The current research examined the bidirectional effects between internalizing problems and peer victimization within a meta-analytic framework. The study also investigated several potential ...moderators of these effects which have not been examined previously in relation to meta-analytic studies. Only longitudinal studies examining the association between internalizing symptoms and peer victimization from five online databases were included and after screening 7,122 articles, 85 studies were included with a total of 117,520 participants. Results supported a bidirectional relationship between internalizing symptoms and peer victimization with small effects for both: victimization to internalizing, r = .18 and internalizing to victimization, r = .19. There were few differences between effects based on moderators. The effects were consistent across youth’s age and sex. Although significant effects in both directions were shown for most forms of victimization, internalizing more strongly predicted cyber victimization than traditional forms of victimization. The results hold implications for theories of the interplay between peer relationships and internalizing psychopathology and may help to improve treatment or early intervention programs.
•Peer victimization predicts higher internalizing symptoms in school-aged children.•Higher internalizing symptoms predict increases in peer victimization.•The bidirectional relationships were consistent across age, sex, and study interval.•Findings hold across all forms of victimization and especially cyberbullying.•Effects were maintained when self-reported and when reported by different informants.
•Dynamic social network studies can separate peer influence from selection.•Delinquency and weapon carrying are related to peer influence.•Peer dynamics in direct aggression depend on context and ...person.•Social needs may be driving peer influence in antisocial behavior.
In adolescence, peer influences are important in the development of antisocial behavior. Previous empirical work has often focused on peer similarity to make claims about peer influence. However, peer similarity can be the result of both peer selection and influence, or general social network processes, such as reciprocity (preference for mutual friendships) and transitivity (preference for becoming friends with the friends of one’s friend). Empirically, it is often difficult to separate these processes from each other. Only recently, studies have been able to statistically separate selection from influence, using dynamic social network models. These new models thus allow for a closer study of peer influence on the development of antisocial behavior. The current article presents a review of recent empirical studies that have used dynamic social network analyses to study peer influence effects for different forms of antisocial behavior (i.e., aggression, delinquency, externalizing behavior, weapon carrying) as these forms may be differently affected by peer influence. Studies that lump different kinds of antisocial behavior together as “externalizing behavior” show mixed results with regard to peer influence. With regard to the development of delinquency and weapon carrying, peer influences were observed in studies that had six month to one-year measurement intervals, but not in those with shorter intervals. With regard to direct forms of aggression, peer influence was only observed in certain contexts and depended on individual antisocial traits. What is recommended for further advance in the field of peer influence is to avoid container variables of antisocial behavior (such as “externalizing behavior”), to pay close attention to the role of status and belonging needs, and to focus more strongly on a detailed examination of the sequential order of peer selection and influence processes and their moderation by individual and contextual conditions.
After sketching how my own interest and research into bullying problems began, I address a number of potentially controversial issues related to the definition and measurement of such problems. The ...importance of maintaining the distinctions between bullying victimization and general victimization and between bullying perpetration and general aggression is strongly emphasized. There are particular problems with the common method of peer nominations for purposes of prevalence estimation, comparisons of such estimates and mean levels across groups and time, and measurement of change. Two large-scale projects with time series data show that several recent claims about cyber bullying made in the media and by some researchers are greatly exaggerated and lack scientific support. Recent meta-analyses of the long-term outcomes for former bullies and victims provide convincing evidence that being involved in such problems is not just a harmless and passing school problem but something that has serious adjustment and public health consequences that also entail great costs to society. Another section presents my view of why the theme of bullying took quite some time to reach the peer relations research community in the United States and the role of a dominant research tradition focusing on "likeability" in this account. In a final section, I summarize some reasons why it may be considered important and interesting to focus both research and intervention on bully/victim problems.
The Teenage Brain: Sensitivity to Social Evaluation Somerville, Leah H.
