The ups and downs of support from friends when teens experience peer victimization
New study looks at depressive symptoms and delinquency among harassed youth
2014-12-10
(Press-News.org) There are pros and cons to the support that victimized teenagers get from their friends. Depending on the type of aggression they are exposed to, such support may reduce youth's risk for depressive symptoms. On the other hand, it may make some young people follow the delinquent example of their friends, says a team of researchers from the University of Kansas in the US, led by John Cooley. Their findings are published in Springer's Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment.
Adolescence is an important time during which youth establish their social identity. Experiences of peer victimization can therefore have an effect on their social relationships, and lead to various psychological and social adjustment problems. Peer victimization may take several forms, including overt victimization, which happens when someone is physically attacked or verbally threatened by a peer, and relational victimization, which happens when someone's relationships are manipulated through rumor spreading or social ostracism. Overt victimization is more common among younger children, while relational victimization tends to become more prevalent during adolescence.
Findings have thus far been inconclusive about whether having the support of friends can actually buffer someone from the negative effects of peer victimization. The University of Kansas research team delved further into this matter by asking 152 Midwestern 14- to 19-years-olds from a predominantly Latino, low-income background to complete a series of questionnaires. Questions focused on whether they had been victimized by peers, what type of support they received from their friends, and whether their buddies were recently involved in deviant behavior such as stealing or skipping school. Teachers also completed a questionnaire about their students' rule-breaking behavior.
Overall, the University of Kansas team found that the support of peers generally influences the effects of peer victimization on maladjustment. However, this moderating effect differs depending on the form of victimization teenagers are subjected to and what type of relationship they have with their peers.
Among teenagers who suffered from relational victimization, the more support they received from their friends, the lower their feelings of depression. Such support, however, did not have an effect on the moods of those who were overtly victimized, or in other words, who were physically attacked or verbally threatened. Cooley believes this may be because relational victimization, as opposed to overt victimization, damages relationships during a time when youth are trying to establish their social identity within the peer group.
The more social support those experiencing relational victimization received from delinquent friends, the greater the chances that they would also take part in rule-breaking activities. Those experiencing overt victimization were more likely to exhibit rule-breaking behavior, regardless of the level of support or type of friends they had.
"Our study provides additional evidence suggesting that peer social support buffers the association between experiences of relational victimization and depressive symptoms in adolescence," says Cooley. "However, our findings also suggest that relationally victimized adolescents who receive high levels of social support and associate with delinquent peers may be more likely to exhibit rule-breaking behavior."
INFORMATION:
Reference: Cooley, J.L., Fite, P. J., Rubens, S. L., & Tunno, A. M. (2014). Peer Victimization, Depressive Symptoms, and Rule-Breaking Behavior in Adolescence: The Moderating Role of Peer Social Support, Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, DOI 10.1007/s10862-014-9473-7
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2014-12-10
Patients with heart disease who receive transfusions during surgeries do just as well with smaller amounts of blood and face no greater risk of dying from other diseases than patients who received more blood, according to a new Rutgers study.
The research, published in the journal Lancet, measures overall mortality and mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer and severe infection, and offers new validation to a recent trend toward smaller transfusions.
For the study, led by Jeffrey Carson, chief of the Division of Internal Medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson ...
2014-12-10
A class of drug for treating arthritis - all but shelved over fears about side effects - may be given a new lease of life, following the discovery of a possible way to identify which patients should avoid using it.
The new study, led by Imperial College London and published in the journal Circulation, sheds new light on the 10-year-old question of how COX-2 inhibitors - a type of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) - can increase the risk of heart attack in some people.
NSAIDs - which include very familiar drugs such as ibuprofen, diclofenac and aspirin - are ...
2014-12-10
Typhoon Hagupit soaked the Philippines, and a NASA rainfall analysis indicated the storm dropped almost 19 inches in some areas. After Hagupit departed the Philippines as a tropical storm, NASA's Terra satellite passed over and captured a picture of the storm curled up like a cat waiting to pounce when it landfalls in Vietnam on Dec. 11.
The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite, managed by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency gathered over a week of rainfall data on Hagupit. That rainfall data along with data from other satellites was compiled ...
2014-12-10
COLUMBIA, Mo. - Previous cancer research has revealed that women are less likely than men to suffer from non-sex specific cancers such as cancer of the colon, pancreas and stomach. Scientists theorized that perhaps this trend was due to a protecting effect created by female hormones, such as estrogen, that help prevent tumors from forming. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found evidence suggesting that the male hormone testosterone may actually be a contributing factor in the formation of colon cancer tumors.
In his study, James Amos-Landgraf, an assistant ...
2014-12-10
Ants: Ever since agriculture evolved ca 10.000 years ago, plants have been artificially selected to become the fast growing and highly productive varieties we know today. However, humans were not the first to see merit in cultivating their own food, as ants have been doing this for 50 million years. A lineage of South-American ants collect leaves and recycle their own feces to manure a fungus garden for food. New research shows that these ants have an evolutionary history of improvement of their fungal crops.
A joint effort by researchers at the Universities of Copenhagen ...
2014-12-10
ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Urinary tract infections can occur with no apparent cause, and as effectiveness of antibiotics fades, treating them is also becoming less predictable.
University of Michigan Medical School researchers have identified bacterial genes that help the infections spread, providing a potential new target for treating UTIs, a global public health concern mostly affecting women. UTIs lead to lost work time, emergency room visits and health care spending of $3.5 billion in the United States.
The research findings, published in this week's Proceedings of the ...
2014-12-10
A new study by Robert Stahelin, an adjunct associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame and an associate professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine-South Bend, as well as a member of Notre Dame's Eck Institute for Global Health, investigates how the most abundant protein that composes the Ebola virus, VP 40, mediates replication of a new viral particle.
"In brief, the Ebola virus has just seven proteins that encode in its genome," Stahelin said. "VP40 is critical to the formation of a new viral particle and it does this ...
2014-12-10
Ads can communicate their main message in as little as a tenth of a second, helped by color, according to a new study published in Marketing Science, a publication of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
The Buffer Effect: The Role of Color When Advertising Exposures Are Brief and Blurred is by Michel Wedel, Pepsico Chaired Professor of Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland and Rik Pieters, Professor of Marketing at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management of the University of Tilburg ...
2014-12-10
A sex-changing fish called California sheephead (Semicossyphus pulcher) plays a vital role in the food web of kelp forests along the Pacific coast. Commonly found in the waters from Baja California to Point Conception -- although they can sometimes be found as far north as Monterey Bay -- sheephead feed on sea urchins, whose grazing habits can wreak havoc on community composition in kelp forests.
A new study by UC Santa Barbara research biologist Jenn Caselle uses data from three decades of research to document differential exploitation and recovery of sheephead populations ...
2014-12-10
Recent research from the University of Alberta reveals that contrary to current scientific knowledge, there's no atmospheric lead pollution in the province's oil sands region.
William Shotyk, a soil and water scientist who specializes in heavy metal pollution, examined sphagnum moss from 21 separate peat bogs in three locations around the oil sands area, near open pit mines and processing facilities.
After measuring the heavy metal content in the moss samples in his ultra-clean lab at the University of Alberta, Shotyk, based in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life and ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] The ups and downs of support from friends when teens experience peer victimization
New study looks at depressive symptoms and delinquency among harassed youth
