This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The transition to middle school is associated with declines in psychological well-being and academic engagement for many preadolescents. The challenge of this developmental period may be that normative biological changes and school transitions are coupled with escalating stress in peer relationships. Peers can provide crucial companionship and support during preadolescence; at the same time, they can become sources of considerable distress. Indeed, feelings of social anxiety and experiences of peer rebuff typically peak around middle school, and nearly half of middle school students report that they are bullied at least occasionally. Relatively little is currently known, however, about responses to common peer stressors in preadolescence that may prevent or exacerbate subsequent problems. In this research project, preadolescents' real-time physiological and coping responses to common peer stressors (social evaluation and peer rebuff) will be assessed in a laboratory simulation prior to middle school, and examined as predictors of social, emotional, and academic outcomes one year later. Participants will be ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, allowing the investigators to extend the research to understudied populations. The specific objectives of the proposed research are to: (1) characterize prosocial and defensive coping responses to peer stress; (2) examine theoretically-based associations among coping responses and physiological responses (i.e., sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system responses); (3) investigate how pre-transition physiological and coping responses predict important outcomes across the transition to middle school, including social and school adjustment as well as emotional and physical health, assessed via multiple informants (e.g., preadolescents, parents, teachers); and (4) examine whether stress responses differentially predict middle school outcomes depending on gender, ethnicity, temperament, or earlier peer experiences.
This project will test an integrative conceptual model which proposes that prosocial and defensive responses to peer stress are interconnected at physiological and behavioral levels and related to subsequent social experiences and psychosocial adjustment. Results of the research will improve understanding of coping responses that may protect preadolescents against excessive feelings of fear and humiliation that can disrupt progress toward critical social and educational accomplishments. New discoveries about the physiology of stress experiences and coping responses are also anticipated, informing efforts to tailor interventions to the behavioral and physiological profiles of preadolescents with peer problems. In addition, the project will provide advanced training in interdisciplinary research for a diverse group of graduate and undergraduate students.
