Friendship interactions in children with and without depressive symptoms: observation of emotion during game-playing interactions and post-game evaluations

Depression symptoms, communication and cooperation skills, and friendship: longitudinal associations in young Norwegian children

Introduction

Symptoms of depression in early childhood have been linked to interpersonal difficulties, whereas friendships serve a protective function.

Methods

In the present study, we examined depression symptoms in preschool age (4 years) in relation to social skills (communication and cooperation), and friendships into early school age (Grades 1 and 2) in a large subsample (n = 943) of Norwegian children.

Results

The results indicated that preschool depression symptoms negatively predicted Grade 1 communication skills, which in turn predicted Grade 2 depression symptoms. This pathway suggests that communication skills may be a maintenance factor for depression symptoms in young children. In addition, preschool depression symptoms predicted lower Grade 1 cooperation skills, which in turn predicted lower Grade 2 communication skills, suggesting that preschool depression symptoms may begin a cascade of social skill problems that affect cooperation and communication skills into early school years. Best friendships were negatively related to depression symptoms in preschool and Grade 2.

Discussion

Given that preschool depression symptoms impact the development of social skills and friendships, it is important to attend to depression symptoms in early childhood.

Measuring Mental Wellbeing of Children via Human-Robot Interaction: Challenges and Opportunities

During the last decade, children have shown an increasing need for mental wellbeing interventions due to their anxiety and depression issues, which the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated. Socially Assistive Robotics have been shown to have a great potential to support children with mental wellbeing-related issues. However, understanding how robots can be used to aid the measurement of these issues is still an open challenge. This paper presents a narrative review of child-robot interaction (cHRI) papers (IEEE ROMAN proceedings from 2016-2021 and keyword-based article search using Google Scholar) to investigate the open challenges and potential knowledge gaps in the evaluation of mental wellbeing or the assessment of factors affecting mental wellbeing in children. We exploited the SPIDER framework to search for the key elements for the inclusion of relevant studies. Findings from this work (10 screened papers in total) investigate the challenges in cHRI studies about mental wellbeing by categorising the current research in terms of robot-related factors (robot autonomy and type of robot), protocol-related factors (experiment purpose, tasks, participants and user sensing) and data related factors (analysis and findings). The main contribution of this work is to highlight the potential opportunities for cHRI researchers to carry out measurements concerning children's mental wellbeing.

"Adolescents who feel depressed are rejected but do not withdraw: A longitudinal study of ethnically diverse friendship networks in England, Sweden, and Germany"

Adolescents who feel depressed are likely to experience social isolation from friends. Previous studies have put forward at least four hypotheses that can account for the association between felt depression and social isolation. The hypotheses are: (1) adolescents who are rejected tend to feel more depressed, (2) adolescents who feel depressed tend to become rejected, (3) adolescents who withdraw from friends tend to feel more depressed, and (4) adolescents who feel depressed tend to withdraw from friends. The present study aims to test these four hypotheses in ethnically diverse contexts in three countries. Two waves of data from England (n = 515), Sweden (n = 1,228), and Germany (n = 869) were obtained from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries (CILS4EU). One separate stochastic actor-oriented model of the longitudinal coevolution of friendship networks and felt depression was estimated for each of the three countries using the statistical package RSiena. The results consistently indicated that, in all three countries, adolescents who felt depressed were rejected by their peers. Also, the results consistently indicated that adolescents who felt depressed sought more friends, and the results therefore refuted the suggestion that adolescents who feel depressed withdraw from their friends. The findings of the study can inform health-promotion interventions that attempt to limit the social isolation of adolescents who feel depressed in ethnically diverse contexts. More specifically, the study suggests that the social isolation of adolescents who feel depressed may be limited through interventions that reduce the rejection that these adolescents experience from their peers.

The interplay between adolescent friendship quality and resilient functioning following childhood and adolescent adversity

Background

Child and adolescent adversity ('CA') is a major predictor of mental health problems in adolescence and early adulthood. However, not all young people who have experienced CA develop psychopathology; their mental health functioning can be described as resilient. We previously found that resilient functioning in adolescence following CA is facilitated by adolescent friendships.However, during adolescence, friendships undergo significant change. It is unknown whether resilient functioning after CA fluctuates with these normative changes in friendship quality.

Methods

We used Latent Change Score Modelling in a large sample of adolescents (i.e. the ROOTS cohort; N=1238) to examine whether and how emergent friendship quality and resilient functioning at ages 14 and 17 inter-relate and change together.

Results

We found that friendships quality and resilient functioning had strong associations at age 14, although friendships at 14 did not predict higher resilient functioning at 17. Higher resilient functioning in 14-year-olds with a history of CA was associated with a positive change in friendships from age 14 to 17. Finally, improvements in friendship quality and resilient functioning went hand in hand, even when taking into account baseline levels of both, the change within friendship quality or resilient functioning over time, and the association between resilient functioning and change in friendship quality over time.

