A hybrid approach with agent-based simulation and clustering for sociograms

In the last years, some features of sociograms have proven to be strongly related to the performance of groups. However, the prediction of sociograms according to the features of individuals is still an open issue. In particular, the current approach presents a hybrid approach between agent-based simulation and clustering for simulating sociograms according to the psychological features of their members. This approach performs the clustering extracting certain types of individuals regarding their psychological characteristics, from training data. New people can then be associated with one of the types in order to run a sociogram simulation. This approach has been implemented with the tool called CLUS-SOCI (an agent-based and CLUStering tool for simulating SOCIograms). The current approach has been experienced with real data from four different secondary schools, with 38 real sociograms involving 714 students. Two thirds of these data were used for training the tool, while the remaining third was used for validating it. In the validation data, the resulting simulated sociograms were similar to the real ones in terms of cohesion, coherence of reciprocal relations and intensity, according to the binomial test with the correction of Bonferroni

Spanish Validation of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA): Introducing the ERQ-SpA

Research on emotion regulation is now extensive and shows the benefits of the adaptive management of emotions for social functioning and psychological well-being. Our purpose was to test the psychometric properties of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents with a sample of nonclinical Spanish adolescents. A total of 462 secondary education students (223 girls, mean age = 13.89 years, SD = 1.38) participated. The instrument proved to be two-factor and gender-invariant. Results revealed the temporal stability of both emotion regulation strategies, while the predictive validity study revealed that depressive symptoms were negatively related to cognitive reappraisal, and positively related to expressive suppression. Our findings support the use of the ERQ-SpA in Spanish adolescents

School violence towards peers and teen dating violence: the mediating role of personal distress

School violence towards peers and teen dating violence are two of the most relevant behaviour problems in adolescents. Although the relationship between the two types of violence is well established in the literature, few studies have focused on mediators that could explain this empirical relationship. We departed from the evidence that relates anger, emotional distress and impaired empathy to teen dating violence and juvenile sexual offending, to explore the role of personal distress, i.e., a self-focused, aversive affective reaction to another’s emotion associated with the desire to alleviate one’s own, but not the other’s distress; as a possible mechanism linking school violence towards peers and teen dating violence in a sample of Spanish adolescents. We also explored the prevalence of emotional and physical teen dating violence, both occasional and frequent, and the differences between boys and girls. A total of 1055 adolescents (49.2% boys and 50.8% girls) aged between 11 and 17 years (M = 14.06, SD = 1.34) who had had at least one romantic relationship within the last year, completed measures of school violence towards peers, teen dating violence, and personal distress. Statistical analyses revealed that occasional and frequent teen dating violence (both physical and emotional) was more frequent in girls than in boys, and that personal distress functioned as a partial mediator, with an overall model fit higher for boys than girls: in boys, partial mediation occurred for both physical and emotional teen dating violence; in girls, partial mediation occurred only for physical violence. The interpretation of the results is tentative given the novel nature of the study, and points to the evidence of the emotional costs of school violence and the importance of emotion and behavior regulation to undermine the social costs of personal distress

Transactional Links between Teacher-Adolescent Support, Relatedness, and Aggression at School: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Study

This study examines the reciprocal effects between two school-based relationships within the classroom-namely, perceived teacher support and relatedness with classmates-and school aggression (overt and relational) across two courses of secondary education. Participants were 654 adolescents (48% boys), who were assessed in three waves: first, at the beginning of the academic year (T0), second, at the end of the same academic year (T1), and third, at the beginning of the next academic year (T2) (Mage wave 1 = 13.98 years). Autoregressive cross-lagged modeling was applied. Results show a protective effect of relatedness against relational aggression in both genders. Moreover, we observed a protective effect of perceived teacher support at the beginning of the course for later school aggression as well as a risk effect if this perceived teacher support is maintained throughout the course. These effects were observed in relation with gender-atypical forms of aggression (overt in girls and relational in boys). Finally, aggression had negative consequences for relatedness in girls and for teacher support through the mediation of relatedness in boys. Gender differences and practical implications of these findings are discussed