Tuning out tenderness: the influence of gender and friends on U.S. adolescents' emotional self-socialization via film selection and avoidance.

This article investigates how 13- and 14-year-old adolescents' film selections reflect emotional self-socialization into traditional gender roles, focusing on boys' avoidance of "feminine" emotions such as tenderness and preference for "masculine" hostile emotions. Using the Selective Exposure Self- and Affect-Management (SESAM) model, an online experiment with 402 U.S. teens assessed interest in and likelihood of viewing films pretested for hostile or tender emotional content, under imagined conditions of watching alone or with friends. Results showed boys expressed greater interest in hostile emotions and films and lower interest in tender ones compared to girls and nonbinary youths, with media selections reinforcing lower post-viewing tenderness but not increasing hostility. While imagined co-viewing with friends did not broadly moderate gender differences, post hoc analyses indicated that gender composition of friends influenced boys' avoidance of tender content, particularly when imagining viewing with same-gender peers. The study highlights media selection as a gendered emotional self-socialization process during early adolescence, emphasizing boys' selective avoidance of tender media as a key factor in reinforcing restrictive emotionality.