This study investigated developmental trajectories for prosocial behavior for a sample followed from age 10 – 18 and examined possible adjustment outcomes associated with membership in different trajectory groups. Participants were 136 boys and 148 girls, their teachers, and their parents (19.4% African American, 2.4% Asian, 51.9% Caucasian, 19.5% Hispanic, and 5.8% other). Teachers rated children’s prosocial behavior yearly in grades 4 – 12. At the end of the 12th grade year, teachers, parents, and participants reported externalizing behaviors and participants reported internalizing symptoms, narcissism, and features of borderline personality disorder. Results suggested that prosocial behavior remained stable from middle childhood through late adolescence. Group-based mixture modeling revealed three prosocial trajectory groups: low (18.7%), medium (52.8%), and high (29.6%). Membership in the high prosocial trajectory group predicted lower levels of externalizing behavior as compared to the low prosocial trajectory group, and for girls, lower levels of internalizing symptoms. Membership in the medium prosocial trajectory group also predicted being lower on externalizing behaviors. Membership in the high prosocial trajectory group predicted lower levels of borderline personality features for girls only.
Many adolescents are heavily engaged with social media and text messaging (George & Odgers, 2016; Lenhart, 2015), yet few psychologists have studied what digital communication means for adolescents’ relationships and adjustment. This paper proposes that psychologists should embrace the careful study of adolescents’ digital communication. We discuss theoretical frameworks for understanding adolescents’ involvement with social media, present less widely recognized perils of intense involvement with social media, and highlight positive features of digital communication. Co-construction theory suggests that adolescents help to create the content of digital communication that shapes their lives, and that there may be strong continuity between adolescents’ offline and online lives (Subrahmanyam, Smahel, & Greenfield, 2006). However, psychological theories and research methods could further illuminate the power and the pain of adolescents’ digital communication. Psychologists need to understand more about subtle but potentially serious risks that adolescents might face: the agony of victimization by even a single episode of cyberbullying and the pain of social exclusion and comparison resulting from vast amounts of time reading large social media feeds and seeing friends doing things without you and comparing your inner emotional experience to everyone else’s highly groomed depictions of their seemingly marvelous lives. If we seek to understand developmental psychopathology and to help youth at risk, psychologists need to embrace careful study of the content of adolescents’ online communication, parents need to talk with their children about their own online experiences and become familiar with social media themselves, and clinicians need to address adolescents’ online social lives in prevention and treatment programs.
This brief report presents an innovative method for capturing the content of adolescents’ electronic communication on handheld devices: text messaging, email, and Instant Messaging. In an ongoing longitudinal study, adolescents were provided with BlackBerry devices with service plans paid by the investigators, and use of text messaging was examined when participants were 15 years old and in the 10th grade (N=175, 81 girls). BlackBerries are configured so that the content of all text messages, email messages, and Instant Messages is saved to a secure server and organized in a highly secure, searchable, online archive. This paper describes the technology used to devise this method and ethical considerations. Evidence for validity is presented, including information on use of text messaging to show that participants used these devices heavily and frequencies of profane and sexual language in a two-day sample of text messaging to demonstrate that they were communicating openly.
Passive social networking site use and well-being: The mediating roles of social comparison and the fear of missing out. AbstractPassively browsing social networking sites (SNSs) correlates with poorer well-being (Verduyn, Ybarra, Résibois, Jonides, & Kross, 2017). However, less research has been conducted that fully examines what factors may mediate this association. In particular, both online social comparison and the fear of missing out (FoMO) may play roles in how passive SNS browsing relates to depressive symptoms and self-perceptions. The current study adds to the literature by investigating how passive use relates to these outcomes through social comparison and FoMO. For an ethnically diverse sample of college students (N = 717, Mage = 21.47, SDage = 4.64, 69% female), passively using SNSs positively predicted social comparison, which was positively related to FoMO, which in turn positively predicted depressive symptoms, and negatively predicted global self-worth, self-perceived physical appearance, and self-perceived social acceptance. These findings suggest that social comparison and FoMO play a role in the link between passive SNS use, depressive symptoms, and self-perceptions, and that FoMO could result from online social comparison.
This research examined developmental trajectories for social and physical aggression for a sample followed from age 9–18, and investigated possible family predictors of following different trajectory groups. Participants were 158 girls and 138 boys, their teachers, and their parents (21% African American, 5.3% Asian, 51.6% Caucasian, and 21% Hispanic). Teachers rated children’s social and physical aggression yearly in grades 3–12. Participants’ parent (83% mothers) reported on family income, conflict strategies, and maternal authoritarian and permissive parenting styles. The results suggested that both social and physical aggression decline slightly from middle childhood through late adolescence. Using a dual trajectory model, group based mixture modeling revealed three trajectory groups for both social and physical aggression: low-, medium-, and high-desisting for social aggression, and stably-low, stably-medium, and high-desisting for physical aggression. Membership in higher trajectory groups was predicted by being from a single-parent family, and having a parent high on permissiveness. Being male was related to both elevated physical aggression trajectories and the medium-desisting social aggression trajectory. Negative interparental conflict strategies did not predict social or physical aggression trajectories when permissive parenting was included in the model. Permissive parenting in middle childhood predicted following higher social aggression trajectories across many years, which suggests that parents setting fewer limits on children’s behaviors may have lasting consequences for their peer relations. Future research should examine transactional relations between parenting styles and practices and aggression to understand the mechanisms that may contribute to changes in involvement in social and physical aggression across childhood and adolescence.
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