Social rejection is an undesirable phenomenon with serious present and future implications for children who experience it. Growing rates of social rejection and bullying in elementary-school children, especially on social networks, have been examined mostly from a pathological perspective focused on the rejected child or rejecting group. This…

Bullying is a goal-directed behavior that has long been in the spotlight of worldwide school mental health programs and research. However, the role of popularity goals in bullying and its potential mechanisms are unclear for adolescents in a non-Western cultural context. Based on 333 Chinese adolescents (52% female), the current study was the…

Most research on peer victimization has focused on Western samples, but in recent years peer victimization in China has become more prevalent. As a result, limited information is available on how peer victimization, school climate, peer preference, and adjustment difficulties impact Chinese middle school students. This cross-sectional study…

This short-term, longitudinal study examines evidence that the level of popularity among adolescents' peer role models exacerbates the emotional impact of mistreatment by peers. We recruited 469 adolescents (255 boys, 214 girls; [X-bar] age = 12.7 years) from an ethnically diverse middle school and followed these youth for a 1-year period. We…

Although a number of social--cognitive and contextual correlates of defending against bullying have been identified, research on the personality traits associated with defending have yielded weak and inconsistent results. The current study provided a novel examination as to whether a tendency toward social withdrawal is associated with less…

The study investigated the longitudinal relations between students' roles in bullying (i.e., bullying, defending, and victimization) and social status within the class. Moreover, we tested the hypothesis that students' perception of their own status may mediate these relations. A sample of 432 early adolescents completed peer nominations for…

Associations between social norms and bullying bystander behaviours have been studied extensively over the years, but the mechanisms by which subjective norms influence bystander behaviours remain unclear. This study is the first to examine whether bystander popularity moderates the association between perceived peer pressure for intervention and…

Prior research links need for approval (NFA; the extent to which self-worth is contingent on peer approval or disapproval) to critical developmental outcomes, but little is known about how NFA develops over time or within social contexts. To address this gap, the present study used a sophisticated analytic approach (autoregressive latent…

This study assessed the prevalence of verbally being put down by others and intrapersonal and normative factors associated with being put down by others among middle and high school students. Students (N = 1,027) completed the Adolescent Health Risk Behavior Survey. Over 16% of participants reported being put down at school. Students who…

We explored how gender and gender similarity affects friendship dissolution following the transition to middle school. We predicted that both gender and gender similarity (measured by perceived similarity to own-gender and other-gender peers) explain dissolution trends and that less own-gender similarity or more other-gender similarity predicts…

Social norms are vital for the functioning of adolescent peer groups; they can protect the well-being of groups and individual members, often by deterring harmful behaviors, such as aggression, through enforcement mechanisms like peer victimization; in adolescent peer groups, those who violate aggression norms are often subject to victimization.…

Background: Very-low-income students are a population at a high risk of perpetrating and suffering bullying at school, and at the same time the peer group at school is often one of the few sources of support for these minors. Objective: This two-wave study is aimed to disambiguate the two different roles of peer acceptance and friendship on…

The researchers in this study investigated rural middle school teachers' perspectives regarding bullying. The researchers gathered information about the teachers' definitions of bullying, where bullying occurs in their school, and how to prevent bullying. Peer-reviewed literature associated with this topic was studied in order to achieve a broader…

Youth with ADHD are more at-risk for peer victimization than their typically developing peers, and may not be benefiting from current interventions. Thus, we sought to examine risk (i.e., anxiety, depression, and forms of aggression) and protective (i.e., social skills and social acceptance) factors for peer victimization in this group.…

Perceptions of the ecology and middle school transition are examined in relation to interpersonal competence patterns (ICPs) of approximately 3,000 sixth graders (46.2% boys) including 415 students with disabilities from 26 metropolitan schools. Teacher ratings of students' academic competence, externalizing and internalizing behavior, popularity,…