Coming of Age With Generative Artificial Intelligence: The High Stakes of Automating Adolescent Development
Synthesis in Perspectives on Psychological Science of interdisciplinary research on how adolescents' use of generative AI chatbots may uniquely affect the key psychosocial developmental tasks of adolescence — social belonging, emotion regulation, autonomy, and identity formation. Argues GenAI can offer low-stakes opportunities to simulate social interaction, scaffold emotional regulation and support identity exploration, but also threatens to displace or thwart essential developmental experiences, and calls for a developmental-science framework to guide research, technology design and policy.
Publisher
Perspectives on Psychological Science (Association for Psychological Science / Sage)
Published
28 Aug 2026
Added
yesterday
Key Findings
- Frames adolescent conversational-AI risk through developmental tasks with lifelong consequences rather than through content exposure alone
- Named risk pathways: increasing social isolation, undermining distress tolerance, distorting expectations for human relationships, compromising identity and purpose development, and exposure to biased, inaccurate or sexually inappropriate content
- Notes GenAI may scaffold emotional regulation and identity exploration in some contexts — the framework is two-sided, not alarmist
- Calls for longitudinal, use-case-specific studies spanning all developmental domains, accounting for varying vulnerability across adolescent stages and populations, with academic-industry partnership and youth perspectives
Methodology Notes
Perspectives-format synthesis article (no original data), published online 2026-08-28. Authors at UNC Chapel Hill (Maheux) and UNC/Université Libre de Bruxelles (Maes). Sage blocks automated fetchers from this box: verified via Crossref metadata and the publisher-deposited abstract reconstructed from the OpenAlex abstract_inverted_index route; nothing beyond the abstract is attributed to the full text.
Sources
Authors
Anne J. Maheux, Chelly Maes
Tags
Cite This
APA
Anne J. Maheux, Chelly Maes (2026). Coming of Age With Generative Artificial Intelligence: The High Stakes of Automating Adolescent Development. Perspectives on Psychological Science (Association for Psychological Science / Sage). https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916261460771
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