Adolescents’ Online Coping: When Less Is More but None Is Worse

Mobile technologies are omnipresent across adolescent life and require better characterization of their potential benefits. Adolescents also experience high rates of daily stress so that investigating youths’ technology use in relation to their stress response is of practical importance. We employed experience sampling data from a subset of 115 youths (n = 1,241 time points) who reported on their technology-based coping and assessed how these related to emotion change throughout the day and controlled for important covariates. Models testing for the benefits of moderate use (relative to no or heavy use; i.e., Goldilocks effect) showed a clear pattern of positive effects of moderate coping online, particularly in relation to support seeking and self-distraction. Moderate online coping was adaptive and often fostered declines in negative emotion.