Every day at recess, 11-year-old Anya Goss huddles with her best friend on the playground of her Toronto school and begins going over the day's problems.
The girls talk about who has been bullying them, who picked a fight with someone who used to be their best friend, who is mean and who is just jealous.
"In one recess we can cover about five problems," said Anya, who will start Grade 6 in the fall.
"But none of them really get solved."
Anya and her friends, like most girls their age, talk about their problems a lot. They whisper about them in the halls and cry to each other on the phone after school.
For many adolescent girls, this process is a major component of friendship, a way to help each other out and build solidarity against perceived injustices.
But the constant discussion of all things downer could actually be making thing worse. According to a study in the July issue of Developmental Psychology, girls who constantly rehash their problems with friends develop higher levels of depression and anxiety over the course of a school year.
"With this focused insistence on talking about their problems, they don't get a chance to do other things that might take their mind off it," said Amanda Rose, the study's author and a professor at the University of Missouri. "They keep getting reminded about what they're upset about, so it's harder for them to move on."
Dr. Rose made her discovery after spending eight months studying a group of 813 students in grades 3 through 9.
Both boys and girls were found to co-ruminate - or talk to one another about their problems - but only among girls did the habit predict heightened levels of depression and anxiety.
Boys were less likely to talk to their friends about emotional problems, she said, and even when they did, it did not seem to make them feel any worse.
"I was surprised that co-rumination didn't cause depression among boys," Dr. Rose said.
She believes this is because girls tend to blame themselves for their problems, while boys find fault externally - a gender difference that has been established in other research.
But Dr. Rose also found that the more girls talked to a friend about a problem, the closer they felt to that individual. Their friendships improved even as their moods seemed to darken.
"I think their intentions are very positive and they might feel better in the moment when they're actually talking," she said. "They really bond over it."
Anya began discussing her problems regularly when she entered Grade 5 and "things got more complicated."
Suddenly, girls in her class were fighting every day, and talking about it with her best friend made Anya feel like she wasn't the only one being picked on.
But she admits that having people on her side sometimes agitates things further.
"Some problems I like keeping secret," she said, "because if you tell your friends they want to make stuff better, but when they try and make stuff better, it makes stuff worser."
Like Dr. Rose, Anya has noticed that boys don't seem to endlessly discuss their issues.
"As much as I'm close to a lot of my friends that are boys, more girls understand about this stuff," she said. "Boys will forget it or ignore it, but girls basically put it in a library and they can take it out whenever they want."
Marshall Korenblum, chief psychiatrist at the Hincks-Dellcrest Centre for Children in Toronto, said his female patients are regularly involved in this kind of constant chronicling.
"It can be pretty all-consuming. They talk about it on MSN [instant messaging] and you think that would be enough, but no, then they have to go to Facebook and then the telephone. But they just saw each other 10 minutes ago," he said.
Instead of telling them to stop, Dr. Korenblum encourages the girls also to discuss their problems with an adult, who may be able to help them reach a solution in a single sitting. Once they feel better about the issue, he said, they will naturally stop obsessing over it with their friends.
Dr. Rose, on the other hand, believes girls should be told directly to "rein in" the time they spend commiserating, and should be taught about the link between co-rumination and depression.
"A lot of people don't think talking about problems could make you feel worse," she said. "So even just letting them know about this idea could help move them away from it."
Nevertheless, Dr. Rose said it won't be easy for girls to stop talking each other's ears off about their issues. For most women, including the researcher herself, the behaviour continues into the teenage years and adulthood.
"Now that I've seen these findings I do try and co-ruminate less," she said.
"But I'm not sure how successful I'll be."
