One argument for the inclusion of children with special education needs (SEN) is that they will benefit from the interactions and relationships with their typically developing peers. However, students with SEN tend to be more rejected than their non-SEN peers. Considering the negative consequences of peer rejection on socioemotional development…

Socialization among aggressive friends is believed to play a critical role in the development of aggressive behavior. This study examined the moderating effect of norm salience in the classroom on the association between reciprocal friends' and children's own physical, relational, and general aggression. A total of 713 children (M = 10.32 years,…

In this study, we sought to create and validate a brief measure to assess students' perceptions of kindness in school. Participants included 1,753 students in Grades 4 to 8 attending public schools in a large school district in southern British Columbia. The School Kindness Scale (SKS) demonstrated a unidimensional factor structure and adequate…

Adolescents' perceptions of peers' relational characteristics (e.g., support, trustworthiness) were examined for subtypes of youth who evidenced chronic maladaptive behavior, chronic peer group rejection, or combinations of these risk factors. Growth mixture modeling was used to identify subgroups of participants within a normative…

This study examined relations among peer acceptance, inhibitory control, and math achievement in ninety-nine 4th and 5th grade early adolescents. Teachers rated students on peer acceptance and students completed a computerized executive function task assessing inhibitory control. Math achievement was assessed via end of year math grades. Results…

This study examined the communication of non-aggressive, rejected (NAR) children and popular children during peer interaction. The participants were 80 fifth and sixth graders recruited from a larger sociometric sample (40 boys and 40 girls; 20 NAR children and 60 non-aggressive, popular children). Participants were assigned to 40 same-gender…

The present study investigated the role of theory of mind (ToM) skills in three forms of involvement in bullying: ringleader bullying, defending the victim(s), and victimization. Individual (affective empathy) and interpersonal variables (social preference and perceived popularity) were assumed to moderate the associations between ToM and the ways…

This paper reports results from two studies aimed at examining whether perception of social acceptance and actual social acceptance differ according to the presence of an illusion of scholastic incompetence. Results of both studies conducted in Belgium and in Quebec (respectively 179 and 543 participants) show that children's illusion of…

The author investigated the role of individual characteristics (self-esteem, social anxiety, and self-reported classroom participation) and peer reactions (peer-perceived shyness, peer nominations) in classroom loneliness in a sample of 704 preadolescent boys (360) and girls (344). It was hypothesized that classroom participation functions as a…

The extant literature on the social functioning of students with learning disabilities (LD) has indicated that whereas a majority belong to peer groups, a higher proportion are isolated and most have lower social status among peers in general than their typically achieving classmates. Although some work has examined these issues over short-term…

It has been proposed that aggressive behavior may result from unrealistically positive self-evaluations that are disputed by others (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996). The present three studies tested this proposition concurrently and longitudinally for the domain of self-perceived social competence (SPSC) in 3-6th grade children on two…

This study examined ethnic and sex differences in children's depressive symptoms, along with hypothesized mediators of those differences (academic achievement, peer acceptance), in a follow-up of African American (n = 179) and Euro-American (n= 462) children in Grades 3 to 5. African American boys reported more depressive symptoms than African…

This study of fifth graders identified 22 behavioral cues to develop and test a peer-report measure of social transactions used to infer liking by peers. Sixteen of the 22 cues described positive behaviors, indicating that positive behaviors may play a more important role in relational communication among children than negative transactions. (TJQ)

Reviews observational data concerning the social interactions of preadolescents and examines the role that peers play in children's social development. Findings indicate that peer responses to a child's early efforts to interact with others determines whether the child will be accepted and included in social activities or subjected to rejection.…

Twenty-four socially rejected children were coached on the importance of displaying behaviors known to be used by peers in making inferences of liking and then were encouraged to communicate these behaviors toward selected friendship targets within their own classroom groups. Significant treatment-related improvements were found in these…