Say you'll be there: Associations between observed verbal responses, friendship quality, and perceptions of support in young adult friendships.

Friendships are a primary source of social support during young adulthood; however, little is known about the factors associated with young adults feeling greater support during interactions with friends. We examined how micro-level verbal responses and macro-level judgments of friendship quality were associated with perceptions of support following an interaction between friends. Same-gender friend dyads (N = 132; 66.2% female; 18-24 years, M age = 19.63) took turns speaking about a problem, then participants rated their perceptions of support given and received following the task. We coded each participant's verbal responses while in the listening role. Actor Partner Interdependence Models (APIMs) revealed significant partner effects for negative engagement responses, such that greater negative engagement responses were linked with the partner perceiving poorer support both given and received. Models revealed significant actor effects for supportive responses, such that greater supportive responses predicted the actor perceiving better support both given and received. Additionally, models revealed significant actor effects of friendship quality predicting actors' perceiving better support both given and received. Finally, exploratory models revealed minimal interactions between a few types of verbal responses and positive friendship quality. Taken together, results suggest that (a) negative verbal responding styles may be more meaningfully associated with partners' perceptions of support in the moment than are supportive behaviours, whereas (b) supportive verbal responding styles may be more meaningfully associated with actors' perceptions of support in the moment, and (c) actors' judgments of friendship quality are strongly associated with their overall perceptions of support, and a critical factor to consider in future research.

The Development and Preliminary Validation of a Measure of Victimization within the Friendships of Emerging Adults.

For emerging adults, high-quality friendships can be an important source of companionship and support. The most commonly studied negative interaction between friends is conflict, yet work with youth suggests more serious victimization also occurs in friendship. In the current study, we developed and obtained preliminary psychometric evidence for the Friendship Victimization Scale, a measure that assesses physical, sexual, relational, and verbal forms of victimization in the friendships of emerging adults, as well as coercive and controlling behaviors. Emerging adults (N = 316, Mage = 21.27 years, SD = 1.47; 60.4% women, 37.0% men; 59.2% White) completed the Friendship Victimization Scale along with measures to examine construct validity. The majority of the sample reported experiencing at least one act of victimization by a friend, and men reported more victimization than did women. Results supported a 2-factor structure, with relational and verbal victimization loading on one factor and physical and sexual victimization and controlling behaviors loading on the other. Cronbach's alphas exceeded .90 for the total score and both subscales. Greater friendship victimization was predicted by negative features in each of a best and a challenging friendship, even after accounting for negative features in a dating relationship, and was unrelated to positive features in any of these relationships. Overall, results indicate that victimization is common in emerging adults' friendships. The findings provide preliminary evidence for the utility of the Friendship Victimization Scale as a measure of this understudied source of risk in the interpersonal lives of emerging adults.

The Slut-Shaming Instrument: Preliminary validation, correlates, and links with psychological distress among adolescent girls.

Despite social awareness of the problem of slut-shaming for adolescent girls, no existing measure captures this construct. Using data from a sample of 202 girls from Québec, Canada (ages 14-17; 68% White), preliminary validation is provided for the Slut-Shaming Instrument, a seven-item measure of negative peer experiences related to being perceived as too sexually active, sexualized, or flirtatious. The measure showed strong psychometric properties including good reliability and factor structure, expected associations with daily experiences of slut-related victimization and sexual harassment, and links with number of sexual partners and other forms of peer victimization. Slut-shaming was associated with distress accounting for these other forms of victimization (including sexual harassment), suggesting the pertinence of addressing this type of gender-based victimization.

Teen perceptions of adolescent dating violence.

INTRODUCTION: Previous research shows that adolescents who experience dating violence most often disclose their victimization to a peer or friend, more so than to other sources of support. However, surprisingly little research has explored how adolescents respond to peer disclosures of dating violence. Addressing this gap, the present study assessed variations in adolescents' perceptions of blame, interpretations of the incident as violence, and intentions to respond across physical, psychological, sexual, cyber-psychological, and cyber-sexual dating violence scenarios. METHODS: As part of a national research project across Canada, 663 high school adolescents (432 girls, 65.2%) between the ages of 14-17 were randomly assigned to complete a questionnaire which included one of five different hypothetical dating violence scenarios. Next, participants responded to questions about their perceptions of the incident, as well as victim and perpetrator blame and responsibility, and their intentions to respond. RESULTS: Results indicated that the type of dating violence experienced and the age and gender of participants all played a role in perceptions of blame, understandings of violence, and intentions to respond. CONCLUSIONS: As one of the first studies to explore how adolescents perceived and responded to dating violence, considering both in-person and cyber forms of dating violence, this study fills an important gap in the literature. Findings underscore the uniqueness of cyber forms of dating violence and how pre/intervention programs must address the specific contexts and issues unique to each type of dating violence.

