Study: Teen Love Hurts

Feb. 15 -- The most famous youthful romance in the English-speaking world,that star-crossed love of Romeo and Juliet, was a tragedy. Nowresearchers have published a huge study of real-life adolescents inlove.

The results suggest that on balance, falling in love makesadolescents more depressed, and more prone to delinquency andalcohol abuse than they would have been if they’d avoided romance.

The reported effect on depression is small, but it’s bigger forgirls than boys. The researchers suggest it could be one reasonteen girls show higher rates of depression than teen boys do, adifference that persists into adulthood.

Teen Love Ain't Grand

This is not exactly the view of romance that prevails aroundValentine’s Day. Researchers who’ve studied teenage love say thatsmaller studies had shown teen romance can cause emotional trouble,but that the new work overlooked some good things.

The study was done by sociologists Kara Joyner of CornellUniversity and J. Richard Udry of the University of North Carolinaat Chapel Hill. They presented the results in the December issue ofthe Journal of Health & Social Behavior.

Their results are based on responses from about 8,200adolescents across the country who were interviewed twice, about ayear apart, about a wide variety of things. The kids were ages 12to 17 at the first interview.

To measure levels of depression, the researchers examinedadolescents’ answers to 11 questions about the previous week, suchas how often they felt they couldn’t shake off the blues, feltlonely or sad or got bothered by things that normally wouldn’t fazethem.

Researchers Compared Teens In and Out of Romance

To see what love’s got to do with it, the researchers comparedresponses from adolescents who didn’t report any romanticinvolvement at either interview with those who reported it at bothinterviews. They looked at how much depression levels changedbetween interviews for each group.