Katie Davis

Emotion regulation (ER) is essential to youth well-being, and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is an established approach for building ER skills. Clinicians often use creative mediums such as visuals and narratives to support ER through CBT, yet access and personalization remain limited. Generative AI (GenAI) shows promise for addressing these limitations, but its benefits and risks in youth ER remain underexplored, underscoring the need for expert perspectives. We interviewed 20 ER specialists–psychotherapists, art therapists, and psychiatrists–using a GenAI technological probe that generated CBT-based visuals and narratives. Clinicians highlighted GenAI’s potential as a “bridge” to help youth concretely identify and express emotions, practice personalized coping skills, and mediate ER conversations between home and clinics. They also cautioned that the vividness and unpredictability of GenAI outputs may trigger trauma or reinforce maladaptive thinking. We propose psychologically grounded design implications for GenAI to foster safe, engaging youth ER as a foundation for lifelong well-being.

This introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this section. Observing that the harms of social media are well-addressed in other parts of the handbook, the authors of the chapters in this section focus more on the positive dimensions of young people’s social media experiences. This introduction provides an executive summary of each chapter, highlighting notable themes that address the section’s overarching focus on youth wellbeing, kindness, social communication, and connection in online environments.

Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the pressures created by social media, such as heightened self-consciousness and the need for extensive self-presentation. In this study, we investigate how BeReal, a social media platform designed to counter some of these pressures, influences adolescents' self-presentation behaviors. We interviewed 29 users aged 13-18 to understand their experiences with BeReal. We found that BeReal's design focuses on spontaneous sharing, including randomly timed daily notifications and reciprocal posting, discourages staged posts, encourages careful curation of the audience, and reduces pressure on self-presentation. The space created by BeReal offers benefits such as validating an unfiltered life and reframing social comparison, but its approach to self-presentation is sometimes perceived as limited or unappealing and, at times, even toxic. Drawing on this empirical data, we propose design guidelines for platforms that support authentic self-presentation while fostering reciprocity and expanding beyond spontaneous photo-sharing. These guidelines aim to enable users to portray themselves more comprehensively and accurately, ultimately supporting teens' developmental needs, particularly in building authentic relationships.