Family alliance as a developmental antecedent of depressive and anxiety symptoms in early adolescence: Friendship quality as a mediating factor.

Family interactions constitute a critical context in which children can learn the basic relational skills that they need to make friends. In turn, friendship quality is a robust predictor of child socioemotional functioning. Therefore, friendship is likely to act as a bridge in a socioemotional developmental cascade linking early family interactions to child subsequent socioemotional adjustment. This study aimed to examine a mediation model linking family alliance (the degree of mother-father-child engagement and coordination in joint activities) in kindergarten to anxiety and depressive symptoms in early adolescence through the mediating role of friendship quality in middle childhood. The family alliance of 87 mother-father-child triads was assessed when children were aged 6 years based on a 15-min videotaped interaction. Children reported on the quality of their relationship with their best friend at age 10 and on their anxiety and depressive symptoms at both 12 and 13 years (averaged). Results showed that children who experienced better family alliance at 6 years had higher relationship quality with their best friend at 10 years which in turn, predicted less anxiety (but not depressive) symptoms in early adolescence. There was a significant indirect effect of family alliance on anxiety through friendship quality. Findings suggest that family alliance may play a central role in shaping children's capacity to develop high-quality friendships, with implications for their subsequent socioemotional functioning. Further longitudinal studies are needed to examine the reciprocal influences unfolding over time that are likely to characterize developmental cascades among family systems, children's developing friendships, and their socioemotional functioning.

Food and Mood: Daily Associations Between Missed Meals and Affect Among Early Adolescents.

OBJECTIVE: Youth frequently miss meals and experience hunger, yet no studies have assessed how these experiences relate to changes in daily emotional states. This daily diary study examined associations of missing breakfast, missing lunch, and hunger with daily positive and negative affect among young adolescents. METHODS: A community sample of 133 grade 5 and 6 students (50.4% boys, Mage = 10.77, 19.5% BIPOC) from two public schools completed baseline socio-demographic measures at the beginning of the study and daily measures at the end of the school day over 5 consecutive days. Measures included positive and negative affect, breakfast, lunch, and hunger. Multilevel regression models were constructed to test the associations. RESULTS: Among participating youth, 27.8% missed breakfast at least once, 15.0% missed lunch at least once, and 26.3% felt hungry at least once. Missing breakfast was associated with increased negative affect (B = 0.36, p = .030) and missing lunch was related to both increased negative affect (B = 0.52, p = .019) and decreased positive affect (B = -0.80, p = .002). Hunger was not related to daily affect. CONCLUSION: This study provides a unique view of youths' experiences of missing meals, hunger, and daily emotional states. The findings underscore the importance of youth being adequately nourished through school meal programs. Clinicians should screen for and address missing meals among their young patients.

Associations between peer stress in early adolescence and multiple event-related potentials elicited during social feedback processing.

Interpersonal stress in adolescence has been associated with alterations in neural responses to peer feedback, and increased vulnerability to psychopathology. However, it is unclear whether the associations of interpersonal problems with neural responses are global across event-related potentials (ERPs) or might result in alterations only in specific ERPs. We examined associations between multiple informants of peer stress (self-reported, parent-reported, and peer-reported) and multiple ERPs (N1, P2, RewP, and LPP) to social feedback in a sample of 46 early adolescents (aged 12-13 years). Reports of peer stress were only moderately correlated with one another, indicating different informants capture different aspects of peer stress. Regressions using informant reports to predict ERPs revealed greater parent-reported peer stress was associated with a smaller RewP, whereas self-reported stress was associated with a smaller P2, to acceptance. In contrast, greater peer-reported stress was associated with larger P2, RewP, and LPP to acceptance. Findings suggest that different sources of stress measurement are differentially associated with ERPs. Future research using social feedback-related ERPs should consider multiple sources of information as well as multiple ERP components across the time-course of feedback processing, to gain a clearer understanding of the effects of peer stress on neural responses to feedback.

