Girls' Talk

Amanda Rose rethinks the conventional wisdom on caring, sharing and kids' emotional health.

By Alan Bavley

'it is easier for girls to think that if talking about their problems makes them feel good, then talking about their problems a bunch will make them feel even better.'

Amanda rose was watching sixth grade kids on an elementary school playground when she made a simple but insightful observation about their behavior: The boys weren't spending much time talking to each other. They were too busy with sports and games. And they seemed to be having a great time. The girls, meanwhile, were huddled in conspiratorial pairs, chatting away. From the looks of things, they didn't seem to be having much fun.

For Rose, a University of Missouri research psychologist, it was one of those "a-ha!" moments when the evidence at hand arranges itself in new and creative ways. Her playground observations have inspired a series of major studies that are offering provocative new insights into the inner workings of friendships among children in their "tween" years.

Rose's key finding is that girls who spend time mulling over their problems with close friends may end up increasing their feelings of depression and anxiety rather than relieving them. And this process, which Rose named "co-rumination," could spell trouble for at least some of these girls.

Rose's findings run counter to the conventional wisdom about the benefit of close friendships to an emotionally healthy childhood. Her ideas are so novel that she was invited to make her case on "Good Morning America" and has been featured in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

The originality of her work has also been winning her good reviews from within the academic community. In the International Journal of Behavioral Development, William Bukowski, an expert on the psychology of peer relations, and two of his colleagues at Concordia University in Montreal refer to Rose as a creative researcher who has contributed new understanding of children's "social and personal experiences with peers, parents and siblings."

Rose was perceptive enough, Bukowski says, to see the potential problems of social behaviors others have failed to notice. "To the casual observer, co-rumination might appear to be a pleasant, supportive process, which would make it a process that could be easily overlooked as a contributor to negative outcomes like depression."

Psychologists and most everyone else, for that matter, have generally viewed friendships among children as a good thing. The stronger and closer the friendships, the better they were. And girls, most typically, are the children who have these close friendships where feelings are shared and problems are worked out.

"We have messages in our society that if you let your feelings out you'll feel better," Rose says. "I think it is easier for girls to think that if talking about their problems makes them feel good, then talking about their problems a bunch will make them feel even better. This was really held up as an ideal of friendship; it was even held up as superior to the friendships of boys."

But while looking at those glum female faces at the playground, it occurred to Rose that some girls may be getting too much of a good thing: That talking about problems to an extreme might lead to emotional distress.

One pair of girls on that playground was focused on a boy whom one of them liked. Did he like her, they wondered. Who was he talking about?

"It was really bringing them down," Rose says. "It just really leaped out at me, how this kind of conversation can lead to bigger problems."

From observations like these, Rose developed her novel concept of "co-rumination," where two close same-sex friends hash out their problems, analyze them in detail and hash them out again. Co-rumination offers fertile ground for negative feelings and endless speculation.

"You really see this intense level of dissection in their conversation," Rose says. "What the tone of a voice might mean, what are all the explanations for not being invited to a party."

Rose, 36, has taken an intense interest in the playground who's who for as far back as she can remember. "It feels like I've always been interested in friendship," she says. Even as a teenager growing up near Dayton, Ohio, she paid close attention to who was friends with whom. That interest in friendships turned academic when she majored in psychology at Ohio State University, and then at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she received her doctorate in 1999.

Her mentor at Illinois was Steven Asher, now at Duke University, a leading researcher on peer relationships. She built on his work by pursuing her interest in gender differences in friendships. It was during that time that Rose first noticed the different patterns of playground activity that led her to the idea of co-rumination. Rose joined the Missouri faculty right after she graduated and began working on co-rumination soon after, collecting vast amounts of data on public school students in the state.

For her first study, published five years ago in the journal Child Development, Rose had about 600 students in third, fifth, seventh and ninth grade classes fill out a series of questionnaires to assess the quality of their friendships, their levels of anxiety and depression and the extent of their co-rumination. Only same-sex friendships were considered because they are far more common at these ages and more likely to lead to conversations about personal problems.

The co-rumination questionnaire that Rose created posed queries such as, "When we talk about a problem that one of us has, we usually talk about that problem every day even if nothing new has happened." The study was a massive undertaking that required the help of several graduate students and about 30 undergraduates to eventually complete.

Rose found that girls co-ruminated and confided in their girlfriends significantly more than boys confided in other boys. Girls reported closer, higher quality friendships. But girls also reported more depression and anxiety than boys. And both the high-quality friendships and the emotional distress correlated closely with higher levels of co-rumination.

