Nowadays, an increasing number of children and adolescents living in Europe have an immigrant background. Because ethnicity is a recognizable characteristic that may become the driver of bullying, these youths are at high risk of victimization. School interventions based on peer-led approaches, assuming all the conditions postulated in contact…

Sibling bullying is highly prevalent and has been found to have adverse effects on mental health lasting into early adulthood. What is unknown is what predicts sibling bullying roles (uninvolved, victim, bully-victim and bully). This study aimed to identify precursors of sibling bullying roles in middle childhood using a large sample of 6,838…

Although a number of social--cognitive and contextual correlates of defending against bullying have been identified, research on the personality traits associated with defending have yielded weak and inconsistent results. The current study provided a novel examination as to whether a tendency toward social withdrawal is associated with less…

The joint development of trajectories of bullying perpetration and peer victimization from Grade 5 to Grade 8 and concurrent and predictive associations with parent- and child-reported symptoms of psychopathology (anxiety, depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and somatization) were examined in a large sample (N = 695) of Canadian…

Frequent exposure to victimization by peers is related to greater psychological problems. It is often assumed that peer victimization is associated with fewer psychological problems in classrooms where defending victims of bullying is common (i.e., a norm). The few studies testing this claim have been cross-sectional and have produced mixed…

Peer victimization during the school years can impair victims' mental and physical health even in adulthood. Moreover, some victims of school bullying may also experience revictimization at work as adults. Later revictimization at work may thus at least partly explain (i.e., mediate) the negative consequences of peer victimization in school.…

This study examined whether the degree to which bullying is normative in the classroom would moderate associations between "intra"- (cognitive and affective empathy, self-efficacy beliefs) and "inter"personal (popularity) factors and defending behavior. Participants were 6,708 third- to fifth-grade children (49% boys;…

The current study examined the development of bullying and defending over a 1-year period as related to friends' influence and individual and friends' moral disengagement (i.e., self-justification mechanisms that allow one to avoid moral self-censure of transgressive actions) in children and young adolescents. Via longitudinal social network…

An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New…

This study examined the moderating role of classroom injunctive norms salience regarding social withdrawal and regarding aggression in the longitudinal association between these behaviors and peer victimization. A total of 1,769 fourth through sixth graders (895 girls, M = 10.25 years, SD = 1.03) from 23 schools (67 classrooms) completed a peer…

The current study examined school-level victimization as a moderator of associations between peer victimization and changes in 2 types of self-blaming attributions, characterological and behavioral, across the first year of middle school. These associations were tested in a large sample (N = 5,991) of ethnically diverse adolescents from fall to…

The increasing availability of Internet and cell phones has provided new avenues through which adolescents can bully. Electronic bullying is a new form of bullying that may threaten adolescent social and emotional development. In this study the relation between involvement in electronic and traditional bullying was examined. Eighty-four…

This article proposes an evolutionary model of risky behavior in adolescence and contrasts it with the prevailing developmental psychopathology model. The evolutionary model contends that understanding the evolutionary functions of adolescence is critical to explaining why adolescents engage in risky behavior and that successful intervention…

Recent perspectives on social dominance in normative populations have suggested a developmental progression from using primarily coercive strategies to incorporation of more socially competent strategies to attain material and social resources. Parental influences on the resource control strategies children use have been proposed but not…

Why do some adolescents respond to interpersonal conflicts vengefully, whereas others seek more positive solutions? Three studies investigated the role of implicit theories of personality in predicting violent or vengeful responses to peer conflicts among adolescents in Grades 9 and 10. They showed that a greater belief that traits are fixed (an…