Conclusions

We show that friendship quality and resilient functioning after CA inter-relate and change together between ages 14 and 17. Our results suggest that improving friendship quality or resilient functioning within this timeframe may benefit this vulnerable adolescent group, and this should be tested in future research.

Interpersonal similarity of autistic traits predicts friendship quality

Autistic traits are known to be associated with social interaction difficulties. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, relevant research has been typically restricted to studying individuals. In line with the 'dialectical misattunement hypothesis' and clinical insights of intact social interactions among autistic individuals, we hypothesized that friendship quality varies as a function of interpersonal similarity and more concretely the difference value of autistic traits in a dyad, above and beyond autistic traits per se. Therefore, in this study, we used self-report questionnaires to investigate these measures in a sample of 67 neurotypical dyads across a broad range of autistic traits. Our results demonstrate that the more similar two persons are in autistic traits, the higher is the perceived quality of their friendship, irrespective of friendship duration, age, sex and, importantly, the (average of) autistic traits in a given dyad. More specifically, higher interpersonal similarity of autistic traits was associated with higher measures of closeness, acceptance and help. These results, therefore, lend support to the idea of an interactive turn in the study of social abilities across the autism spectrum and pave the way for future studies on the multiscale dynamics of social interactions.

Close Friendship Strength and Broader Peer Group Desirability as Differential Predictors of Adult Mental Health

Middle adolescents' close friendship strength and the degree to which their broader peer group expressed a preference to affiliate with them were examined as predictors of relative change in depressive symptoms, self-worth, and social anxiety symptoms from ages 15 to 25 using multimethod, longitudinal data from 169 adolescents. Close friendship strength in midadolescence predicted relative increases in self-worth and decreases in anxiety and depressive symptoms by early adulthood. Affiliation preference by the broader peer group, in contrast, predicted higher social anxiety by early adulthood. Results are interpreted as suggesting that adolescents who prioritize forming close friendships are better situated to manage key social developmental tasks going forward than adolescents who prioritize attaining preference with many others in their peer milieu.

Relational victimization, friendship, and adolescents' hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis responses to an in vivo social stressor

Adolescents' peer experiences may have significant associations with biological stress-response systems, adding to or reducing allostatic load. This study examined relational victimization as a unique contributor to reactive hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis responses as well as friendship quality and behavior as factors that may promote HPA recovery following a stressor. A total of 62 adolescents (ages 12-16; 73% female) presenting with a wide range of life stressors and adjustment difficulties completed survey measures of peer victimization and friendship quality. Cortisol samples were collected before and after a lab-based interpersonally themed social stressor task to provide measures of HPA baseline, reactivity, and recovery. Following the stressor task, adolescents discussed their performance with a close friend; observational coding yielded measures of friends' responsiveness. Adolescents also reported positive and negative friendship qualities. Results suggested that higher levels of adolescents' relational victimization were associated with blunted cortisol reactivity, even after controlling for physical forms of victimization and other known predictors of HPA functioning (i.e., life stress or depressive symptoms). Friendship qualities (i.e., low negative qualities) and specific friendship behaviors (i.e., high levels of responsiveness) contributed to greater HPA regulation; however, consistent with theories of rumination, high friend responsiveness in the context of high levels of positive friendship quality contributed to less cortisol recovery. Findings extend prior work on the importance of relational victimization and dyadic peer relations as unique and salient correlates of adaptation in adolescence.

Gender differences in emotion expression in children: a meta-analytic review

Emotion expression is an important feature of healthy child development that has been found to show gender differences. However, there has been no empirical review of the literature on gender and facial, vocal, and behavioral expressions of different types of emotions in children. The present study constitutes a comprehensive meta-analytic review of gender differences and moderators of differences in emotion expression from infancy through adolescence. We analyzed 555 effect sizes from 166 studies with a total of 21,709 participants. Significant but very small gender differences were found overall, with girls showing more positive emotions (g = -.08) and internalizing emotions (e.g., sadness, anxiety, sympathy; g = -.10) than boys, and boys showing more externalizing emotions (e.g., anger; g = .09) than girls. Notably, gender differences were moderated by age, interpersonal context, and task valence, underscoring the importance of contextual factors in gender differences. Gender differences in positive emotions were more pronounced with increasing age, with girls showing more positive emotions than boys in middle childhood (g = -.20) and adolescence (g = -.28). Boys showed more externalizing emotions than girls at toddler/preschool age (g = .17) and middle childhood (g = .13) and fewer externalizing emotions than girls in adolescence (g = -.27). Gender differences were less pronounced with parents and were more pronounced with unfamiliar adults (for positive emotions) and with peers/when alone (for externalizing emotions). Our findings of gender differences in emotion expression in specific contexts have important implications for gender differences in children's healthy and maladaptive development.