The study, however, left some important questions unanswered. Rose's data wasn't sufficient for her to determine whether co-rumination was contributing to depression and anxiety, or was something that depressed and anxious children were just more likely to do. To answer that question, she needed to follow a group of children over time. The results of that study, published this year in Developmental Psychology, set off the media whirl over co-rumination.

Using methodology similar to that of her first study, Rose had about 1,000 students from four rural Missouri school districts fill out questionnaires during the fall semester, and then again six months later during the spring semester. The results not only confirmed the findings of Rose's first study, but revealed a startling effect that co-rumination was having on girls: Co-rumination appeared to be increasing their levels of depression and anxiety over time. "This was only true for girls, not for boys," Rose says. "I was a little surprised."

But not only did co-rumination aggravate the girls' depression and anxiety, their emotional distress also predicted increasing amounts of co-rumination. "We called it a vicious cycle," Rose says. It's a cycle, she adds, that will be difficult to stop.

Rose doesn't want her research to be interpreted in a way that would stop children from seeking help from their friends. "But it's possible to get too much of a good thing," she says. "We need to take another look at whether their friendships are doing harm. We already knew that kids without friends were at high risk of depression. But a real risk of this past research is that we've been lulled into a false sense of security about girls who have friends. We feel confident they're going to be OK."

There are, in fact, a variety of reasons why girls may suffer from co-rumination, while boys do not. "One of the reasons girls co-ruminate so much is that what is happening in their social relationships is so ambiguous," she says. Girls fret more over such things as whether they are being snubbed or excluded, for example. Boys' emotional conflicts tend to be more direct, so there's not as much to speculate about. And there is also an unwritten code of conduct for girls that deems it inconsiderate or even rude for a girl to ignore a friend's problems or concerns.

"It's sort of considered her job to make sure her friend is OK," Rose says. "As a result, it's harder for problems to go away." Girls also may think about problems in a way that makes them more depressed and anxious. They may be more likely to take personal responsibility for their problems while boys may be more likely to blame others.

Rose is midway through a third major study that will try to shed light on what exactly goes on when kids co-ruminate. For this research, she has equipped her lab with a well-appointed observation room. It has three prominent video cameras mounted on the room's walls and microphones tucked into light fixtures hanging from the ceiling.

In this tiny room, pairs of best friends from seventh and tenth-grade classes meet alone for 15 minutes with instructions to talk about a problem they are having. Again, with the help of a host of graduate and undergraduate assistants, 100 pairs of students went through the observation room this summer. Nine months later, they will fill out co-rumination questionnaires.

The process will be repeated for the next two summers until Rose has videos of about 300 pairs of friends. The kids in the study also are given Palm Pilot handheld computers to carry with them. Whenever they have an interaction with someone that lasts more than five minutes, they are supposed to answer anywhere from about 15 to 45 questions that the computer poses.

Guaranteeing compliance may be difficult, Rose concedes. "I don't think we're getting every interaction, but I think we're getting a fair sample," she says. "What we would like to find is that same pattern of co-rumination being related to the adjustment trade-off between stronger friendships and more anxiety and depression. If you find converging evidence, you can feel confident you've found a real phenomenon."

So far, the results suggest that this new project will yield plenty of valuable information.

"Things are going as we hoped," Rose says. "Kids are engaging in really long, co-ruminative conversations. They're saying things you wouldn't expect them to say in front of adults. They know we're watching, but we're in another room and the door is closed."

Rose has noted "wild variation" in the topics and the amount of time the kids spent talking about their problems. In an earlier pilot study in preparation for this project, Rose found that girls tended to discuss their boyfriends, or lack of boyfriends, and other commitment issues at length. Boys discussed a wider array of problems dealing with academics and athletics, as well as interpersonal issues. Boys also tended to spend less time dwelling on things.

One boy, for example, told his friend that he was thinking about asking a certain girl out. His buddy cut him off quickly: "That's not a problem, moron," he said.

Gender differences in co-rumination styles only seem to grow with age, Rose's research has found. And that could have further implications for male-female relationships later in life, she says.

While co-rumination levels are higher among girls at all ages, the differences between the sexes grow larger by the time children reach 12 or 14. "Just at the time they become interested in each other their interpersonal styles diverge," she says. "It's no wonder a big conflict among married couples is how they support each other."

Women may want to talk and talk about their problems, while their spouses may want to talk and get it over with. "They are both trying to do their best," Rose says.

Rose is considering a follow-up study that would look at older teenagers as they begin romantic relationships to see whether their communication styles collide. In the distant future, Rose will be able to observe this whole process of gender differences in her own family.

Rose is married to Christopher Robert, an industrial-organizational psychologist with joint appointments in the University's psychology and business management departments. They have two young children of their own. Zack is less than a year old. Emma is three. Hardly old enough to be co-ruminating, Rose says. "But I'm watching."