Emotion regulation skills have an essential role in children and adolescents’ social, cognitive, and academic development in various areas. Regulating and mitigating negative emotions, such as sadness and anger, leads to positive developmental outcomes, especially in the early years of life. Among the emotion regulation strategies, sadness management has an enhanced potential to provide information on coping with negative emotions, and thus it is important to investigate the sadness regulation skills in children and adolescents. This study aims to examine children and adolescents’ sadness management skills and their predictors in a nationally representative sample. The study was collected from a total of 180 schools (elementary school, middle school, high school) which were randomly selected from various provinces in Turkey, and the students were randomly selected from each grade level. The students completed the questionnaires in school, and their mothers also filled out a separate online questionnaire form. A total of 5198 children and adolescents (M_age=12.52) participated in the study with their mothers, and 52% of the students were females. The results were analyzed through regression analysis and conducted separately for each subscale. It was found that mothers’ reappraisal levels significantly increase childrens’ emotion regulation skills (β = .03, p = .044). Also, mothers’ suppression significantly increases childrens’ both inhibition (β = .04, p = .003) and dysregulated expression (β = .03, p = .034). Additionally, while male students have higher scores on inhibition and emotion regulation coping compared to females, female students have higher scores on dysregulated expression than males. The results show that mothers' emotion regulation skills influence their children’s sadness management skills. As the participants were representative of school-age children and adolescents, the results are thought to contribute to the literature for potential intervention programs and future emotion regulation studies.

Peer-nominations have long been used as an important method for understanding both positive (popularity, likeability, friendship) and negative (rejection, bullying, victimization) aspects of classroom social dynamics. Traditionally, this work has focused on those who receive a high number of positive and/or negative nominations from their classmates. However, relatively little attention has been given to understanding the characteristics and well-being of children who receive very few (or even zero) positive or negative nominations. In the early days of peer relations research, it had been assumed that shy children were likely to be among those who received few nominations from peers, but this was disproven by several studies showing that shy children receive higher than average numbers of “dislike” nominations (Rubin et al., 1989; Richmond et al., 1985). Thus, if children who receive very few nominations are not shy, the question remains as to who these “invisible” children are and how they are doing socially and emotionally. The aim of this study will be to address these questions.

This study has two parts. First, we will use large scale data (n = 75,000) from Stoeltjesdans (an educational tool in the Netherlands that helps teachers to use peer nominations to monitor classroom social dynamics) to determine how often children receive zero nominations from peers and how this may be associated with classroom climate and broader measures of well-being. Then, we use data from Project Safe at School (n = 1624; https://osf.io/57z9a) to zoom in on how receiving little to no peer attention is associated with more specific measures of well-being (depression, social anxiety, loneliness, and self-esteem) and school engagement (working hard/participating in school and enjoying school). Results will be forthcoming; however we hope that findings may aid teachers in identifying and supporting children who may otherwise go unnoticed.

Emotions play a crucial role in children’s socio-emotional development, and teachers’ responses to children’s sadness can significantly influence their emotional well-being. This study explored the emotion socialization behaviors adopted by teachers in response to children’s sadness, analyzing the impact of triggering events and the coping strategies used by children themselves. To this end, a structured interview was conducted with 50 primary school teachers (age range = 25–64 years, M = 46.8, SD = 10.9, all females), asking them to describe for each student: (1) a significant episode of sadness, (2) the coping strategies used by the child, and (3) their own response to the child's sadness. Additionally, teachers completed the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire to measure children’s externalizing and internalizing symptoms.

Responses were coded into three categories of emotion socialization behavior (emotion-focused behavior, problem-focused behavior, unsupportive behavior), two categories of events (personal events, school-related events), and two categories of coping strategies (constructive strategies, non-constructive strategies). A multinomial analysis with mixed effects revealed that personal events significantly increased the likelihood that teachers would adopt emotion-focused behavior rather than unsupportive or problem-focused behavior. However, children’s coping strategies did not have a main effect on the strategies adopted by teachers, becoming significant only in interaction with the type of event. Additionally, higher levels of externalizing symptoms increased the likelihood that teachers would adopt emotion-focused behavior rather than unsupportive or problem-focused behavior.

The analysis of random effects highlighted significant interindividual variability among teachers, confirming the influence of personal style in modulating responses to children’s sadness. Overall, these results underline the key role of school-related events in emotional socialization and suggest that targeted interventions could support teachers in responding more effectively to children’s emotions, promoting more adaptive coping strategies.

The influence of self-efficacy sources is broadly studied in academic domains, yet little is known about what kind of profiles and transitions of self-regulatory efficacy sources can be identified among students, even though prior findings on declining trends among adolescent’s self-regulatory efficacy exist. Hence, this study focuses on four important efficacy building sources related to self-regulation—mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasion, and physiological and emotional arousal (i.e., stress) —to gain novel insights into primary school students’ (N=345, grades 4–6, 53.1 % girls, Mage 11.07) individual patterns and transitions of self-regulatory efficacy sources within a school year. Students responded with sources of self-regulatory self-efficacy questionnaire and self-regulatory efficacy questionnaire. The results revealed four distinct and meaningful profiles of self-regulatory efficacy sources in both fall and spring semester: Highly positive, Average, Stressed, and Highly positive but stressed. Most students showed a positive combination of self-regulatory efficacy sources, but some students’ profiles were more maladaptive, characterized by relatively high levels of stress. While most of the students remained in their initial profile during the school year, some transitions into maladaptive profiles did occur. These stabilities and transitions, in general, were associated with students’ self–regulatory efficacy, so that students showing more positive and stable profiles reported higher self-regulatory efficacy, whereas students belonging or transitioning to more stressed profiles reported lower self-regulatory efficacy. These findings indicate that students show various patterns of self-regulatory sources, and that even though students report positive mastery and vicarious experiences and social persuasion, it might not be enough to boost higher self-regulatory efficacy outcome if it is combined with stress.

The development of a positive self-concept in adolescence, which is important for good mental health and well-being, is highly dependent on social interactions. However, experiencing social exclusion might thwart the fundamental human need for social belongingness, thereby threatening the development of an individual’s self-worth. Notably, there is a dearth of longitudinal studies investigating how and to which extent social exclusion predicts the development of general self-concept in adolescents, and vice versa, whether self-concept prospectively relates to later social exclusion. In the present study we thus aimed to examine the reciprocal relations between self-concept and social exclusion in a community sample of 719 Norwegian adolescents from the Trondheim Early Secure Study, followed up biennially from ages 10 to 14. Self-concept was measured with the Self-Description Questionnaire (SDQ-I) (age 10) and the Revised Self-Perception Profile for Adolescence (SPPA-R) (ages 12 and 14) reported by the adolescents. Social exclusion was measured with 3 items from the Teacher Report Form (TRF). By applying a Random Intercept Cross-lagged Panel Model, which disentangles the between and within-person variance, we found that increased teacher-reported social exclusion at ages 10 and 12 predicted decreased self-concept two years later, at ages 12 and 14. There were no significant paths from self-concept to later social exclusion. These results highlight the detrimental effects of social exclusion on the development of self-concept during the transition from childhood to adolescence and early adolescence, supporting the tenets of the need-to-belong theory. Our findings imply that facilitating safe and inclusive social environment in schools might benefit the formation of a positive self-concept in adolescents.