions for youth during a pandemic, as low peer-connectedness and loneliness were crucial factors in youth mental health problems during the pandemic. Caregivers should promote virtual and safe social interactions to maintain and build social connections and to mitigate social isolation and loneliness during a pandemic. Interventions could also strengthen youth's pre-pandemic social skills, by increasing secure peer attachment and addressing feelings of social connections, as positive peer relations can buffer against the effects of the pandemic. Third, training of emotion regulation skills pre-and during a pandemic is a promising intervention and prevention strategy to promote coping and adaptive emotion regulation and to buffer some of the negative effects of global crises on mental health and academic engagement. As parental emotion socialization is an important predictor of emotion regulation and mental health during the pandemic, prevention and intervention programs targeting parental emotion socialization are also warranted.

Notwithstanding the importance of the results for our understanding of the impact of large pandemics on adolescent development, there are a number of directions for future research. First, research should continue following adolescents into later phases of the pandemic as well as after the pandemic. Many of the studies so far focused on the pandemic's first months, yet the prolonged duration of the pandemic might result in chronic stress, which might change the impact of the pandemic on adolescent development. Preferably these studies started before the pandemic so that they can compare development before, during and after the pandemic. Given the particular long-term nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the extended lockdown measures, we need to understand changes in adolescent functioning across different phases of the pandemic. Individuals may show different responses to chronic stress in different phases, developing from alarm, resistance, and adaptation to exhaustion (Butto, 2019) . It would be important for future research to understand which adolescents experience chronic negative consequences and which adolescents are able to bounce back to normal again, or even have learned and benefitted from the pandemic, once the pandemic is over or people get used to the "new normal' (see also Hussong et al., 2021) . Also, studies need to include different age cohorts to disentangle "normative" developmental changes from changes due to the pandemic. Moreover, although the special issue included studies from four continents, low-SES and other minority groups were relatively underrepresented. As the pandemic disproportionally affects minority groups (Patel et al., 2020) and people in developing countries (Shadmi et al., 2020) , the current findings need to be complimented by findings from other regions and populations. Also, studies on other outcomes such as substance use are needed. Although findings so far suggest that e-cigarette use declined and use of other tobacco, cannabis, and alcohol and alcohol intoxication declined or remained stable among 15-to 18-year-olds during COVID-19 (Chaffee, Cheng, Couch, Hoeft, & Halpern-Felsher, 2021; Thorisdottir et al., 2021) , there are concerns regarding increases particularly for young adults. Together, these kind of studies will increase our understanding of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent development, and will shed light on which adolescents are in most need of intervention and how policy and practice can best support them.

Fall from grace: Increased loneliness and depressiveness among extraverted youth during the German COVID-19 lockdown

Friend support and internalizing symptoms in early adolescence during COVID-19

Friendship quality and social development

Beyond homophily: A decade of advances in understanding peer influence processes

COVID-19 and child and adolescent psychiatry: An unexpected blessing for part of our population? European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Four phases of life and four stages of stress: A new stress theory and health concept

Adolescent adjustment during COVID-19: The role of close relationships and COVID-19 related stress

Adolescents' substance use and physical activity before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Slow life history strategies and increases in externalizing and internalizing problems during the COVID-19 pandemic

Potential effects of "social" distancing measures and school lockdown on child and adolescent mental health

Predicting negative and positive affect during COVID-19: A daily diary study in youths

COVID-19 impact on parental emotion socialization and youth socio-emotional adjustment in Italy

Challenges and burden of the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic for child and adolescent mental health: A narrative review to highlight clinical and research needs in the acute phase and the long return to normality

Adolescent psychiatric disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown

During a pandemic, the digital divide, racism and social class collide: The implications of COVID-19 for black students in high schools

Adolescent and maternal anxiety symptoms decreased but depressive symptoms increased before to during COVID-19 lockdown

Beyond storm and stress: Typicality, transactions, timing, and temperament to account for adolescent change

Adolescence amid a pandemic: Short-and long-term implications

Peer connectedness and pre-existing social reward processing predicts U.S. adolescent girls' suicidal ideation during COVID-19

The impact of COVID-19 on adolescents' daily lives: The role of parent-child attachment

Parental support and positive mood buffer adolescents' academic motivation during the COVID-19 pandemic

Positive and negative online experiences and loneliness in Peruvian adolescents during the COVID-19 lockdown

Education in times of COVID-19 pandemic: Academic stress and its psychosocial impact on children and adolescents in India

#Grateful: Longitudinal associations between adolescents' social media use and gratitude during the COVID-19 pandemic

Longitudinal changes in adolescents' school bonding during the COVID-19 pandemic: Individual, parenting, and family correlates

Multisystem resilience for children and youth in disaster: Reflections in the context of COVID-19

Egyptian and Roma adolescents' perspectives on their developmental assets in Albania during the COVID-19 pandemic

Social disconnection during COVID-19: The role of attachment, fear of missing out, and smartphone use

Poverty, inequality and COVID-19: The forgotten vulnerable

Risk and resilience in family well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic

Risk and protective factors for changes in adolescent psychosocial adjustment during COVID-19

Too lonely to help: Children's (virtual) social connections and willingness to help during COVID-19 lockdown

Adolescents' longitudinal school engagement and burnout before and during COVID-19: The role of socio-emotional skills

Understanding and promoting resilience in children and youth. Current Opinion in Psychiatry

Health equity and COVID-19: Global perspectives

Chinese adolescents' coping with COVID-19: Relationships with emotional maladjustment and parental reactions to negative emotions

Selfinjury and domestic violence in young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic: Trajectories, precursors, and correlates

Depressive symptoms, mental wellbeing, and substance use among adolescents before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iceland: A longitudinal, population-based study

Prepandemic risk factors of COVID-19-related concerns in adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction to the Special Issue: Parenting and Family Dynamics in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic

For Susan Branje, work on this paper was supported by a grant of the European Research Council (ERC-2017-CoG -773023 INTRANSITION). For Amanda Morris, work on this paper was supported by the National Institute for General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health [P20GM109097] and a U01 from the National Institutes of Health [5U01DA050989].