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In this article, we examine the construct of peer contagion in childhood and adolescence and review studies of child and adolescent development that have identified peer contagion influences. Evidence suggests that children’s interactions with peers are tied to increases in aggression in early and middle childhood and amplification of problem behaviors such as drug use, delinquency, and violence in early to late adolescence. Deviancy training is one mechanism that accounts for peer contagion effects on problem behaviors from age 5 through adolescence. In addition, we discuss peer contagion relevant to depression in adolescence, and corumination as an interactive process that may account for these effects. Social network analyses suggest that peer contagion underlies the influence of friendship on obesity, unhealthy body images, and expectations.
I restrict the tabular presentation of findings to those coefficients that measure the causal influence of interstate contagion on the congressional vote. All the evidence for the operation of congressional contagion in presidential election years is confined to the non-synchronized states. Gubernatorial elections turn out to be a more promising environment in which to test for contagion effects. The degree of contagion increased as parasite burden rose and then declined rapidly following a crash in parasite abundance.
Finally, much of what we are interested in learning about peer contagion unfolds in milliseconds. The development of imaging techniques has rapidly widened the social neuroscience program of research. It has led to increased understanding of the social human brain, which is highly focused and responsive to the social environment, including an area of the brain that mirrors the behavior of the other or that responds to social rejection. It is particularly important to better understand change in the adolescent brain in terms of potential social influence. With a downward shift during puberty in self-regulatory abilities may also be an upward shift in attentional biases to peer social stimuli, sensitivity to social reward, and concomitant vulnerability to peer contagion.
To date, few reports have been published about adult structure and monitoring in the context of interventions that aggregate, accounting for variations in outcomes. In our research, observations of high-risk youth during the unstructured periods of the group intervention sessions yielded the highest levels of deviancy training, which in turn predicted escalations in tobacco pivot meaning in telugu use and delinquent behavior. In addition to recognizing the types of news coverage that can promote suicide contagion, the workshop participants strongly agreed that reporting of suicide can have several direct benefits. An ongoing dialogue between news media professionals and health and other public officials is the key to facilitating the reporting of this information.
In particular, these researchers are interested in the questions of how people express emotions online and how people “catch” the emotions of others through the sheen of social media and other digital communications . Empathy for family and friends often leads to a focus on reporting the positive aspects of a suicide completer’s life. For example, friends or teachers may be quoted as saying the deceased person “was a great kid” or “had a bright future,” and they avoid mentioning the troubles and problems that the deceased person experienced. As a result, statements venerating the deceased person are often reported in the news. However, if the suicide completer’s problems are not acknowledged in the presence of these laudatory statements, suicidal behavior may appear attractive to other at-risk persons — especially those who rarely receive positive reinforcement for desirable behaviors. Improve evaluation of programs and interventions that aggregate youth and the use of science in policy decision-making.
Individual differences in children’s self-regulation have also been shown to moderate the influence of peers on subsequent behavior. Finally, being socially rejected may render youth more vulnerable to peer effects. A primary concern of peer contagion research is to identify influence mechanisms. One candidate is the deviancy training process during which children organize their relationships around the expression of problem behavior or emotional distress, which appears to amplify these symptoms over time. School-based prevention is by far the most cost-effective public health strategy for improving the lives of children and adolescents.
The self-regulation construct was defined by using the Rothbart measure of effortful control (Ellis & Rothbart 2005), including adolescent and parent report of effortful control and teacher reports of self-control in the context of school. As hypothesized, adolescents with high levels of self-regulation were less vulnerable to peer influences to engage in problem behaviors. The second study, which included children in second-grade classrooms with a high density of aggressive children, found increased future levels of aggression in the children (Warren et al. 2005). Note that in both studies the intervention itself did not cause increases in problem behavior; rather, the context—high-risk children in a public elementary school environment—was the factor underlying peer contagion in terms of aggression. Community and neighborhood interventions have been successful in reducing problem behaviors (for a review, see Biglan & Hinds 2009).
