Linda Rose-Krasnor

Attachment, friendship, and psychosocial functioning in early adolescence

Fifth-graders’ (N = 162; 93 girls) relationships with parents and friends were examined with respect to their main and interactive effects on psychosocial functioning. Participants reported on parental support, the quality of their best friendships, self-worth, and perceptions of social competence. Peers reported on aggression, shyness and withdrawal, and rejection and victimization. Mothers reported on psychological adjustment. Perceived parental support and friendship quality predicted higher global self-worth and social competence and less internalizing problems. Perceived parental support predicted fewer externalizing problems, and paternal (not maternal) support predicted lower rejection and victimization. Friendship quality predicted lower rejection and victimization for only girls. Having a supportive mother protected boys from the effects of lowquality friendships on their perceived social competence. High friendship quality buffered the effects of low maternal support on girls’c internalizing difficulties.

Interpersonal Problem-Solving and Social Competence in Children

Well-known sayings, quotations, and proverbs help provide us with bases for understanding socially acceptable thoughts and deeds. Generally, in Western cultures, it is believed that adherence to the Golden Rule and acting in a charitable manner will lead to interpersonal and intrapersonal profit, whereas those who subscribe to Machiavellian rhetoric will suffer because of his or her own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice. In short, common sense dictates that those whose social behaviors are judged to be skillful, successful, and acceptable over time and across settings will lead productive, honorable, and successful lives. Those judged as incompetent are predicted to suffer a variety of malevolent consequences.

Trajectories of Social Withdrawal from Middle Childhood to Early Adolescence

Heterogeneity and individual differences in the developmental course of social withdrawal were examined longitudinally in a community sample (N = 392). General Growth Mixture Modeling (GGMM) was used to identify distinct pathways of social withdrawal, differentiate valid subgroup trajectories, and examine factors that predicted change in trajectories within subgroups. Assessments of individual (social withdrawal), interactive (prosocial behavior), relationship (friendship involvement, stability and quality, best friend’s withdrawal and exclusion/victimization) and group- (exclusion/victimization) level characteristics were used to define growth trajectories from the final year of elementary school, across the transition to middle school, and then to the final year of middle school (fifth-to-eighth grades). Three distinct trajectory classes were identified: low stable, increasing, and decreasing. Peer exclusion, prosocial behavior, and mutual friendship involvement differentiated class membership. Friendlessness, friendship instability, and exclusion were significant predictors of social withdrawal for the increasing class, whereas lower levels of peer exclusion predicted a decrease in social withdrawal for the decreasing class.

A longitudinal examination of breadth and intensity of youth activity involvement and successful development.

Connections between youth activity involvement and indicators of successful development were examined in a longitudinal high school sample. Drawing on theories of expertise skill development (e.g., J. Côté, 1999); the selection, optimization, and compensation framework (P. B. Baltes, 1997); and theories of positive youth development (e.g., R. M. Lerner, J. B. Almerigi, C. Theokas, & J. Lerner, 2005), reciprocal associations between breadth and intensity of activity involvement and developmental success were explored. Time 1 breadth (but not intensity) and increases in breadth predicted higher levels of successful development at Time 2 (20 months later). Time 1 developmental success and improvements predicted greater Time 2 breadth and intensity. Implications for research and theory related to connections between youth activity involvement and successful development are discussed.

Relating Preschoolers' Social Competence and their Mothers' Parenting Behaviors to Early Attachment Security and High-Risk Status

Early attachment quality was related to social competence with an unfamiliar peer at age four, and to maternal management of peer interaction. Subjects were thirty-eight children, eighteen insecure and twenty securely attached children at twenty months. Approximately half of each group was middle-class and half was lower-class, high risk. At age four, each focal child and an unfamiliar play partner were videotaped during dyadic free play; the mother and the two children were videotaped building a house out of Duplo blocks. Behaviors of the mother and the focal child were coded using a social problem-solving framework. Results indicated that mothers of insecurely attached children were more adult-centered and less likely to use questions to meet their goals than were mothers of securely attached children. High-risk mothers were more adult-centered and more likely to use coercive, power assertive strategies than middle-class mothers. Four-year-old children who were insecurely attached as toddlers were more aggressive and their social interchanges were more likely to involve negative affect than securely attached children. Attachment x social class interactions suggested diverging maladaptive developmental pathways for insecures from different family environments.

Alone is a crowd: social motivations, social withdrawal, and socioemotional functioning in later childhood.

