Real-world exploration, affect, autonomy and mental health during school transitions

When adolescents start a new school or arrive at university, they must navigate new campuses, new peers and new routines. Exploration is recognised as a key cognitive process supporting adolescent development and wellbeing but how real-world exploration relates to emotional adjustment during major life transitions remains unclear. To address this question, we tracked adolescents entering high school and university (N=64) over the first three months of transition using continuous smartphone geolocation and ecological momentary assessment (EMA). We quantified daily exploration as the dispersion of time in a day across locations (“roaming entropy”) and the number of newly visited locations (“novelty”) and assessed in-the-moment affect, autonomy and new social connections using EMA. On days when individuals visited more novel locations than usual, they reported higher positive affect, lower negative affect and more new social connections. Novelty was a stronger predictor of these outcomes than roaming entropy. Associations between exploration and positive affect were more pronounced in university students than in high school students, consistent with greater autonomy during this transition. Greater anxiety and depressive symptoms were not associated with lower exploration, but attenuated the positive associations between novelty, affect and perceived autonomy. These findings link theories and laboratory studies of adolescent exploration and mental health to naturalistic behaviour, showing that engagement with novel environments during major transitions is linked to positive emotional and social experiences. Importantly, these associations were weaker when depression and anxiety symptoms were greater. Real-world exploration may therefore represent a behavioural pathway supporting adjustment as young people navigate environmental change.