Emotional adjustment and peer relationships: The role of behavioural reputation and classroom social climate

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0332297 September 18, 2025 1 / 13 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Banerjee R, Wright M, Bianco F (2025) Emotional adjustment and peer relationships: The role of behavioural reputation and classroom social climate. PLoS One 20(9): e0332297. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0332297 Editor: Ioannis G. Katsantonis, University of Cambridge, UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND Received: December 6, 2024 Accepted: August 28, 2025 Published: September 18, 2025 Copyright: © 2025 Banerjee et al . This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data availability statement: Data, codebook, and readme can be found at https://osf.io/cjzt6/. Funding: Three UK local authorities. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. RESEARCH ARTICLE Emotional adjustment and peer relationships: The role of behavioural reputation and classroom social climate Robin Banerjee 1*, Mark Wright2, Federica Bianco3 1 School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom, 2 School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Brighton, Brighton, United Kingdom, 3 Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy * robinb@sussex.ac.uk Abstract Internalising and externalising difficulties are linked with poor peer relationships, but

there are gaps in our understanding of the reputational and contextual factors that connect emotional adjustment, social behaviour, and social acceptance in the peer group. A sample of 1439 children aged 7–13 years from 60 classrooms provided self-report and peer-nomination data at two time points over one school year. Chil- dren completed a self-report measure of anger, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, alongside ratings of positive and negative peer experiences. They also provided responses to a sociometric survey, which generated scores of social preference as well as behavioural reputation for cooperative, disruptive, aggressive, shy, and leadership qualities. Anger predicted lower social preference via a less cooperative reputation and a more disruptive reputation. Results also showed that anger had a weak connection with greater social preference via a less shy reputation. Anxiety pre- dicted lower social preference via a more shy reputation. Moreover, a more problem- atic classroom social climate, in terms of peer experiences, was found to attenuate the negative peer consequences of the disruptive reputation associated with anger. Results clarify the value of locating internalising and externalising difficulties in the peer context. They advance theoretical conceptions of the social consequences of emotional maladjustment, and indicate the relevance of classroom-level social factors in peer socialisation processes. Introduction Children’s levels of social acceptance and their behavioural reputation amongst their

peers have long received attention in developmental psychology because difficul- ties in these areas are intertwined risk factors for later psychological problems [1,2]. We also know from a large and established body of previous work that high levels