Children involved in bullying at elementary school age: their psychiatric symptoms and deviance in adolescence. An epidemiological sample

OBJECTIVE: This study investigated psychiatric symptoms and deviance at the age of 15 years among children involved in bullying at the age of 8 years or at the age of 12 years. Furthermore, the relationships between involvement in bullying at the age of 8 years, concurrent psychiatric deviance, and later psychiatric deviance were studied. METHOD: Questionnaires filled in by the parents, teachers and children themselves were used to reveal psychiatric symptoms and deviance. RESULTS: Children involved in bullying, in particular those who were bully-victims at early elementary school age and those who were victims in their early teens, had more psychiatric symptoms at the age of 15 years. The probability of being deviant at the age of 15 years was higher among children involved in bullying at the age of 8 or 12 years than among non-involved children. When concurrent psychiatric deviance was taken into account, involvement in bullying increased the probability of teacher-defined deviance at the age of 15 years. CONCLUSION: Bullying experiences are connected not only to concurrent psychiatric symptoms but also to future psychiatric symptoms. Furthermore, the probability of being deviant in adolescence is increased if the child has been involved in bullying at elementary school age.     

Cross-Cultural Concepts of Adolescence in Europe,the United States and Japan

In the twentieth century, in Europe and North America, the origin and development of the concept of adolescence owes much to the growth of universal education. However, in the latter years of the present century the countries of Europe and North America began to experience relative economic decline and, at the same time, develop growing respect for the educational achievements of the countries of the Pacific Rim. This paper seeks to examine models of adolescence more closely both in the countries of the first industrial revolution and in the country that leads the world in academic achievement – Japan.     

Contradictory Messages: A Content Analysis of Hollywood-Produced Romantic Comedy Feature Films

This study analyzed the romantic content of a sample of 40 romantic comedy films using a basic grounded theory methodology. Analyses revealed that such films appear to depict romantic relationships as having qualities of both new and long-term relationships; that is, to be both novel and exciting, yet emotionally significant and meaningful. Furthermore, relationships were shown to have both highly idealistic and undesirable qualities but for any problems or transgressions experienced to have no real negative long-term impact on relationship functioning. The potential for viewer interpretations is discussed and the need for future research highlighted.     

Edge of seventeen: melodramatic coming‐out in new queer adolescence films

Queer adolescence films in the US and Britain in the 1990s show positive representations of same‐sex attraction, romance, and confrontations with homophobia. Films like Beautiful Thing, Edge of Seventeen, and Get Real are primarily targeted at young gay and lesbian viewers who need supportive and optimistic visualizations of eroticized queer politics, struggle and success, agony and happiness. These films are characterized, however, by complicated representations of the queer body, eroticization of physical inequality in same‐sex relationships, and the melodramatic coming‐out of agonized protagonists, which highly support the notion of a fixed and stable sexual orientation.     

Psychometric evaluation of the Adverse Childhood Experience International Questionnaire (ACE-IQ) in Malawian adolescents

BackgroundAdverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have lifelong adverse impacts on health and behavior. While this relationship has been extensively documented in high-income countries, evidence from lower-income contexts is largely missing. In order to stimulate greater research on the prevalence and consequences of ACEs in low-income countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed the ACE-International Questionnaire (ACE-IQ).ObjectiveIn this paper, we explore the factor structure, validity and reliability of the original ACE-IQ, and evaluate whether potential adaptations improve its predictive validity.Participants and settingFour hundred and ten adolescents (age 10–16 years old) from Malawi.MethodsThe adolescents answered an adapted version of ACE-IQ and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI).ResultsTaken together, our results suggest that (a) the ACE-IQ is structured in three dimensions: household disruption, abuse, and neglect; (b) there is support for the validity of the scale evidenced by the correlation between subdimensions (average across 13 correlations, phi = .20, p < 0,01; across subdomains (phi = .10, p < 0,01); partial agreement among children with the same caregiver (ICC = .43, p < .001) and correlation between ACE and depression (predictive validity; r = .35, p < .001); (c) information on the timing of the adversities (“last year” in addition to “ever”) modestly improved the predictive value of the ACE-IQ in models of depression (from R² = .12 to .15, p < .001); and (d) additional HIV-related questions showed low endorsement and a modest correlation with BDI (r = .25, p < 0,01).ConclusionOur findings suggest that the ACE-IQ is appropriate for use among adolescents from a low-income context.     

