Interdependence of depressive symptoms, school involvement, and academic performance between adolescent friends: A dyadic analysis

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113150/1/bjep12075.pd

Understanding the cognitive and affective underpinnings of whistleblowing

textEnron, Pfizer, UBS, Halliburton: In recent years, organizational wrongdoing has cost taxpayers and stakeholders billions of dollars. Whistleblowers, organizational insiders who witness and report wrongdoing with the intent of effecting an organizational response, play a major role as combatants to such corruption. What motivates whistleblowers versus silent witnesses of wrongdoing? And what cognitive and emotional patterns underlie their actions? Here I construe whistleblowing as a personally costly but pro-organizational action (Miceli, Near, & Dworkin, 2008). As such, whistleblowing represents a novel type of extreme pro-group behavior that identity fusion theory seeks to explain (Swann, Jetten, Gomez, Whitehouse, & Bastian, 2012). The identity fusion approach posits that some people experience a visceral feeling of "oneness" with a group, a feeling that motivates a range of extreme pro-group actions. Across four preliminary studies, I first establish that fusion with one's organization (i.e., work or university) parallels fusion with other groups (e.g., country, political party). In addition, Preliminary Study 4 shows that fusion and whistleblowing are associated in retrospective accounts of workplace behavior. Given this initial support, a controlled lab experiment was conducted to address two major questions. First, to what extent is identity fusion with one's university associated with initial and formal whistleblowing behaviors? Second, in what ways, if any, do strongly vs. weakly fused individuals' cognitive and emotional experiences differ in response to witnessing organizational wrongdoing? As hypothesized, fusion with one's university predicted spontaneous reporting of an in-group transgressor. Strongly fused students' actions were associated with several cognitive and emotional factors, and cross-method evidence indicated that active negative emotions (e.g., anger) coupled with a heightened sense of personal responsibility drove strongly fused persons to spontaneously blow the whistle. Furthermore, strongly fused students were also especially likely to formally (as compared to spontaneously) report the transgressor. Evidence from participants' debriefing responses suggested that while weakly fused students diffused formal reporting responsibility to others, strongly fused students felt personally responsible to follow-through with a formal report. Overall, these results suggest that identity fusion is a promising perspective for understanding motives underlying personally costly pro-group behaviors.Psycholog

Friendship Features and Social Exclusion: An Observational Study Examining Gender and Social Context

This study examined the effects of gender and context on relations between children’s friendship features (intimacy, exclusivity, and aggression) and socially exclusive gestures and remarks. One hundred forty dyads of mutually nominated close friends (N = 280, ages 10, 12, and 14) participated in a laboratory study of social exclusion toward a newcomer and then rated features of their friendship. As compared to boys, in the presence of the provoking peer, girls’ aggressive friendship features were less strongly related to exclusive verbalizations but more strongly related to observed exclusive gestures. In the absence of the provocateur, girls’ aggressive friendship features were more strongly related to exclusive remarks than were boys’ friendship features. These findings suggest that the relation between friendship features and social exclusion may be influenced more by context for girls and that girl friends may dissemble more when excluding a newcomer, perhaps in keeping with their interpersonal needs for communion and harmony

Social Support of Indonesian and U.S. Children and Adolescents by Family Members and Friends

Multiple features of social support provided by mothers, fathers, siblings, and friends to Indonesian (N 240) and U.S. (N 203) elementary and junior high school students were assessed using the Networks of Relationships Inventory. Cultural differences in the relative salience of friends and family members as providers of social support emerged. Indonesian youth ranked family members higher and friends lower on companionship and satisfaction than did U.S. youth. Friends were seen as the primary sources of intimacy in both countries. These results are consistent with suggestions that patterns of social support vary as a function of cultural differences in familism, individualism, and collectivism