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
04/2013, Letnik:
22, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Relative to childhood, peer relationships take on a heightened importance during adolescence. Might adolescents be highly attuned to information that concerns when and how they are being evaluated ...and what their peers think of them? This review evaluates how continuing brain development—which influences brain function—partially explains and reflects adolescents' attunement to social evaluation. Though preliminary, evidence is mounting to suggest that while processing information relevant to social evaluation and the internal states of other people, adolescents respond with heightened emotional intensity and corresponding nonlinear recruitment of socioaffective brain circuitry. This review highlights research findings that relate trajectories of brain development to social behavior and discusses promising avenues of future research that will inform how brain development might lead adolescents to be sensitized to social evaluation.
Investigators have long recognized that adolescents’ peer experiences provide a crucial context for the acquisition of developmental competencies, as well as potential risks for a range of adjustment ...difficulties. However, recent years have seen an exponential increase in adolescents’ adoption of social media tools, fundamentally reshaping the landscape of adolescent peer interactions. Although research has begun to examine social media use among adolescents, researchers have lacked a unifying framework for understanding the impact of social media on adolescents’ peer experiences. This paper represents Part 1 of a two-part theoretical review, in which we offer a
transformation framework
to integrate interdisciplinary social media scholarship and guide future work on social media use and peer relations from a theory-driven perspective. We draw on prior conceptualizations of social media as a distinct interpersonal context and apply this understanding to adolescents’ peer experiences, outlining features of social media with particular relevance to adolescent peer relations. We argue that social media transforms adolescent peer relationships in five key ways: by changing the frequency or immediacy of experiences, amplifying experiences and demands, altering the qualitative nature of interactions, facilitating new opportunities for compensatory behaviors, and creating entirely novel behaviors. We offer an illustration of the
transformation framework
applied to adolescents’ dyadic friendship processes (i.e., experiences typically occurring between two individuals), reviewing existing evidence and offering theoretical implications. Overall, the
transformation framework
represents a departure from the prevailing approaches of prior peer relations work and a new model for understanding peer relations in the social media context.
Emotion dysregulation emerges from an interaction between individual factors and environmental factors. Changes in biological, cognitive, and social systems that characterize adolescence create a ...complex array of environmental factors contributing to emotion dysregulation during this developmental period. In particular, peer victimization (PV) has long-term consequences for emotion dysregulation. Yet, previous research has also indicated that emotion dysregulation can be both an antecedent to and outcome of PV. The present study evaluated reciprocal associations between longitudinal changes within repeated measures of PV and emotion dysregulation across adolescence and into young adulthood. The sample included 167 adolescents (53% male,
= 14.07 years at Time 1) who participated in a longitudinal study across five time points, with approximately 1 year between each assessment. Latent change score modeling was used to examine reciprocal associations between PV and emotion dysregulation. Results emphasize bidirectional associations between PV and emotion dysregulation. Consistent with social information processing theory, greater emotion dysregulation predicted greater relational and overt victimization over time. Moreover, higher overt victimization predicted increases in emotion dysregulation. Our results offer insights toward developmentally informed longitudinal, transactional models linking negative social environments, and emotion dysregulation development across adolescence and into young adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
We examined the links of supportive and conflictual peer interactions to mood and self-care via ecological momentary assessment.
Adolescents with Type 1 diabetes (
= 167, 49% female) recruited ...between 2018 and 2021 were prompted 8 times a day for 8 days to complete brief surveys that measured perceived social interactions, affect, and self-care.
Cross-sectional analyses revealed between- and within-person (WP) links of peer support to positive mood and conflict to negative mood. Between-person peer support was linked to healthy self-care, but WP support was not. Lagged analyses showed conflictual interactions were associated with self-care decline. There was some evidence that females did not benefit as much from support and were more bothered by conflict than others.
Results underscore differences in between- and WP links of social interactions to health. Individual differences in support were more influential than conflict, but conflictual interactions had more momentary effects than supportive interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Adolescent mental health issues are a major public health concern, highlighted by the US Surgeon General as a crisis. Traditional school-based interventions show inconsistent success, creating a ...demand for effective solutions.