Adolescents and young adults differ in their neural response to and recognition of adolescent and adult emotional faces.

Peer relationships become increasingly important during adolescence. The success of these relationships may rely on the ability to attend to and decode subtle or ambiguous emotional expressions that are common in social interactions. However, most studies examining youths' processing and labeling of facial emotion have employed adult faces and faces that depict emotional extremes as stimuli. In this study, 40 adolescents and 40 young adults viewed blends of angry-neutral, fearful-neutral, and happy-neutral faces (e.g., 100% angry, 66% angry, 33% angry, neutral) portrayed by adolescent and adult actors as electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. Participants also labeled these faces according to the emotion expressed (i.e., angry, fearful, happy, or neutral). The Late Positive Potential (LPP), an event-related potential (ERP) component that reflects sustained attention to motivationally salient information, was scored from the EEG following face presentation. Among adolescents, as peer-age faces moved from ambiguous (33%) to unambiguous (100%) emotional expression, the LPP similarly increased. These effects were not found when adolescents viewed emotional face blends portrayed by adult actors. Additionally, while both adolescents and young adults showed greater emotion labeling accuracy as faces increased in emotional intensity from ambiguous to unambiguous emotional expression, adolescent participants did not show greater accuracy when labeling peer-compared to adult-age faces. Together, these data suggest that adolescents attend more to subtle differences in peer-age emotional faces, but they do not label these emotional expressions more accurately than adults.

Neural response to rewarding social feedback in never-depressed adolescent girls and their mothers with remitted depression: Associations with multiple risk indices.

Prevention of depression requires a clear understanding of etiology. Previous studies have identified reduced neural responses to monetary reward as a risk factor for depression, but social reward processing may be particularly relevant to depression. This study investigated associations between neural responses to social reward and three well-established risk factors for depression: personal history, family history, and interpersonal stress. We examined the reward positivity (RewP), an event-related potential sensitive to rewarding feedback, in a sample of 85 women with and without remitted depression and their never-depressed adolescent daughters. In never-depressed daughters, maternal history of depression predicted a blunted social RewP, but interpersonal stress did not. In the mothers, greater interpersonal stress predicted a blunted RewP, but personal depression history was not significant. Combined, these data suggest that personal history, family history, and interpersonal stress may converge on social reward sensitivity, which may advance future research to understand the development of depression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Associations between interpersonal behavior and friendship quality in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analysis.

This meta-analysis examined concurrent associations between aggression, withdrawal, assertion, and prosocial behavior and each of positive and negative friendship quality across studies with 22,657 children and adolescents (Mage  = 11.71 years; 51.7% girls; 67.7% White). Studies were published between 1995 to 2021 and 32.4% were conducted outside of North America. Aggression was linked to more negative, r ¯  = .19, 95% CI [.14, .24], and less positive, r ¯  = -.05 [-.08, -.01], friendships. Withdrawal was associated with less positive friendships, r ¯  = -.13 [-.18, -.08], whereas prosocial behavior was related to more positive, r ¯  = .29 [.22, .37], as well as less negative, r ¯  = -.16 [-.20, -.12], friendships. Assertion was related to more positive friendships, r ¯  = .15 [.01, .28].

Intergenerational transmission of depression risk: Mothers' neural response to reward and history of depression are associated with daughters' neural response to reward across adolescence.

Impaired reward responsiveness, a construct of the RDoC positive valence systems (PVS), prospectively predicts depression onset and may therefore represent an important marker of risk. Neural structures implicated in reward processing undergo substantial change during adolescence, a period of heightened risk for depression, particularly for those with a family history of the disorder. However, it is not clear whether familial transmission of PVS functioning also changes across adolescence, nor whether a family history of depression influences normative development of the PVS. To address these questions, mothers and their adolescent daughters each completed a monetary reward guessing task while an electroencephalogram was recorded (N = 109 dyads). Daughters' pubertal status significantly moderated the association between mothers' and daughters' reward processing in the delta frequency, such that there was a negative association for daughters in early puberty that shifted toward a positive association in later puberty. Furthermore, for never-depressed daughters without a maternal history of depression, more advanced pubertal development was associated with increased reward-related power in the delta frequency, whereas, for daughters with a maternal history of depression, more advanced pubertal development was associated with reduced power in the delta frequency. These data indicate that biomarkers of risk for psychopathology may differ as a function of both familial risk and developmental status. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Contextual variations in associations between measures of aggression and withdrawal and functioning with peers: A replication study.