The primary goals of this study were to test a conceptual model linking social approach and avoidance motivations, socially withdrawn behaviors, and peer difficulties in later childhood and to compare the socioemotional functioning of different subtypes of withdrawn children (shy, unsociable, avoidant). Participants were 367 children, aged 9-12 years. Measures included assessments of social motivations (i.e., self-reported shyness and preference for solitude) and social withdrawal (observations of solitary behaviors in the schoolyard and self-reports of solitary activities outside of school), as well as self- and parent-reported peer difficulties and internalizing problems. Among the results, both shyness and preference for solitude were associated with socially withdrawn behaviors, which in turn predicted peer difficulties. However, only shyness (but not preference for solitude) also displayed a direct path to peer difficulties. As well, results from person-oriented analyses indicated that different subtypes of socially withdrawn children displayed decidedly different profiles with regard to indices of internalizing problems. For example, whereas unsociable children did not differ from their nonwithdrawn peers on indices of internalizing problems, socially avoidant (i.e., high in both shyness and unsociability) children reported the most pervasive socioemotional difficulties. Findings are discussed in terms of the implications of different forms of social withdrawal for socioemotional functioning in later childhood.

The Relation of Maternal Directiveness and Child Attachment Security to Social Competence in Preschoolers

The primary focus of this study was the assessment of childrens social competence in relation to two aspects of the mother-child relationshipattachment security and maternal directiveness. Specifically, we expected concurrent child-mother attachment security to be positively correlated with childrens positive social engagement and social problem-solving skills and negatively related to aggression, whereas maternal directiveness was predicted to show the opposite pattern of correlations. Subjects were 111 mothers and their 4-year-old target children, each paired with a same-sex, same-age unfamiliar control child. Maternal directiveness was assessed in co-operative task and free-play sessions involving the target child, target mother, and control child. The target childs social engagement and social problem-solving skills were measured during dyadic free play with the control child. Multiple regression analyses assessed relative contributions of maternal directiveness and attachment security to the prediction of child behaviour with the peer. Attachment security predicted positive social engagement. Maternal directiveness was associated only with aspects of the childrens social problem-solving. These results support previous research linking child-mother attachment security, maternal control patterns and childrens social competence, although our findings showed the importance of separating the influences of attachment quality and the socialisation aspects of parenting.

Adolescent peer interaction and trait surgency weaken medial prefrontal cortex responses to failure

Adolescent risk taking has been known to increase in the presence of peers. We hypothesized that peer interaction reduces the activation of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that is required for self-regulation of reward-driven behavior. We also expected that mPFC activity would be reduced more in those with greater surgency, a composite trait of behavioral approach, sensation seeking and positive affect. In our study, 20 15-year-old boys played a simulated driving video game alone and in the presence of peers who were encouraged to call out advice while we recorded the feedback-related negativity (FRN) event-related potential in response to an impending car crash. FRN amplitude was reduced both as a function of peer presence and increased surgency. More importantly, we also calculated intracerebral current source density at the time of the FRNs, and found that both greater surgency and peer presence are associated with reduced activity specifically in the mPFC. Riskier performance resulting in more car crashes resulted from the presence of peers only as an interaction with surgency, this interaction being related strongly to reduced activity in the ventromedial PFC.

Maternal Beliefs and Children’s Competence

How children acquire the capacity to interact competently with others and how they develop forms of less competent social behavior are critical questions in the study of child development. Because social relationships are of such central importance in everyday life, there may well be no skills more important than those required to sustain relationships. Thus, the achievement of social competence can be considered one end point of successful development. Aside from its intrinsic value, social competence may also be a marker of adaptive socio-emotional development. Children who lack social competence usually evidence a variety of other difficulties and are considered to be at risk for maladjustment later in life. For example, aggression and social withdrawal are two forms of problematic social behaviors in childhood that not only tend to persist but also tend to forecast poor personal and social adjustment in later years (e.g., Moskowitz, Schwartzman, & Ledingham, 1985; Parker & Asher, 1987; Rubin & Mills, 1988a).

Attachment, social information processing, and friendship quality of early adolescent girls and boys

Sixth graders (N = 223; 109 girls) completed questionnaires assessing their attachment security with their mothers and fathers, their social information processing (SIP) when faced with ambiguously caused hypothetical negative events involving a close friend, and the quality of the relationship with that friend. Aspects of more maladaptive SIP were significantly related to lower levels of security. The overall pattern of results did not provide strong evidence for mediation, although boys’ anger did tend to mediate the relation between attachment to the mother and friendship quality. The results are consistent with attachment theory and suggest that the mechanisms connecting attachment and friendship are specific with regard to the relationships boys and girls have with their fathers and mothers.