Adolescents' emotional support to friends and family: A resiliency-promoting factor amidst and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Helping others may serve as a resiliency-promoting factor for adolescents during challenging times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study examined short- and long-term within-person associations between providing emotional support and mood (i.e., vigor) among adolescents. We used data from an eight-wave longitudinal study with 6 months in-between timepoints (May 2020 and December 2023) among 2,430 adolescents aged 12-25. We performed random intercept cross-lagged panel models to examine daily and half-yearly lagged associations between emotional support and vigor and tested how sense of contribution and purpose, and age moderated these associations. Results revealed bidirectional lagged effects. Higher levels in emotional support to family were followed by subsequent higher vigor levels a day later, while higher vigor was followed by higher levels of emotional support to friends a day later. However, at the half-year level, higher vigor was associated with lower levels of emotional support to friends. Moderation analyses revealed that for adolescents who have a higher sense of contribution and purpose, providing emotional support to friends is more strongly associated with vigor increases, whereas providing emotional support to family is less strongly associated with such increases. Preliminary evidence also suggested that emotional support to friends was more strongly associated with vigor for older adolescents, whereas support to family showed stronger associations with vigor for younger adolescents. Our study highlights the potential of prosocial behavior to buffer against the negative effects of societal challenges for today's youth through feelings of purpose. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).