Social-emotional Development in Adolescents and Friendship. A Theoretical Review

Abstract

In this research we conducted a systematic review of the characteristics of social-emotional development in adolescents and the extent to which they are influenced or correlated by the concept of friendship. We also investigated the influence of socio-emotional traits on the quality of friendship in adolescence. To achieve this, we searched for published scientific studies from several major databases. . The main keywords used for this study were "Adolescence", "Friendship", "Social-emotional development", "Social development", "Emotions". We initially identified 123 studies with the mentioned keywords and we decided that 73 studies are eligible for the purpose of this research. Those were read and analyzed in full-text format. Following this stage, we decided to include 29 studies in the review. We identified a large diversity in the sample of participants presented in the study, with a total of 11,684 participants; from the total of eligible studies, three are systematic reviews that have explored our key concepts (friendship and concepts related to social-emotional development). Through this systematic review, we were able to summarize the current data and knowledge about friendship, social-emotional development and relationships between the two, during adolescence.