Friendship, Negative Peer Experiences, and Daily Positive and Negative Mood
Abstract
We examined the effect of negative peer experiences (peer victimization and exclusion) on mood (depressed, angry, positive). Seventy-seven (43 female) 5th graders from elementary schools located in a small town in the Midwest completed a friendship quality measure in addition to daily reports (seven school days) of mood and peer experiences. Multilevel modeling showed that children who had negative peer experiences in which no one intervened had more negative and less positive mood. For negative mood, this result was attenuated if the child had a friend who was generally helpful. The results demonstrate the positive role of bystanders during negative peer experiences and highlight the protective role of high-quality friendships.
... Friendship plays an increasingly important role in adolescence for providing opportunities for adolescents to learn and practice cognitive skills that promote positive social outcomes (Vitaro et al., 2009). Adolescents with higher positive friendship quality may have better social adjustment and mental health (Berndt, 2002), which makes it easier for them to learn social skills (Reavis et al., 2015) and behave in a more prosocial manner (Padilla-Walker et al., 2015). Negative friendship quality, on the contrary, is less likely to provide adolescents with a positive context for social interaction and collaboration (Ehrlich et al., 2012). ...
Adolescents’ friendship quality and positivity have been shown to be related to their prosocial behavior. However, little is known about how friendship quality is associated longitudinally with positivity and prosocial behavior. To address this gap, this study examined longitudinal bidirectional relations among friendship quality, positivity, and prosocial behavior in early adolescents. A sample of 3944 Chinese early adolescents (Mage = 10.44 years; 54.4% male) completed multiple measurements of relevant constructs on four occasions at six-month intervals. After controlling for sex and family socioeconomic status (SES), cross-lagged path analyses revealed bidirectional relations between positive friendship quality and prosocial behavior; positivity and prosocial behavior; and positive friendship quality and positivity. Negative friendship quality predicted subsequent prosocial behavior and positivity more than the reverse relations. Furthermore, tests of indirect effects indicated that positive friendship quality indirectly predicted prosocial behavior via positivity and vice versa; negative friendship quality indirectly predicted prosocial behavior via friendship quality and vice versa. The findings provide a more comprehensive understanding of how friendship quality and positivity temporally interrelate with prosocial behavior in early adolescents from a positive youth development perspective, and they yield significant implications for prosocial behavior interventions.
... In the family dimension, the previous study has found that shy individuals feel stress in the social situation (Henderson & Zimbardo, 1999), and those who frequently talk about stressful experiences with family members tend to relieve fatalistic beliefs (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999). In the peer dimension, highquality friendships buffered the effect of the negative events on adjustment problems and global self-worth, reducing their pessimistic thinking (Adams et al., 2011;Reavis et al., 2015). And researchers have found that adolescents with more secondary friendships could buffer the relationship between social anxiety and lower social self-efficacy (Erath et al., 2010), namely, one of the manifestations of fatalists (Zuo et al. 2020). ...
Recently, cyberbullying studies have attracted attention given the consequences of victims’ personal and social domains. The present research investigated the risk and protectors of cyberbullying victimization (CV) among adolescents. Based on the Social Fitness Model, the current study examined the relationship between shyness and CV. To explore this influencing mechanism further, fatalism was tested as a mediator. Moreover, according to the Social Ecological Theory, supportive power was examined as a moderator in the direct and indirect relationship between shyness and CV. A total of 831 adolescents (M = 13.13; SD = 1.15; 51.14% girls) volunteered to complete the multiple questionnaires, namely, Shyness Scale, Revised Cyber Bullying Inventory, Fatalism Scale, and the Supportive Power sub-questionnaire. Correlation analysis indicated that shyness, fatalism, and CV were significantly related to each other positively, and supportive power was negatively correlated with shyness, fatalism, and CV. Moderated mediation analysis showed that fatalism played a mediating role between shyness and CV. Specifically, shy adolescents were more likely to have stronger fatalism, which further triggered CV. Additionally, supportive power moderated the direct and indirect relationship between shyness and CV through fatalism. Specifically, a high level of supportive power buffered the associations of shyness with CV and fatalism, and the association of fatalism with CV, supporting the moderated mediation model. This study contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between shyness and CV, and revealed the moderated mediation mechanism. The results implicate the preventative interventions to reduce the risk of cyberbullying victimization in shy adolescents.
