Why are adolescents so sensitive to their peers' behavior? And is this sensitivity necessarily negative, as the term peer pressure often implies? In his Ph.D. dissertation, UvA behavioral scientist ...

Best friends primarily shape a child’s internal emotional state and academic behavior, popular peers set the standard for public image and social media engagement. As children enter adolescence, peers ...

Not all adolescents are equally susceptible to peer influence, and for some, peer influence exerts positive rather than negative effects. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, the ...

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner states in his book Changing Minds that by about age 10 a child’s peers rather than the parents assume primary importance in the child’s decisions about what to do, ...

Bullying among South African adolescents is a critical public health issue. This study explores the relationship between childhood adversity, peer influence, and personality traits in predicting ...

When I was a child, one of the things that upset me the most was watching friends be mean to other kids—whether it was a classmate they didn’t like or someone who was just going about their day being ...

To what Extent does Peer Group Smoking Predict Adolescent Smoking? The tendency for adolescent peer group members to share common characteristics such as smoking, termed alternatively as peer group ...

As children enter adolescence, peers become a dominant force in their lives. With adult supervision waning, teens look to agemates for guidance on how to act, think, and fit in. But who matters ...