Although the onset of illicit substance use during adolescence can hit parents abruptly like a raging flood, its origins likely start as a trickle in early childhood. Understanding antecedent factors and how they grow into a stream that leads to adolescent drug use is important for theories of social development as well as policy formulations to…

The problem is well known to every parent of a teenager, every high school teacher, every clinical practitioner, and every social policy maker: vulnerable adolescents risk becoming more deviant through association with deviant peers and peer groups. Deviant peer influences are among the most potent factors in the development of antisocial…

Proposes a model of social exchange in children which conceptualizes social behavior as a function of the child's processing of a set of social environmental clues. Reports results of two studies which provide support for a reciprocal influence model of the relation between social information-processing patterns and children's social behavior.…