This study evaluates the impact of technology-supported cooperative learning (CL) on adolescent mental health, focusing on positive peer relations and peer victimization.
Participants included 813 adolescents (50.2% female; 70.7% White) from 12 middle and high schools in the Pacific Northwest. The study used hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) to assess the effectiveness of CL facilitated via PeerLearning.net.
Implementing CL led to significant improvements in peer relations and reductions in victimization and mental health problems, with moderate-to-large effect sizes observed across different demographics. Positive peer relations significantly predicted lower victimization and improved mental health.
The findings highlight the potential of technology-supported CL in addressing adolescent mental health by enhancing protective factors and reducing risks. Such interventions offer a scalable and sustainable approach for schools to address mental health challenges.
Technology-supported cooperative learning offers a promising strategy for improving adolescent mental health, demonstrating significant benefits in peer relations and reducing victimization. This approach provides schools with an accessible and effective tool to tackle the mental health crisis among students.
•Studied the contribution of peers’ norms and parental mediation on online behavior.•A representative sample of 6th to 11th grade students responded to an online survey.•Restrictive parental ...supervision increased adolescents’ risky behavior online.•Perceptions of peers norms strongly associated with risky online behavior.
Previous studies have shown that parental mediation of adolescents online is associated with the latter’s participation in risky behavior online and being a victim of online harassment and bullying. However, there is a paucity of studies investigating the differential contribution of peers’ norms and parental mediation on adolescents’ engagement in risky online behavior. To fill this gap in the literature, we collected data from a representative sample of 495 sixth to eleventh grade students in a large city in Israel. Participants responded to an online survey measuring three types of parental mediation: active guidance, restrictive supervision and non-intervention. We measured risky behavior online with items indicating the frequency of posting personal details, sending an insulting massage and meeting face-to-face with a stranger met online. In addition, respondents reported their perceptions about their peers’ attitudes toward various risky online behaviors. Multivariate findings show that after controlling for age, gender, time spent online and online activities, only restrictive parental supervision had a significant effect. However, such supervision actually increased adolescents’ risky behavior online. Perceptions that one’s peers approve of such behavior reduced the effect of restrictive parental supervision, leading to increased risky actions online. The results emphasize the importance of peer networks in youngsters’ engagement in risky online activities.
For decades, psychological research has examined the extent to which children's and adolescents' behavior is influenced by the behavior of their peers (i.e., peer influence effects). This review ...provides a comprehensive synthesis and meta-analysis of this vast field of psychological science, with a goal to quantify the magnitude of peer influence effects across a broad array of behaviors (externalizing, internalizing, academic). To provide a rigorous test of peer influence effects, only studies that employed longitudinal designs, controlled for youths' baseline behaviors, and used "external informants" (peers' own reports or other external reporters) were included. These criteria yielded a total of 233 effect sizes from 60 independent studies across four different continents. A multilevel meta-analytic approach, allowing the inclusion of multiple dependent effect sizes from the same study, was used to estimate an average cross-lagged regression coefficient, indicating the extent to which peers' behavior predicted changes in youths' own behavior over time. Results revealed a peer influence effect that was small in magnitude (β¯ = .08) but significant and robust. Peer influence effects did not vary as a function of the behavioral outcome, age, or peer relationship type (one close friend vs. multiple friends). Time lag and peer context emerged as significant moderators, suggesting stronger peer influence effects over shorter time periods, and when the assessment of peer relationships was not limited to the classroom context. Results provide the most thorough and comprehensive synthesis of childhood and adolescent peer influence to date, indicating that peer influence occurs similarly across a broad range of behaviors and attitudes.
Public Significance StatementThis meta-analysis suggests that in childhood and adolescence, peer influence occurs across a wide range of behaviors and attitudes. The strength of the peer influence effect was small but significant and robust, and it was found to be similar for externalizing, internalizing, and academic behaviors.
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