Family and peer conflicts predict teenage mental health issues, study finds

Identifying the factors that contribute to psychopathology and increase the risk of experiencing specific mental health conditions is a long-standing goal for many psychology researchers. While past studies have highlighted the crucial role of some experiences, particularly challenging events unfolding during childhood and adolescence, in the development of mental health disorders, their influence is often difficult to quantify and differentiate from other factors that could contribute to psychopathology.

Recent technological advances, particularly the development of increasingly sophisticated machine learning and computational analysis tools, have opened new possibilities for the study of mental health disorders and their underlying patterns. When used to analyze the large amounts of data collected by mental health services and professionals over the past decades, these methods could help to uncover correlations between specific variables and hidden trends that are associated with psychopathology.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Washington University School of Medicine recently set out to explore the possible contribution of different factors to poor mental health among teenagers using data mining techniques (i.e., computational approaches to uncover patterns in data). Their findings, published in Nature Mental Health, suggest that social experiences, particularly conflicts between family members, bullying or a loss of reputation among peers, are the strongest predictors of psychopathology in adolescents.

“A key challenge in predicting a person’s state of mind is that a wide range of contributing factors each has a subtle, yet meaningful, influence on mental health,” wrote Robert J. Jirsaraie, Deanne M. Barch and their colleagues in the paper. “We applied data mining techniques to identify the most important risk factors for predicting current symptoms and longitudinal outcomes from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Developmental (ABCD) study (n = 11,552).”

As part of their study, Jirsaraie, Barch and their colleagues examined data from a large dataset that was collected as part of one of the largest studies of brain development ever conducted, known as the ABCD study. Since 2016, the ABCD study has been periodically gathering psychological, behavioral and brain imaging data from the same children at 21 research sites across the United States, starting from when the children were 9–10 years old.

Using data mining techniques, the researchers analyzed ABCD data collected so far, to identify the factors that best predicted the mental health outcomes of children and adolescents. Their analyses focused on social factors, demographic factors and collected brain imaging scans.

“Our results consistently revealed that social conflicts were the strongest predictors of psychopathology, especially family fighting and reputational damage between peers,” wrote the authors. “Sex differences also emerged as a critical factor for predicting long-term mental health outcomes. Neuroimaging-derived metrics were consistently the least informative.”

Interestingly, the researchers found that brain imaging data was the worst predictor of mental health, while social factors were the strongest predictors. This suggests that family conflicts and difficult relationships with peers may play a particularly crucial role in the emergence of emotional and psychological difficulties during adolescence.

The results gathered by Jirsaraie, Barch and their colleagues could guide the future development of psychological interventions addressing social difficulties during childhood and adolescence or aimed at reducing the risk of teenage psychopathology. Notably, while social conflicts were found to be the strongest predictors of poor mental health, they only explained less than half of the variation in the data. Further studies could thus perform additional analyses that examine a broader range of factors.

“Although these findings provide novel insight into the developmental origins of psychopathology, our best-performing models could explain only up to 40% of the variation between individuals,” wrote Jirsaraie, Barch and their colleagues. “Future research is needed to obtain a more complete understanding of all the factors that meaningfully contribute to mental health.”

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