At a high school reunion this summer, I felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned to see a well-dressed man in a stylish blazer with a shaved head and a few ear piercings. He smiled and introduced himself. 

“You won’t remember me. We didn’t travel in the same circles. I did a lot of drugs back then and was not known for making good choices,” he said with a small laugh. He explained that because our last names were alphabetically close, we’d often been assigned in the same groups, and he remembered I’d always been nice to him. He introduced me to his wife and told me about the company he’d founded (“I’ve gotten my act together since then”). As we said goodbye, he urged me to go home and tell my children that being kind matters. 

Initially, I was struck by the fact that he’d had the self-awareness and confidence to characterize his high-school self that way. The next day, I found myself wondering how he’d even remembered our small interactions, whatever they had been, and was amazed he stuck his neck out to say anything.

There’s a famous Maya Angelou quote: "People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." Truer words might never be spoken about adolescence, a notoriously sensitive time when we’re sorting out who we are, what we do, and where we fit in. Along the way, we contend with all kinds of slights and stings by peers who are likewise figuring out who they are, often with elbows out. I’m guessing my classmate might have had more than his share of that.

Countless coming-of-age memoirs attest to the stickiness of cruelty during these years and keep therapists’ calendars full. When I was a new kid in town back in middle school, I was on the business end of some memorable comments. Not just sticky. Downright gorilla glue.

For many adolescents, those experiences remain more memorable than beefier slights later in adulthood, says Dr. Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University and author of hundreds of articles on development during the teenage years. I reached out via email and asked him why it is that the teen years pack such a potent punch. 

“EVERYTHING that happens during adolescence is remembered in more detail than are events, people, etc. that occur in childhood or adulthood,” Steinberg wrote back. “This is especially true for phenomena that have strong emotional correlates.” 

But what gets retained — good or bad, major or trivial, and for how long — depends on the kid and the adult supports who can help put things in perspective.

The science of remembering

Adolescence is an intense time, developmentally speaking. The brain is weeding out and rewiring neural connections at a rate not seen since early youth. This malleability means teens are extra sensitive to emotional experiences, both good and bad.

Adolescent identities are forming in a social Petrie dish with long-term impact. Rejection, embarrassment, and abuse don’t just cause pain in the moment; they integrate into the sense of self. Adolescents are more emotionally sensitive to negative stimuli compared to adults, regardless of the emotional intensity of the stimuli. The physical effect of this sting is actually measurable: Neuroimaging studies show adolescents have visibly stronger neural responses to social rejection and criticism than adults or younger children. Stress hormones like cortisol amp up memory consolidation, making painful moments more vivid and enduring. 

Relationships with people who provide a social buffer — mentors, teachers, peers who show empathy — can mitigate negative impacts.  

In this way, negative events can “burn in” more vividly than positive ones, a psychological preference known as a negativity bias. It serves us, from an evolutionary perspective. Remembering painful experiences helps us adapt and evolve at an age where parents are no longer a safety net in quite the same way. When you are a teenager, it’s important to know whom and what to avoid like a third rail. 

Remembering positive experiences doesn’t quite serve the same survival function. However, developmental psychologists say positive experiences provide a valuable reality check against the lasting value of unkind messaging. 

For positive memories to stick, teens have to have a mindset in place to take note of things that go well — and assign them mental value. That’s no small order. It’s hard enough for adults to drive a gratitude mindset strong enough to overcome the negativity bias. Expecting students to do it is like steering a tanker away from the rocks without a license. And yet the ability to train our focus on positive details is a critical skill, developmental psychologists say. Particularly for teens who are on the rocks. 

Helping young adults notice and name the positive 

Indeed, positive experiences can also be deeply encoded, especially if they follow or counterbalance negative experiences. Relationships with people who provide a social buffer — mentors, teachers, peers who show empathy — can mitigate those impacts and even rewire those pathways toward resilience. 

And here’s the hopeful side: Positive, supportive experiences can be encoded just as deeply when they’re reinforced and recognized. A single supportive adult or friend can shift a young person’s trajectory by providing what neuroscientists call a “corrective emotional experience” — a moment of kindness or affirmation that rewires the way the brain interprets itself and its relationships. Which is why kindness and empathy are so powerful in adolescence. 

Positive interactions can slip past unnoticed, especially for teens busy scanning the horizon for threats. Finding ways to draw teens’ attention to episodes of kindness helps strengthen the neural pathways associated with positive memory consolidation. In some sociological scenarios, it’s known as naming the moment.

A teacher in my kids’ own high school told me she routinely “calls out the good” because so often the positive can go over their heads, get lost in the noise. 

“They are so intent on looking for fins in the water that sometimes they miss the life rafts,” she said. “I have to find a creative way to repeat it when I can.”

I can only guess my classmate at the reunion became acquainted with this way of thinking somewhere along his path. His chosen field, and the company he established, is adjacent to recovery and the science of how we learn. When you swim in those waters, you come to know a thing or two about life rafts.