Data from 790 older school-age (Mage = 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, specifically aggression and withdrawal, and two measures of effective functioning with peers, specifically sociometric preference and friendship. The Montréal participants were primarily from families with European backgrounds. The ethnicity of the participants from Barranquilla can be described as Latinx/Caribbean. Multilevel analyses provided evidence of replication of place differences only for the associations between measures of aggression and sociometric preference. Stronger negative associations were observed between (a) measures of aggression and sociometric preference, (b) measures of withdrawal and sociometric preference, and (c) withdrawal and friendship in peer groups that were high in collectivism. These findings are interpreted as largely replicating the deep structure of the findings from the Valdivia et al. study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Development and Validation of the Teen Dating Aggression Measure Among Canadian Youth.

Teen dating violence (TDV) victimization is a traumatic experience that can have adverse consequences for adolescents. Current measures that assess TDV do not fully distinguish between psychological and relational forms of aggression, nor do they capture aggressive acts that are common within adolescent relationships. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Teen Dating Aggression Measure (TeDAM) using a sample of 730 Canadian adolescents (M = 15.88 years, SD = 1.23). The measure is an expansion of the Conflict in Adolescent Dating Relationships Inventory and includes items that describe other forms of violence such as coercion and control, along with more traditional indicators of dating violence (e.g., sexual aggression). Factor analyses yielded three factors, namely psychological aggression, sexual and physical aggression, and relational aggression, which were correlated with more frequent cannabis and alcohol use as well as rape myth acceptance. These results provide initial support for the utility of the TeDAM for assessing TDV with adolescents.

Family relationship quality during the COVID-19 pandemic: The value of adolescent perceptions of change.

INTRODUCTION: Adolescents typically spend decreasing amounts of time with family members, but the COVID-19 pandemic changed this pattern for many youth. The objective of the current study was to better understand adolescents' perceived change in family relationship quality, and how these perceptions were related to psychosocial functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic, accounting for more traditional measures of family relationship quality. Understanding how adolescents perceived change in relationship quality with family members during the pandemic offers novel insight into adolescents' relationships with their families and psychosocial functioning during this period. METHOD: A sample of Canadian adolescents (N = 605, ages 14 to 18, 53% girls), was employed to examine patterns of adolescents' perceived change in relationship quality with parents and siblings since the start of the pandemic, accounting for relationship quality, pandemic-related characteristics, and demographic variables. RESULTS: Four latent profiles were identified: youth who perceived (1) low change, (2) improvement only, (3) moderate instability and (4) high instability in relationship quality. Higher perceived instability was associated with poorer functioning, with youth who reported only improvement reporting the highest overall level of functioning. CONCLUSIONS: Adolescent perceptions of change in relationship quality were heterogeneous, and contribute to psychosocial functioning over and above their general evaluations of relationship quality. In particular, youth who perceive considerable change in their relationships with siblings and parents may require additional support in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Relationship dissolution in the friendships of emerging adults: How, when, and why?

Maintaining high-quality friendships is a key predictor of well-being during emerging adulthood, yet factors leading to friendship dissolution-defined here as actions that may decrease friendship quality or end the relationship completely-are poorly understood. Using an open-ended interview paradigm, we elicited 179 emerging adults' (55.9% female; Mage = 20.42, SD = 1.54; 95.0% full-time university students) description of their behavioral responses to 53 hypothetical vignettes involving challenging situations with same-gender friends. We systematically coded participants' 9,487 verbatim responses, identifying three types of friendship dissolution behaviors: completely ending the friendship, distancing from the friend, or compartmentalizing aspects of the friendship. Examining the occurrence of each response across different types of challenging situations, we found that transgressions by friends were more likely to elicit reported use of distancing and ending strategies. We also began to investigate associations between interpersonal goals and dissolution strategies, finding that stronger endorsement of the goal of asserting oneself was linked to greater odds of reporting ending the friendship, whereas the more participants reported that they would be trying to stay friends, the lower the odds of reporting either ending the relationship or distancing from the friend. Implications for future research on interpersonal processes in friendships are discussed.

Recognition of vocal socioemotional expressions at varying levels of emotional intensity.

