This study examines the relationships between peer victimization, peer relations and depression among adolescents, with a focus on the moderating roles of peer rejection, peer acceptance and reciprocal friendships on the association between peer victimization and depression. A sample of 605 adolescents (average age 13.5 years) completed measures…

Although children with Williams syndrome (WS) are strongly socially motivated, many have friendship difficulties. The parents of 21 children with WS and 20 of the children themselves participated in a semi-structured interview about the children's friendships. Parents reported that their child had difficulties sustaining friendships and low levels…

The well-known associations of peer status (acceptance and rejection) with prosocial and aggressive behaviors have mostly relied on peer status measures assessed at a single time point. This study adopted a person-oriented approach to examine longitudinal links between stable peer status profiles assessed at two time points and prosocial and…

Persistence across undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs is exceptionally low. Recent studies have shown that social support and sense of belonging are particularly important for students who are historically underrepresented in STEM, yet few interventions have directly targeted or investigated these…

This research aimed to determine whether the Making Friends (MF) program is effective on social acceptance levels of typically developing children in preschool toward their peers with special needs. The research had an experimental design with a control group, pretest, posttest, and follow-up test. The study included 130 typically developing…

Defending peers who have been bullied is often thought to put defenders at risk of becoming victimized themselves. The study investigated the concurrent and prospective associations between defending and (peer- and self-reported) victimization, and examined popularity and classroom norms as potential moderators. Participants included 4085 Finnish…

Parent-child attachment is robustly associated with typical patterns of emotion regulation but rarely examined in relation to changes in emotion in response to events. We studied how attachment is related to emotion reactivity to positive and negative events and to immediate and delayed emotion recovery from social exclusion. The sample (78%…

This study aimed to investigate the heterogeneity of creativity and the role of interpersonal relationships for creativity subgroups among primary school students. We used latent profile analysis to identify subgroups of creativity among pupils. We then used logistic regression analysis to investigate the role of teacher-student and peer…

The differential susceptibility model proposes that some children are more susceptible to both positive and negative peer relationships than others. However, experimental evidence supporting such a proposition is relatively scarce. The current experiment aimed to help address this gap, investigating whether Chinese (pre)adolescents who have higher…

Existing literature has mostly explained the occurrence of bullying victimization by individual socioemotional maladjustment. Instead, this study tested the person-group dissimilarity model (Wright et al., "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology," 50: 523-536, 1986) by examining whether individuals' deviation from developmentally…

This study investigated how first-year college students described belonging experiences with college peers in the first semester, specifically conceptualizing these relationships as bidirectional, where college students both receive and provide support to one another in a mutual way. A descriptive phenomenological research design was employed to…

Ostracism and dark triad personality traits have been found to be linked with social media addiction. Despite the well-established relationship between the dark triad (i.e., narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopathy) and social media addiction, there is limited research on their mediating effect. In the present study, we tested a hypothetical…

Research shows that peer relationships are associated with students' school adjustment. However, the importance of advantageous and disadvantageous factors for students' educational outcomes may vary by socioeconomic positioning. Drawing on sociometric and register data from a nationally representative sample of Swedish youth (n = 4996, girls 50%;…

We explored factors predicting repeated or hazardous alcohol use among autistic and non-autistic U.S. youth ages 16 to 20 years. Autistic (n = 94) and non-autistic (n = 92) youth completed an online survey. By design, half of each group reported past-year alcohol use. We compared drinking patterns for autistic and non-autistic youth, and within…

The link between peer exposure and self-regulation is likely to vary as a function of the type and quality of peer interaction. In the presented research study, the relationship between self-regulation and peer acceptance/rejection has been explored. The Means-Ends Problem Solving technique was administered in 1625 cases of lower-secondary school…