... Friendships are characterized by individual similarities such as interests in common [1], and, for adolescents, it implies frequent contact and sharing a great deal of spare time without parental control, also outside school [1,[48][49][50][51]. Previous research has shown that having close friendships is important for academic attainment [52][53][54], higher self-esteem [55,56], psychological well-being [30,57], and healthy emotional functioning [58][59][60]. In a recent meta-analysis based on 22 studies, Wentzel and colleagues [61] showed that having friends at school is related to academic benefits, both in terms of cognitive as well as performance outcomes. ...
Background:
This study aimed to investigate differences in adolescents' social relationships with classmates of diverse gender, socioeconomic status, immigrant background, and academic achievement.
Methods:
A population of 10th-grade students (N = 406,783; males = 50.3%; Mage = 15.57 years, SDage = 0.75) completed the Classmates Social Isolation Questionnaire (CSIQ), an instrument specifically designed to measure two distinct but correlated types of peer relationships in class: peer acceptance and peer friendship. To obtain reliable comparisons across diverse adolescent characteristics, the measurement invariance of the CSIQ was established by means of CFAs and then latent mean differences tests were performed.
Results:
Immigrant background, academic achievement, and socioeconomic status all proved to be important factors influencing relationships with classmates, while being a male or a female was less relevant. Being a first-generation immigrant adolescent appears to be the foremost risk factor for being less accepted by classmates, while having a low academic achievement is the greatest hindrance for having friends in the group of classmates, a finding that diverges from previous studies.
Conclusions:
This population study suggests that adolescent characteristics (especially immigrant background, socioeconomic status, and academic achievement) seem to affect social relationships with classmates.
... Friendship is defined as a reciprocal and voluntary relationship between close companions (Lin, 2009), and friendship quality is a key indicator for evaluating friendship (Levy-Tossman et al., 2007;Sullivan, 1953), including levels of support, company, and conflict (Zou et al., 1998). Friendship quality has been found to be an important and malleable factor associated with adolescent mental health and behaviors, including loneliness (Lodder et al., 2017), depression (Marver et al., 2017), delinquency (Kawabata & Tseng, 2019), daily mood (Reavis et al., 2015), internalizing and externalizing problems (Burk & Laursen, 2005), and social adjustment (Teja & Schonert-Reichl, 2013); therefore, friendship quality is demonstrably connected with adolescent socialization, and even life course development, in profound ways. It is thus imperative to understand the mechanisms that may enable adolescents to improve the quality of their friendships. ...
This study expanded current understanding of the previously demonstrated association between parent-adolescent relationships and friendship quality. A moderated mediation model was constructed to examine whether adolescent psychological capital (PsyCap) mediated this association and whether the result was further moderated by neighborhood safety and satisfaction. This was a cross-sectional study for which we recruited 733 adolescents (Mage =15.08 years, SD =1.96) in Macao, China. Participants completed questionnaires regarding their parent-adolescent relationships, PsyCap, neighborhood safety and satisfaction, and friendship quality. After controlling for gender and age, it was found that the positive association between parent-adolescent relationships and friendship quality was partially mediated by PsyCap. Moreover, neighborhood safety and satisfaction moderated the second stage of the indirect effect. Specifically, the positive effect of PsyCap on friendship quality was much stronger for adolescents reporting high as opposed to low level of neighborhood safety and satisfaction. The results underscore the importance of integrating the conservation of resources theory, ecological model, and the model of individual ↔ context relations, to understand how and when parent-adolescent relationships are associated with friendship quality. These findings also highlight the need to simultaneously consider family, neighborhood, and individual factors when developing effective interventions to improve adolescent friendship quality.
... For social species such as humans and rodents, conspecific interactions pervasively shape emotion (1)(2)(3), attention (4), and cognitive ability (5)(6)(7)(8). Higher-order cognitive processes such as memory within a social brain are thus interlaced with social influences. ...