Persistence of phonological awareness deficits in older children with dyslexia

Three groups of children with dyslexia, with mean age 8, 13 and 17 years, together with three groups of normally achieving children matched for age and IQ with the dyslexic groups, undertook tests of sound categorization and phoneme deletion. The design allowed comparison not only across chronological age but also across reading age. The children with dyslexia performed significantly worse even than their reading age controls on both tasks. Indeed, overall performance of the 17 year old children with dyslexia was closest, but inferior, to that of the 8 year old controls. Since the sound categorization task was designed to minimize working memory load, the results extend previous findings on the phonological awareness deficits in dyslexia by dissociating the deficit from memory load and by showing that it persists at least into late adolescence.     

Academic goal orientations,multiple goal profiles,and friendship intimacy among early adolescents

This study investigated the relations between early adolescents’ academic motivational orientations and an aspect of quality of friendship: intimacy. Two-hundred and three Jewish-Israeli seventh grade students responded to surveys asking them about their academic achievement goals and about characteristics of their friendships. Variable-centered regression analyses suggested that mastery goals were positively associated with mutual sharing of difficulties, trust, and adaptive social problem-solving between friends, whereas performance-approach goals were negatively associated with intimacy friendship. Moreover, both performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals were associated with mistrust, inconsideration, and tension between friends. A person-centered analysis, employing cluster analysis, suggested that profiles with a higher level of mastery goals relative to both types of performance goals were associated with less mistrust among friends in comparison with profiles with a higher level of performance goals relative to mastery goals. The findings point to the connection between academic motivation and social relationships in school.     

How teacher emotional support motivates students: The mediating roles of perceived peer relatedness,autonomy support,and competence

Multilevel mediation analyses test whether students' mid-year reports of classroom experiences of autonomy, relatedness with peers, and competence mediate associations between early in the school year emotionally-supportive teacher-student interactions (independently observed) and student-reported academic year changes in mastery motivation and behavioral engagement. When teachers were observed to be more emotionally-supportive in the beginning of the school year, adolescents reported academic year increases in their behavioral engagement and mastery motivation. Mid-year student reports indicated that in emotionally-supportive classrooms, adolescents experienced more developmentally-appropriate opportunities to exercise autonomy in their day-to-day activities and had more positive relationships with their peers. Analyses of the indirect effects of teacher emotional support on students' engagement and motivation indicated significant mediating effects of autonomy and peer relatedness experiences, but not competence beliefs, in this sample of 960 students (ages 11–17) in the classrooms of 68 middle and high school teachers in 12 U.S. schools.     

If 'we' can succeed, 'I' can too: Identity-based motivation and gender in the classroom

Gender matters in the classroom, but not in the way people may assume; girls are outperforming boys. Identity-Based Motivation (IBM) theory explains why: People prefer to act in ways that feel in-line with important social identities such as gender. If a behavior feels identity-congruent, difficulty is interpreted as meaning that the behavior is important, not impossible, but what feels identity-congruent is context-dependent. IBM implies that boys (and girls) scan the classroom for clues about how to be male (or female); school effort will feel worthwhile if successful engagement with school feels gender-congruent, not otherwise. A between-subjects experimental design tested this prediction, manipulating whether gender and success felt congruent, incongruent, or not linked (control). Students in the success is gender-congruent condition described more school-focused possible identities, rated their likely future academic and occupational success higher, and tried harder on an academic task (this latter effect was significant only for boys).     

Ties That Bond: Youth Sport as a Vehicle for Social Identity and Positive Youth Development

An emerging area of research has focused on understanding how the group dynamics of a sport team influence positive youth development (PYD). The identities that youth form through their membership in sport teams (i.e., social identities) have been found to influence teammate behavior and team performance. Yet, minimal work exists on social identity and PYD in youth sport. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between social identity and PYD in sport. Method: Youth engaged in recreational sport (N = 219; M_age = 11.61 years, SD = 1.39 years) completed measures of social identity and PYD in sport. The social identity measure assessed 3 dimensions including ingroup ties (IGT; perceptions of similarity, bonding, belongingness), cognitive centrality (importance of being a team member), and ingroup affect (IGA; feelings associated with group membership). A regression analysis was performed separately for 4 PYD outcomes (personal and social skills, goal setting, initiative, negative experiences) with the 3 dimensions of social identity entered as predictors. Results: Regression analyses revealed that IGT and IGA were positively associated with personal and social skills (R² Adj. = .29). Further, IGT predicted initiative (R² Adj. = .16), whereas IGA was positively associated with goal setting (R² Adj. = .17) and negatively associated with negative experiences (R² Adj. = .08). Conclusion: The findings extend previous research highlighting the benefits of social identity on teammate behavior and team performance and demonstrate how social identity may contribute to PYD through sport.