Nonverbal expressions of emotion can vary in intensity, from ambiguous to prototypical exemplars: for instance, facial displays of happiness may range from a faint smile to a full-blown grin. Previous work suggests that the accuracy with which facial expressions are recognized as the intended emotion increases with emotional intensity, although this pattern depends on the displayed emotion. Less is known about the association between emotional intensity and the recognition of vocal emotional expressions (affective prosody), which also convey information about others' socioemotional intent but are perceived and interpreted differently than facial expressions. The current study examined listeners' ability to recognize emotional intent in morphed vocal prosody recordings that varied in emotional intensity from neutral to prototypical exemplars of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) and social expressions (friendliness, meanness). Results suggest that listeners' accuracy in identifying the intended emotional intent in each recording increased nonlinearly with emotional intensity. This pattern varied by emotion type: for instance, accuracy for anger rose steeply with increasing emotional intensity before plateauing, whereas accuracy for happiness remained unchanged across low-intensity exemplars but increased thereafter. These findings highlight emotion-specific ways in which dynamic changes in emotional intensity inform perceptions of socioemotional intent in emotional prosody. Moreover, these results also point to potential challenges in emotional communication in social interactions that rely primarily on the voice, with many low-intensity expressions having a higher probability of being misinterpreted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Initial Development of a Situation-based Measure of Emerging Adults' Social Competence in their Same-gender Friendships.

This paper describes the development of a situation-based tool to assess emerging adults' social competence with same-gender friends, providing information about (1) challenges occurring in these relationships, (2) the behaviors used to manage these situations, and (3) the perceived effectiveness of these strategies. Undergraduates (N = 747; 409 women; Mage  = 20.16, SD = 1.43) participated in five studies. Transgressions, conflicts of interest, and support situations emerged as key challenges, and emerging adults reported using aggressive, assertive, avoidant, and apologizing behaviors to manage these situations. In general, apologizing and assertive behaviors were judged more effective than aggressive or avoidant behaviors. Results yielded the Inventory of Friendship Challenges for Emerging Adults (IFCEA), which showed expected associations with measures of interpersonal behavior.

Socioeconomic status and child psychopathology in the United States: A meta-analysis of population-based studies.

Children raised in families with low socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to exhibit symptoms of psychopathology. However, the strength of this association, the specific indices of SES most strongly associated with childhood psychopathology, and factors moderating the association are strikingly inconsistent across studies. We conducted a meta-analysis of 120 estimates of the association between family SES and child psychopathology in 13 population-representative cohorts of children studied in the US since 1980. Among 26,715 participants aged 3-19 years, we observed small to moderate associations of low family income (g = 0.19), low Hollingshead index (g = 0.21), low subjective SES (g = 0.24), low parental education (g = 0.25), poverty status (g = 0.25), and receipt of public assistance (g = 0.32) with higher levels of childhood psychopathology. Moderator testing revealed that receipt of public assistance showed an especially strong association with psychopathology and that SES was more strongly related to externalizing than internalizing psychopathology. Dispersion in our final, random effects, model suggested that the relation between SES and child psychopathology is likely to vary in different populations of children and in different communities. These findings highlight the need for additional research on the mechanisms of SES-related psychopathology risk in children in order to identify targets for potential intervention.

After-School Programs and Children's Mental Health: Organizational Social Context, Program Quality, and Children's Social Behavior.

OBJECTIVE: The current study examined associations among organizational social context, after-school program (ASP) quality, and children's social behavior in a large urban park district. METHOD: Thirty-two park-based ASPs are included in the final sample, including 141 staff and 593 children. Staff reported on organizational culture (rigidity, proficiency, resistance) and climate (engagement, functionality, stress), and children's social skills and problem behaviors. Children and their parents reported on program quality indicators (e.g., activities, routines, relationships). Parents also completed a children's mental health screener. RESULTS: A series of Hierarchical Linear Models revealed that proficiency and stress were the only organizational predictors of program quality; associations between stress and program quality were moderated by program enrollment and aggregated children's mental health need. Higher child- and parent-perceived program quality related to fewer staff-reported problem behaviors, while overall higher enrollment and higher aggregated mental health need were associated with fewer staff-reported social skills. CONCLUSIONS: Data are informing ongoing efforts to improve organizational capacity of urban after-school programs to support children's positive social and behavior trajectories.