Significance
Social interactions can bolster and protect memory performance. However, the relationship between social stimuli and individually learned memories remains enigmatic. Our work reveals that exposure to a stressed, naïve nonfamiliar conspecific or to the ambient olfactory–auditory cues of a recently stressed familiar conspecific induces reactivation of the cellular ensembles associated with a fear memory in the hippocampus. Artificially stimulating the hippocampal ensemble active during the social experience induces fearful behaviors in animals that have previously acquired a negative memory, revealing the interaction between individual history and social experience. The neural resurgence of fear-driving ensembles during social experiences leads to a context-specific enhancement of fear recall. Our findings provide evidence that unlike direct stressors, social stimuli reactivate and amplify an individual’s memories.
... In other research, the association between the genetic risk for depression and depressive symptoms was weaker among girls, but not boys, who had at least one reciprocated friendship (Brendgen, Vitaro, Bukowski, Dionne, Tremblay, & Boivin, 2013). Despite these findings, other studies find that friendship experiences moderate relations between risk factors and adjustment similarly for girls and boys (e.g., Adams, Santo, & Bukowski, 2011;Reavis, Donohue, & Upchurch, 2015). A research synthesis focused on these relations would be useful for learning more about friendships as protective factors for girls and boys. ...
Friendships are central relationships in the lives of children and adolescents. This chapter considers the role of gender in these relationships. Starting as early as preschool, children tend to affiliate with same-gender peers. Similarities and differences between girls’ friendships and boys’ friendships are discussed, along with implications for psychological adjustment. Then, the development of cross-gender friendships and their implications for psychological adjustment are considered. Future directions for the study of gender and friendships in childhood and adolescence are proposed.
... It also contributes to relieving loneliness and isolation (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2018) 3. In view of its role in preventing and/or mitigating aggressiveness and violence between peers (Felmlee & Faris, 2016;Meter, Casper, & Noel, 2015;Reavis et al., 2015) 4. Because of its current expansion in social media as a new framework for relationships between people. Topics such as the behaviour of adolescents in chats and the quality of friendship (Vanden Abeele et al., 2017) also arise, along with the possibility of online CF (Kristjánsson, 2019b), and the influence of self-disclosure on social support in messenger communications (Trepte et al., 2018) Finally, recent studies from positive psychology have also highlighted friendship's relationship with well-being and happiness, in particular those carried out by Demir (2015). ...
This article aims to theoretically analyse so‐called character friendship from the perspective of emotions. From this angle, our research enables us to distinguish different types of emotions, and we propose a conceptual model of the hierarchy of the emotions of character friendship and their influence on social behaviour. With this model in hand, the article discusses whether other‐oriented emotions fully explain the emotional underpinnings of character friendship. We find other‐oriented emotions to be ambiguous because they may or may not be selfless. Thus we question whether these emotions can adequately explain the bonding content of character friendship. We conclude that there is a higher affective tier related to moral emotions and moral behaviour, which we have labelled the ‘bonding feeling’. This feeling is described with reference to its historical precedents (Rof Carballo’s ‘affective warp’), thus explaining its particularity.
DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12277
TEXTO EN ESPAÑOL DISPONIBLE. INTERESADOS, SOLICITAR A AUTORAS.
... It also contributes to relieving loneliness and isolation (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2018) 3. In view of its role in preventing and/or mitigating aggressiveness and violence between peers (Felmlee & Faris, 2016;Meter, Casper, & Noel, 2015;Reavis et al., 2015) 4. Because of its current expansion in social media as a new framework for relationships between people. Topics such as the behaviour of adolescents in chats and the quality of friendship (Vanden Abeele et al., 2017) also arise, along with the possibility of online CF (Kristjánsson, 2019b), and the influence of self-disclosure on social support in messenger communications (Trepte et al., 2018) Finally, recent studies from positive psychology have also highlighted friendship's relationship with well-being and happiness, in particular those carried out by Demir (2015). ...
This article aims to theoretically analyse so‐called character friendship from the perspective of emotions. From this angle, our research enables us to distinguish different types of emotions, and we propose a conceptual model of the hierarchy of the emotions of character friendship and their influence on social behaviour. With this model in hand, the article discusses whether other‐oriented emotions fully explain the emotional underpinnings of character friendship. We find other‐oriented emotions to be ambiguous because they may or may not be selfless. Thus we question whether these emotions can adequately explain the bonding content of character friendship. We conclude that there is a higher affective tier related to moral emotions and moral behaviour, which we have labelled the ‘bonding feeling’. This feeling is described with reference to its historical precedents (Rof Carballo’s ‘affective warp’), thus explaining its particularity.
