This study aimed to evaluate the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS: Laugeson et al. in "J Autism Dev Disord" 39(4):596-606, 2009). PEERS focuses on improving friendship quality and social skills among adolescents with higher-functioning ASD. 58 participants aged 11-16 years-old were randomly assigned to…

Previous research suggests that anxiously withdrawn preadolescents demonstrate success in forming friendships, yet these friendships tend to be of lesser quality. Drawing on Selman's (1980) theory of interpersonal understanding, we compared levels of friendship understanding between anxiously withdrawn preadolescents and a sample of non-withdrawn…

Friendships matter for withdrawn youth because the consequences of peer isolation are severe. From a normative sample of 2,437 fifth graders (1,245 females; M age = 10.25), a subset (n = 1,364; 638 female) was classified into 3 groups (anxious-solitary, unsociable, comparison) and followed across a school year. Findings indicated that it was more…

The goal of this study was to examine the ability of friendship to moderate the association between behavioral risk and peer victimization for girls with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; n = 140) and comparison girls (n = 88) in a 5-week naturalistic summer camp setting. Participants were an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse…

To investigate the relationship between cognitive and social functioning, 20 Israeli individuals with HFASD aged 8-12 and 22 age, maternal education, and receptive vocabulary-matched preadolescents with typical development (TYP) came to the lab with a close friend. Measures of abstract reasoning, friendship quality, and dyadic interaction during a…

Three studies compared beliefs about natural and late blooming positive traits with those acquired through personal effort, extrinsic rewards or medicine. Young children (5-6 years), older children (8-13 years), and adults all showed a strong bias for natural and late blooming traits over acquired traits. All age groups, except 8- to 10-year-olds,…

The study examined boys' and girls' autonomy of choice of activities in the after-school hours with samples of children from two different countries. Preadolescent children from Taiwan (n = 289) and the United States (n = 195) completed a questionnaire on their usual after-school activities indicating who determines the choice of any particular…

Objective: As a follow-up to an earlier cross-sectional study (Holmbeck et al., 2003), the current multimethod, multi-informant investigation examined individual growth in psychosocial adjustment across the adolescent transition in 2 samples: young adolescents with spina bifida (SB) and typically developing adolescents (N = 68 in both groups at…

Examined the experience of collaboration from sixth graders' perspective as a function of dyad gender and degree of friendship. Found that enjoyment expectations and affiliation perceptions were greater in dyads with greater degrees of friendship and in same-gender dyads compared with mixed-gender dyads. More positive expectation and greater…

Examined the hypotheses that intimacy of friendship is more integral to socioemotional adjustment during adolescence than during preadolescence, and that competence in close relationship skills is more important during adolescence than preadolescence. Findings suggest the importance of the ability to establish close friendships increases during…

Compared conversational styles mothers used with preadolescent and middle adolescent daughters with styles used with friends. Found that with friends, mothers used a high involvement style with high rates of overlaps and simultaneous speech, whereas with daughters, they used a high considerateness style with low rates of overlaps and simultaneous…

Interviewed family members about family relationships and observed family members' interactions. Found that, compared to other girls, early maturing girls experienced higher levels of psychological distress; experienced greater psychological distress in grade 10 when they had a mixed-sex friendship network in grades 7 through 9; and were more…

How 330 young, 481 middle, and 299 late adolescents (535 males and 575 females) perceive the relative importance of relationships with their mother, father, most important sibling, best same-sex friend, and most important teacher was investigated. Results from the Network of Relationship Inventory were analyzed. (SLD)