How do you feel right now? Investigating momentary well-being in French adolescents using geographically-explicit...

Adolescence is a period of heightened emotional reactivity and vulnerability to mental health problems, during which well-being plays a central role in psychological adjustment. Beyond reflecting immediate experiences, momentary well-being has been linked to long-term outcomes such as depression and substance use. While social and geographic contexts are recognized determinants of adolescents' mental health, their influence on momentary well-being remains unclear. We aimed to investigate these associations in a sample of French adolescents using real-time assessments.

Participants were adolescents from the EXIST cohort, who agreed to participate in the Geographically-explicit Ecological Momentary Assessment (GEMA) sub-study. Over 10 days, participants received two SMS prompts daily linked to a short questionnaire. Geolocation was recorded at each questionnaire completion. We used mixed-effects linear regression models to assess the associations between momentary contextual factors and well-being.

A total of 122 adolescents provided 1236 observations. The median age was 13.4 years (IQR: 13.3-13.6). Being with friends or family was associated with higher momentary well-being compared to being alone (adjusted Beta (95%CI) = 3.5 (1.1-5.9), and 3.0 (1.6-4.5), respectively). There was a trend suggestive of an association between momentary well-being and exposure to green space, as measured by the average NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) within a 100m radius. Girls and gender-diverse adolescents reported significantly lower levels of momentary well-being than boys.

Immediate social context emerged as one of the strongest correlates of adolescents' momentary well-being. Our findings suggest that supportive social relationships are closely associated with higher momentary well-being among adolescents. They also highlight the potential of GEMA for investigating contextual correlates of well-being and for informing future research on context-sensitive approaches to mental health promotion.