The origins of belonging : Social motivation in infants and young children

Our reliance on our group members has exerted a profound influence over our motivation: successful group functioning requires that we are motivated to interact, and engage, with those around us. In other words, we need to belong. In this article, I explore the developmental origins of our need to belong. I discuss existing evidence that, from early in development, children seek to affiliate with others and to form long-lasting bonds with their group members. Furthermore, when children are deprived of a sense of belonging, it has negative consequences for their well-being. This focus on social motivation enables us to examine why and in what circumstances children engage in particular behaviours. It thus provides an important complement to research on social cognition. In doing so, it opens up important questions for future research and provides a much-needed bridge between developmental and social psychology

Children's Bullying Experiences Expressed Through Drawings and Self-Reports

Traditionally, studies assessing children's experiences of bullying and victimization have focused on the use of questionnaires and peer-nominations. The present study aimed to investigate this phenomenon by using two complementary assessment tools, namely self-reported questionnaires and children's drawings. The sample consisted of 448 boys and girls drawn from the 4th to 6th grade classrooms of ten primary schools in Central Greece. Children were asked to: (a) draw a scene of peer victimization taking place in their school and (b) complete self-reported questionnaires regarding bullying behaviour, victimization and participant roles in bully/victim incidences. Although the results showed that the relation between drawing and self-report measures is not a straightforward one, they do reveal some interesting associations primarily related to gender differences. In other words, it was found that boys outnumbered girls in both bullying behaviour and victimization. Regarding the employed forms of victimization, boys tended to depict themselves in more physical aggression scenes than girls, while girls tended to draw themselves in more verbal victimization scenes than boys

Pupils’ perceptions of bullying and disruptions to concentration and attention to school work

This article is not available through ChesterRep.This article discusses how disrupted concentration and attention to school work due to bullying can impact on academic success. Using pupil perceptions as the source of data, the two main aims were to quantify the proportion of pupils affected by bullying in this way, and to solicit their views on possible solutions. Subsidiary aims were to test for gender and school year differences in these variables. Among the 485 participants as a whole, only modest levels of disruptions attributable to bullying were evident but more disturbing was the finding that on nine out of eleven separate questions, around one in twenty pupils reported that this happened ‘lots of times’

Developmental cascades of peer relations and symptoms of externalizing and internalizing problems from kindergarten to fourth-grade elementary school

A developmental cascade model linking symptoms of externalizing and internalizing psychopathology through three indices of peer relational difficulty (peer rejection, peer victimization, friendedness) was tested in a general population sample of 653 children followed annually from kindergarten to fourth grade. Rejection and victimization linked kindergarten externalizing problems with fourth-grade internalizing problems. Transactional links between rejection and victimization were found. In addition, peer rejection added to the development of externalizing problems. Friendedness did not add to the development of externalizing or internalizing problems. Cascade paths were similar for boys and girls. Over the period of kindergarten to fourth grade, psychopathology and peer relations become entangled, and the dynamic interplay between multiple manifestations of poor peer relations ultimately adds to the development of both externalizing and internalizing problems and their cross-time relation. Implications for research and prevention are discussed. © Cambridge University Press 2010