It was designed to prevent escalation of early problem behavior to more serious forms of conduct disorder and delinquency in adolescence. Because of the multimodal nature of the randomized trial, it is difficult to disentangle the effects of any single intervention component, and no negative effects were observed in general. This finding is noteworthy with respect to the need to study peer contagion processes in group interventions using statistical tools other than mean-level analyses. It is likely that peer contagion can reduce effect sizes at a minimum, and at a maximum, create negative effects. The empirical literature is better developed in terms of studies of peer contagion in the natural environment. Such research strongly suggests that parental structure and monitoring, and positive parenting, are major moderators of peer contagion effects.
This approach to social network analysis was later applied to a large national sample of adolescents (Fowler & Christakis 2009), and the effects were replicated in terms of health-related behaviors, such as exercise in general and development of obesity in particular. Another view, emanating from social comparison theories, sees emotional contagion as demanding more cognitive effort and being more conscious. According to this view, people engage in social comparison to see if their emotional reaction is congruent with the persons around them. The recipient uses the emotion as a type of social information to understand how he or she should be feeling. People respond differently to positive and negative stimuli; negative events tend to elicit stronger and quicker emotional, behavioral, and cognitive responses than neutral or positive events.
The effect is apparent even for the general clique, including friends of friends. Interestingly, it was primarily friendships that were found to be prognostic of future happiness, and family members or spouses less so. The topic of positive peer contagion is taken up later in this review as a promising direction for future research. Although peer contagion is more likely to occur in interventions that aggregate children and adolescents, well-supervised interventions that aggregate do not seem to produce overall negative effects. A literature review of carefully conducted randomized trials of cognitive-behavioral group treatment for children’s antisocial behavior revealed that peer contagion did not produce negative effects in any of the studies (Weiss et al. 2005). The study of peer contagion in child and adolescent development is a recent concern, as is evident by a recent review on the interpersonal context of adolescence by Smetana and colleagues , which made no reference to peer contagion processes.
Most persons who have committed suicide have had a history of problems that may not have been acknowledged during the acute aftermath of the suicide. Cataloguing the problems that could have played a causative role in a suicide is not necessary, but acknowledgment of these problems is recommended. The mission of a news organization is to report to the public information on events in the community.
For example, an automated call center software incapable of detecting nuanced changes in conversation can irritate customers. Indeed, theorists on emotions, such as Theodor Lipps, contended that empathy was caused by motor mimicry of others’ expressions of emotions. Half the pairs were put into a positive mood by giving them a bag of candy and having them read funny cartoons prior to the negotiation; the other half did not receive these treatments. Several cultural artifacts are capable of transmitting emotions, such as movies, videotapes, cartoons, and songs.
Emotional contagion refers to a phenomenon of an automatic adoption of an emotional state of another person. It’s that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you hear your child’s laughter, embrace your top forex brokers with high leverage sweetheart, or cuddle a puppy. It’s a subconscious, almost visceral feeling that appears to stem from the brain’s limbic system, which is believed to control emotions, including pleasure.
Internalizing symptoms and disordered eating may also spread through peer networks, although the mechanisms of influence have not been extensively studied. Of considerable alarm is the possibility that adolescent suicide and self-mutilation practices have a contagion quality. When markets are robust, this can buffer negative economic shocks; when markets are fragile, it can magnify global prime spreads negative shocks, like the spread of a disease. There is an emotional contagion in which the mere reactions of players can shape the events on the field—for good and bad. The risk of contagion is mainly to those who handle cadavers, like pathologists, medical examiners and health care workers, and in settings like hospitals and nursing homes, where many deaths may occur.
Research shows that our relationships with others, rather than what we see in the mirror or find in our wallets, may be what matter most. It’s a concept that held true for our cave–dwelling ancestors, who formed elaborate social structures to increase their odds of survival. These days, our connections are more about building a family, gossiping at the water cooler, and adding to our list of Facebook friends than outsmarting saber–toothed tigers. But results of the long–running Grant Study of Adult Development, which Vaillant helps oversee, suggest that the emotional benefits of connectedness remain. Vaillant and his colleagues have found, for instance, that only the capacity for loving relationships predicted life satisfaction in older men. Everyone, it seems—from Buddhist monks to positive psychologists, from Charles Schulz to the Beatles—has offered opinions on what it means to be happy.