Why are friends special? Implementing a social interaction simulation task to probe the neural correlates of friendship.

Friendships form one of the most proximal contexts with a critical role in mental health and social and psychological development. Yet, the neurobiological basis of this crucial developmental factor is largely uninvestigated. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the interaction with friends is associated with specific activity increases in brain areas known to be involved in interpersonal phenomena, such as empathy, and in reward expectancy. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we assessed neural activity in a social interaction simulation task implementing the factors 'type of relationship' (peers vs. familiar celebrities) and 'emotional valence' (positive (liked), negative (disliked), and neutral (neither liked nor disliked)). In this design, all stimuli were selected individually for each of the 28 participants and positive peers constituted the friends. Participants were asked to approach a stimulus, to avoid it, or remain neutral. Behavioral results confirmed the expectations in the sense that the participants approached positive stimuli more often than they approached neutral, which were also more often approached than negative stimuli. Moreover, peers were more often approached than celebrities were. Imaging results revealed, among others, three regions of particular interest as selectively more strongly activated when subjects interacted with their friends than with other peers and celebrities: the amygdala and hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens, and the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex. These results might highlight the role of empathy and reward-related processes in friendship. Thus, we may have identified a potential mechanism by which friendships exert such a critical role in development and mental health.

Peer group reputation and smoking and alcohol consumption in early adolescence.

Research has shown that substance use might serve beneficial, developmental functions for adolescents, in particular concerning young people's functioning in friendships and intimate relationships. Nonetheless, a major problem in these studies is that information on social functioning is based on adolescent's self-reports, which undoubtedly might lead to an overestimation of the social functions of substance use. In the present study, we collected data of 3361 early and mid-adolescents at secondary schools in the Netherlands. Information on individual student's social behavior and psychological traits were gathered by using sociometric measures. All respondents were asked to evaluate all classmates on measures, such as sociability, self-confidence, achievement, withdrawal, and aggression. Person- and variable-centered analyses clearly showed that highest levels of smoking and drinking were found in adolescents who score high on sociability and self-confidence, and relatively low on aggression-inattentiveness, achievement-withdrawal, and emotionality-nervousness. This suggests that beneficial functions of substance use are not only in the eyes of the beholder, at least not in that of the individual drinker or smoker.

Perceived support in sibling relationships and adolescent adjustment.

BACKGROUND: Siblings may support each other, but also reveal fierce rivalry and mutual aggression. Supportive sibling relationships have been linked to the development of psychosocial competence of children. In the present longitudinal study, we will focus on the development of perceived support in sibling dyads and on the influence of sibling support and sibling problem behavior on psychosocial adjustment in adolescence. METHOD: In a three-wave longitudinal sample of 285 Dutch families with two adolescent children (11- to 15-year-olds), these two siblings judged the support perceived from each other. In addition, they themselves and their parents judged their internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors. The relation of sibling support and sibling problem behavior with internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors was examined while controlling for support from parents and friends and, over time, controlling for the autoregressive effects of problem behavior. RESULTS: Support perceived from a sibling is mostly negatively related to externalizing problems; sibling problem behavior is strongly related to internalizing problems. Differential developmental trajectories of adolescents' adjustment are associated with siblings' support and problem behavior. CONCLUSION: The results indicate that adolescents' relationships with both older and younger siblings are characterized by modeling processes.

Relations between Big Five personality characteristics and perceived support in adolescents' families.

The authors investigated the longitudinal relations between family members' Big Five personality factors and perceived support. Members of 285 two-parent families with 2 adolescent children judged their own and other family members' Big Five factors and the support perceived from the other members on 3 occasions at 12-month intervals. The Big Five factor Agreeableness was particularly related to perceived support. Changes in individuals' Big Five factors were linked to changes in the support they perceived themselves but even more to changes in the support that other family members perceived from them. Results are consistent with the parallel continuities hypothesis: Individual characteristics will be stable when there is stability in the supportive environment, but when the environment is changing, personality tends to change in the same direction, and vice versa.

Personality judgments in adolescents' families: the perceiver, the target, their relationship, and the family.

The present study investigated whether personality judgments involve different processes in a family setting than in a nonfamily setting. We used the Social Relations Model to distinguish the effects of perceiver, target, perceiver-target relationship, and family on personality judgments. Family members of families with adolescents judged their own and the other members' Big Five factors. Judgments were found to depend on the relevance of personality factors within the family setting: Agreeableness and Conscientiousness were judged most consistently. Large relationship variance indicated that parents adjust their judgments to the target family member; large perceiver variance indicated that adolescents judge family members' personalities rather similarly. However, a comparison of self- and other-judgments showed adolescents' judgments to be no more related to their self-perceptions than parents' judgments. We concluded that the relevance of personality factors may differ on specific tasks within a setting.

Mutual antipathies and their significance in middle childhood and adolescence.

Mutual antipathies (when two children or adolescents dislike one another) were studied among 2,348 school-age children and 2,768 adolescents to determine incidence, gender and age differences, and implications for social adjustment. The children were more frequently involved than were the adolescents in same-sex antipathies but not mixed-sex ones. Boys were involved more frequently than were girls in same-sex antipathies, but involvement in mixed-sex antipathies was comparable for the two genders. With peer rejection scores used as a covariate, same-sex antipathies were associated with antisocial behavior and social withdrawal among children and adolescents of both genders and, in addition, to emotionality and lack of friendship support among adolescents. Mixed-sex antipathies were related to social adjustment depending on gender: these antipathies were related to antisocial and bullying behavior in boys but not girls; and to nonaggressiveness, victimization, lesser cooperation, shyness, and depression in girls but not boys. Mutual antipathies thus appear to be concomitants of adaptational risk in both childhood and adolescence.

Relational support in families with adolescents.

To better understand what determines the support that family members perceive in dyadic family relationships, this study tested to what extent the perceiver, the partner, their specific relationship, and the family determine perceived support, and whether these effects differ for horizontal (i.e., marital and sibling) versus vertical (i.e., parent-child) relationships, or for different types of perceivers (i.e., parents versus adolescents). Two parents and two adolescents in 288 Dutch families judged the support perceived from each other. Social relations model analysis showed support perceptions to be more determined by the perceiver than by the partner, partly relationship specific, partly generation specific, and partly family specific. Relationship-specific support and reciprocity are more important in horizontal relationships than in vertical ones. Adolescents' support perceptions were more perceiver determined than were parents' perceptions.

Heterogeneity among peer-rejected boys across middle childhood: developmental pathways of social behavior.

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to identify subgroups of rejected boys with different developmental pathways of aggression and prosocial behavior across the elementary school years. Peer, teacher, and parent reports and behavior observations yielded composite scores for aggression and prosocial behavior at 3 measurement waves. A cluster analysis with these composites on 87 initially rejected boys identified 4 subgroups with different developmental pathways of prosocial behavior and aggression that were associated with different patterns of sociometric acceptance and rejection over time and with social emotional adjustment in the last measurement wave. Changes in acceptance and rejection tend to precede changes in aggression and prosocial behavior. Cluster differences on social emotional adjustment indicators converged into I moderately discriminating factor, Social Maladaptation in Peer-Oriented Behavior.