Background
The comorbidity of psychiatric disorders and IA has been widely documented. However, changes and instability of the comorbidity between negative emotional symptoms and IA over time are not fully understood.
Methods
A sample of 453 first-year senior high school students completed all measures three times across one-year period and were included in the current study. The sample consisted of 163 (36.0%) males and 290 (64.0%) females. At the baseline, the mean age of the participants was 15.07 ± 0.46 (range: 12–16) years old. Latent class analysis was used to identify the latent class pattern. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was utilized to examine the association between covariates and latent classes at baseline. Latent transition analysis was applied to explore the changes in latent classes of individuals over time.
Results
Three subgroups of negative emotional symptoms, IA and their comorbidity were identified at all the three time points. Being Internet gamers, high average time of Internet use every day, peer exclusion, verbal and physical bullying experience, and poor self-rated health were found to be significant predictors of the high comorbidity symptom. Students were more likely to remain the same class rather than moving between the latent classes across time.
Conclusions
A better understanding of change characteristics in latent classes across time contributes to confirm an appropriate time for intervention targeted on students who converted from low symptom class to the high class.
People, including children, have an innate drive to “belong”— to feel connected to others and maintain satisfying relationships. Fulfillment of this need requires stable, positive interactions with others; a sense of acceptance by one’s family and peers; enduring, emotionally intimate relationships; and a perception that one is valued. However, for some children, interpersonal relationships fail to fulfill this most essential of needs. Social psychologists have long documented the biological, cognitive, and affective consequences of transient lapses in belongingness, and developmental psychologists have similarly linked poor social relationships to a host of mental and physical health problems. In this chapter, we bridge these two literatures by exploring how pervasive difficulties in forming positive peer relationships at school disrupt regulatory systems and the ability to effectively solve interpersonal problems, placing children’s socioemotional health and academic success at risk. Specifically, we present a conceptual framework that addresses how peer stress leads to dysregulated neural and physiological stress responses and alterations in relational schemas, hindering effective decision making and resulting in automatic and ineffective stress responses. We conclude with recommendations for school-based interventions and future research.
This article illustrates new statistical methods for the study of psychological change in married couples. The design involves time-series data on each partner. The analysis combines longitudinal methods for studies of individual change with cross-sectional methods for the study of matched pairs. Each person is viewed as changing over time as a function of an individual growth curve or change function. As in previous studies of individual change, a person's trajectory depends on time-invariant personal background characteristics and time-varying changes in the environment. However, unlike typical studies of individual change, a person's changing psychological profile depends, in part, on the influence of that person's partner. These methods apply directly to other types of longitudinal studies on families (e.g., studies that use teacher and parent reports of a child's social behavior). The methodology is flexible in allowing randomly missing data, varying spacing of time points, unbalanced designs, and time-varying and time-invariant covariates.
This study examined the relations of fifth-grade children's (181 boys and girls) daily experiences of peer victimization with their daily negative emotions. Children completed daily reports of peer victimization and negative emotions (sadness, anger, embarrassment, and nervousness) on up to eight school days. The daily peer victimization checklist was best represented by five factors: physical victimization, verbal victimization, social manipulation, property attacks, and social rebuff. All five types were associated with increased negative daily emotions, and several types were independently linked to increased daily negative emotions, particularly physical victimization. Girls demonstrated greater emotional reactivity in sadness to social manipulation than did boys, and higher levels of peer rejection were linked to greater emotional reactivity to multiple types of victimization. Sex and peer rejection also interacted, such that greater rejection was a stronger indicator of emotional reactivity to victimization in boys than in girls.
This study examined whether emotions and coping explain (mediate) the association between mother-child attachment and peer relationships. Attachment, positive and negative emotion experience, coping, and peer relationships were examined in 106 fourth-grade through sixth-grade girls attending a 6-day residential camp. Attachment, experience of positive and negative emotions, and coping were measured prior to camp with questionnaires completed by girls and their mothers. Girls reported the quality of their best friendship at camp, and camp counselors rated girls' peer competence. Girls who perceived a more secure attachment to mother reported experiencing more positive and less negative emotions, were reported by mothers to use more social-support coping, reported more positive qualities in camp best friendships, and were rated by counselors as having enhanced peer relationships at camp. Further, the experience of positive emotions, problem-solving coping, and social-support coping mediated the links between attachment and peer relationships.
