Adolescent psychology

This concurrent correlational study examined the relations among perceived parenting, child coping/attachment style, and adjustment outcomes in middle childhood. Instruments measuring children's perceptions of their parents, their style of coping, and their adjustment were administered to 199 children in the third through eighth grades (mean age 11 years). This study tested newly developed self-report scales measuring aspects of disorganized attachment in middle childhood, identified perceived parenting correlates of five child coping styles, investigated how the five coping styles relate to adjustment outcomes, and explored the possibility of indecision interacting with other child coping styles to influence adjustment outcomes. The new measures of indecision, caregiving, and coercive coping styles proved to be reliable and related to perceived parenting and adjustment in meaningful ways. Perceptions of parents as being harassing and low in reliable support were linked with avoidant behaviors in children, whereas perceptions of parents as low in harassment and high in overprotectiveness were linked with preoccupied behaviors. Low reliable support and high levels of fear induction were associated with high levels of indecision, whereas high reliable support was correlated with caregiving behaviors and low reliable support was correlated with coercion. In regards to children's adjustment being affected by their coping style, evidence was found linking externalizing behaviors to coercive coping style and internalizing behaviors to caregiving coping style. When investigating interactions among coping styles predicting adjustment, indecision was found to interact with low levels of preoccupied coping in girls to predict externalizing behaviors, whereas indecision interacted with avoidant coping for both boys and girls to predict greater externalizing behaviors. Caregiving was found to weaken the link between indecision and externalizing and indecision was found to magnify the effects of coercion on externalizing behaviors. Finally, girls who were high in caregiving and low in indecision were found to exhibit increased internalizing behaviors.

Many cardiovascular psychophysiological studies have found evidence of lower arousal states in aggressive individuals and hyper-arousal states in individuals exposed to chronic stress. However, most of these studies have relied on clinical diagnoses or self-reports to identify aggressive and victimized individuals. The present study used peer nominations to identify aggressive, victimized, and non-aggressive or victimized adolescents (mean age = 12.09 yrs.) to examine if any psychophysiological differences exist during resting and startle conditions. ANOVAs revealed that high aggressive/low victimized adolescents had a lower resting heart period/rate compared to high victimized/low aggressive adolescents. Further analyses revealed a statistical trend of lower resting heart period variability in high victimized/low aggressive individuals compared to non-aggressive non-victimized controls. Due to evidence suggesting that individuals with high self-reported empathy display less aggression, empathy as a moderator for aggression was investigated. Although gender differences w3ere found across measures, empathy ws not found to moderate aggression.

Friends have been implicated in the acquisition of adolescent substance use, but little attention has been given to how the origins of substance use similarity vary across groups. The first aim of this study is to examine whether friend selection, de-selection, and socialization differ as a function of friendship group's substance use. The second aim of this study is to extend Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analyses (SIENA) by demonstrating how group-level interactions can be included in the mode, and to demonstrate a new method to follow-up statistically significant group-level interactions in SIENA. Participants include 1419 Finnish students (729 females, 690 males) from upper secondary schools in Finland. Two waves of data were collected, starting when most participants were between 15 and 17 years of age. Waves of data collection were separated by one year. Results indicate that friends are selected, deselected, and socialized for substance use. Follow-up illustrations indicate that the magnitude of these processes vary as a function of substance use in the friendship group.

Self-injury behavior is identified as the non-suicidal, deliberate infliction of a wound to oneself in an attempt to seek expression. Self-injury is becoming more prevalent in the adolescent population; however, many nursing professionals are unaware of this phenomenon and the implications it holds for nursing. Approximately 12 to 17 percent of adolescents deliberately injure themselves although accurate statistics are difficult to obtain due to the secret and private nature of the behavior. Nurses, especially those who care for adolescents, could benefit from an understanding of the implications of self-injury, the characteristics of adolescents who self-injure, the expressivity of the behavior, and the repetitive patterns of the emotions experienced by adolescents who self-injure. Six adolescent females were interviewed for this study. Their stories were shared in rich, descriptive narratives. Common themes emerged from the words of the participants and these themes described the essence of self-injury by cutting for adolescent females. The themes which emerged were living with childhood trauma, feeling abandoned, being an outsider, loathing self, silently screaming, releasing the pressure, feeling alive, being ashamed, and being hopeful for self and others. The general structure that emerged from a synthesis of the themes was that the experience of self-injury by cutting for adolescent females is one where they are struggling for well-being and hoping for more being by using their skin as a canvas upon which internal pain is expressed as tangible and real.