The goal of this study was to examine the unique associations of aggression with peer status in a non-Western context. The moderating effects of peer community and teacher closeness at the classroom level and gender and grade at the individual level were considered. Participants were 1954 third to sixth grade students (M[subscript age] = 9.60…

Peer victimization is a widespread and heterogeneous phenomenon, especially during the transition to middle school, and is associated with numerous negative consequences. However, previous research is limited by variable-centric analyses and data manipulations that either fail to capture or mask the complexity of peer victimization many students…

Research has identified at least three patterns of direct involvement in bullying and victimization: bullying, bullying-victimized, and predominantly victimized. However, little is known about risk and protective factors for these patterns. As such, the goals of the present study were to establish these patterns and examine risk and protective…

Peer nominations and teacher ratings were used to examine age and sex differences in behaviors associated with perceived coolness during middle childhood. Participants were 470 students in Grades 1, 3, and 5. Participants nominated peers whom they perceived as cool; separate scores were calculated for samesex coolness and cross-sex coolness (i.e.,…

Prosocial teasing is the positive playful form of relational aggression, and studies have found children engage in playful teasing more often than aggressive teasing. Therefore, understanding the basic characteristics or skills that contribute to the more complex social skill of prosocial teasing is important. The current study focused on the role…

Introduction: Peer victimization is the experience of being a target of intentional negative or aggressive actions by peers (Card & Hodges, 2008). Peer victimization at school is a growing concern because of its high prevalence rates (Finkelhor et al., 2013) and potential harmful impacts on student mental health and developmental outcomes…

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…

Children who exhibit inattention (IA) and hyperactivity-impulsivity (HI), symptoms often indicative of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), have notable social impairments. We investigated whether IA and HI are directly connected to peer difficulties or indirectly connected through their known association with other problem behaviors.…

The paper investigates gender differences in coolness dynamics among early and middle adolescents in a Hungarian panel dataset, which followed students from grade 5 (age 11-12) to grade 8 (age 14-15). Drawing on Gender Prototypicality Theory, we expected significantly different gendered patterns in the association between coolness and various…

The article focuses on the contentious relation between cyberbullying and physical, verbal, and relational bullying. Drawing on items from the Olweus questionnaire, the study used confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling, and latent factors of bullying were fitted to the data. Different background variables were related to…

Relational aggression is characterized by attempts to damage another's relationships or social status and is a major concern affecting academic, socioemotional, behavioral, and health outcomes, particularly for urban, minority youth. Teachers and peers frequently disagree about which students are relationally aggressive. Factors associated with…

Victims' responses to bullying have the potential to impact bullying outcomes. This study examined students' evaluations of and reported likelihood of adopting four different victim responses (angry, sad, confident, and ignoring). Fifth- and seventh-grade students (N = 206; mean age = 11.13 and 13.18 years, respectively) viewed hypothetical…

Data from 790 older school-age (M[subscript age] = 10.2 years, SD = 1.2 years) girls (N = 427) and boys from Barranquilla, Colombia (N = 449) and Montréal, Canada (N = 331) were used to replicate findings reported by Valdivia et al. (2005). This prior study revealed contextual variations in the association between two measures of social behavior,…

This study explored the role of empathy (cognitive, emotional) as a moderator in the link between coping and proactive and reactive relational aggression (RA) among 328 Greek preadolescents. The results indicated positive associations between emotion-focused coping (i.e., minimization), maladaptive coping, including resignation, passive avoidance,…

This study examined whether compromised emotional clarity prospectively contributes to maladaptive social behavior (aggression, anxious solitude) and adverse social experiences (low social status, victimization) in early adolescence; gender differences in these effects also were explored. Youth (N = 636, [x-bar] age = 10.94, SD = 0.37) completed a…