We examined the connections between attitudes, group norms, and students’ behaviour in bullying situations (bullying others, assisting the bully, reinforcing the bully, defending the victim, or staying outside bullying situations). The participants were 1220 elementary school children (600 girls and 620 boys) from 48 school classes from Grades four, five, and six, i.e., 9–10, 10–11, and 11–12 years of age. Whereas attitudes did predict behaviour at the student level in most cases (although the effects were moderate after controlling for gender), the group norms could be used in explaining variance at the classroom level, especially in the upper grades. The class context (even if not classroom norms specifically) had more effect on girls’ than on boys’ bullying-related behaviours.
This study examined whether emotions and coping explain (mediate) the association between mother-child attachment and peer relationships. Attachment, positive and negative emotion experience, coping, and peer relationships were examined in 106 fourth-grade through sixth-grade girls attending a 6-day residential camp. Attachment, experience of positive and negative emotions, and coping were measured prior to camp with questionnaires completed by girls and their mothers. Girls reported the quality of their best friendship at camp, and camp counselors rated girls’ peer competence. Girls who perceived a more secure attachment to mother reported experiencing more positive and less negative emotions, were reported by mothers to use more social-support coping, reported more positive qualities in camp best friendships, and were rated by counselors as having enhanced peer relationships at camp. Further, the experience of positive emotions, problem-solving coping, and social-support coping mediated the links between attachment and peer relationships.
Gender differences were explored in experiences of social and physical aggression of adolescents (39 boys and 37 girls; mean age 13.8). They reported the frequency of experiencing physical aggression and social aggression, described in detail past incidents of peer victimization, and completed the Self-Perception Profile for Adolescents. The most common social aggression reported was being gossiped about, and the majority of adolescents reported that the aggressor was of the same gender. Although both genders reported equal frequencies of social aggression, girls thought about it more and were more distressed by it than were boys. Frequency of social aggression was more strongly related to girls' self-concepts than to boys'. This research provides evidence that young adolescents, and especially victimized girls, are hurt by social aggression.
The distinction between friendship adjustment and acceptance by the peer group was examined. Third- through 5th-grade children (N = 88 1 ) completed sociometric measures of acceptance and friendship, a measure of loneliness, a questionnaire on the features of their very best friendships, and a measure of their friendship satisfaction. Results indicated that many low-accepted children had best friends and were satisfied with these friendships. However, these children's friendships were lower than those of other children on most dimensions of quality. Having a friend, friendship quality, and group acceptance made separate contributions to the prediction of loneliness. Results indicate the utility of the new friendship quality measure and the value of distinguishing children's friendship adjustment from their general peer acceptance.
Change is constant in everyday life. Infants crawl and then walk, children learn to read and write, teenagers mature in myriad ways, and the elderly become frail and forgetful. Beyond these natural processes and events, external forces and interventions instigate and disrupt change: test scores may rise after a coaching course, drug abusers may remain abstinent after residential treatment. By charting changes over time and investigating whether and when events occur, researchers reveal the temporal rhythms of our lives. This book is concerned with behavioral, social, and biomedical sciences. It offers a presentation of two of today's most popular statistical methods: multilevel models for individual change and hazard/survival models for event occurrence (in both discrete- and continuous-time). Using data sets from published studies, the book takes you step by step through complete analyses, from simple exploratory displays that reveal underlying patterns through sophisticated specifications of complex statistical models.
Based on a sample of 9085 16- to 19-year-old students attending all high schools in Iceland in 2004, the current study examines depressed mood and anger as potential mediators between family conflict/violence and sexual abuse, on the one hand, and suicidal ideations and suicide attempts on the other. Agnew's general strain theory provides the theoretical framework for the study. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was conducted allowing explicit modelling of both direct and mediating effects using observed and latent variables. The findings showed that both depressed mood and anger mediated the relationship between family conflict/violence and sexual abuse and suicidal attempts. However, when testing the mediating pathways between sexual abuse and family conflict/violence and suicidal ideations, only depressed mood but not anger turned out to be a significant mediator. The authors discuss how these finding may inform and facilitate the design and development of interventions to reduce the likelihood of suicide attempts among young people.