To advance research evaluating the relationship between social information processing (Crick & Dodge) and youth aggression, this meta-analytic study examined associations between social goals and aggression in children in 21 separate research reports. Eligible studies provided descriptive or preintervention measurement of children's aggression and…

The present study addresses the influence that group norms exert on individual aggressive and prosocial behavior. The study hypothesis is that for early adolescents who change their peer group affiliations, the characteristics of the group they are leaving (departing-group influence) are not as influential as those of the group that they are…

This study examined antisocial and prosocial behavior of N = 439 adolescent athletes between 14 and 17 years of age (67 teams). Multi-level analyses showed that team membership explained 20 and 13 percent of the variance in antisocial and prosocial behavior in the sports context, respectively. The team effects suggest that aggregating antisocial…

The present study examined whether adolescent loneliness would be lower within the context of positive relationships with peers. The core conceptual model predicted that hypothesized links between peer-rated social behaviors or victimization and loneliness would be mediated by social acceptance. Relationship experiences (i.e., social acceptance,…

This study examined the effects of aggressive and prosocial contexts of peer groups on children's socioemotional and school adjustment. Data on informal peer groups, social functioning, and different aspects of adjustment were collected from multiple sources in a sample of elementary school children (149 boys, 181 girls; M age = 10 years).…

The present study examined the association between theory of mind and indirect versus physical aggression, as well as the potential moderating role of prosocial behavior in this context. Participants were 399 twins and singletons drawn from two longitudinal studies in Canada. At five years of age, children completed a theory of mind task and a…

We examined associations of maternal and child emotional discourse and child emotion knowledge with children's behavioral competence. Eighty-five upper middle-income, mostly White preschoolers and mothers completed a home-based bookreading task to assess discourse about emotions. Children's anger perception bias and emotion situation knowledge…

The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships between children's representations of parent-child alliances (PCA) and their peer relationship quality, using a new scale that was developed to rate representations of PCA in children's family drawings. The parent-child alliance pattern is characterized by a relationship between parent and…

Children's target experiences (as recipients of prosocial peer acts and victims of peer aggression) were investigated for their concurrent and longitudinal associations with prosocial and aggressive behavior. Forty-four children (initially 22-40 months) were observed in naturalistic interactions with peers during a two-month period for each of…

Concurrent and longitudinal relations among parental emotional expressivity, children's sympathy and children's prosocial behavior were assessed with correlations and structural equation modeling when the children were 55-97 months old (N = 214; M age = 73 months, SD = 9.59) and eight years later (N = 130; ages 150-195 months old, M = 171 months,…

Preschool children (N = 78) enrolled in multi-informant, multi-method longitudinal study were participants in a study designed to investigate the role of media exposure (i.e., violent and educational) on concurrent and future aggressive and prosocial behavior. Specifically, the amount of media exposure and the nature of the content was used to…

In Roberts and Strayer (1996), we reported that emotional expressiveness and anger were important predictors of empathy for school-age children, and that empathy strongly predicted prosocial behaviors aggregated across methods and sources. In this paper, we report how empathy was associated with direct observations of anger and aggression in peer…

In Roberts and Strayer (1996) we described how emotional factors were strongly related to children's empathy, which in turn strongly predicted prosocial behavior. This paper focuses on how these child emotional factors, assessed across methods and sources, related to parental factors (empathy, emotional expressiveness, encouragement of children's…

This paper critically reviews the literature on the links between temperament and social development in children and adolescents. Social development is broadly defined to include externalizing and internalizing behaviour problems, prosocial behaviour and social competence. It concludes that there are clear links between specific dimensions of…

This study compared the peer functioning of a community sample of preschool boys with pervasive hyperactivity (N=33) and comparison boys (N=34), and examined the extent to which any differences in peer functioning between these groups could be explained by comorbid child conduct problems and parenting factors. The quality of boys' peer relations…