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 10 / 13 A further examination of the antecedents and causal origins of emotional patterns reported by pupils will be also worthy of examination, to better understand reciprocal associations between individual experience and classrooms dynamics. Furthermore, additional research is needed over a longer time frame to elucidate the way in which the observed changes in social preference can reinforce or alter a child’s emotional and behavioural profile. Social information-processing accounts provide a valuable framework for understanding the cognitive processes that might mediate the impact of social experiences on future negative emotions and behavioural responses in subsequent peer interactions [58]. In this kind of extended longitudinal analysis, it may be of particular importance to consider – as we did with gender in the present analysis – the potential moderating role of age, as the patterns of association between emotional experience, behavioural reputation in the peer group, and classroom climate may shift in meaningful ways as children move from early to middle childhood, and then into early and mid-adolescence. It is important to stress that the present results offer some key insights to incorporate into school interventions, partic- ularly the implementation of programmes and initiatives to promote social and emotional learning. One recent analysis of social, emotional, and mental health needs at school [59] has highlighted the importance of a relational, strengths-based

approach to mental health with social and emotional learning at its centre, and the work reported here adds some speci- ficity to this: while interventions may often be targeted at individuals displaying challenging emotional and/or behavioural profiles, our present analyses indicate that consideration of the wider social context needs attention through universal provision, since the social consequences of any given individual characteristic may vary depending on the overall climate of the classroom as a whole. Indeed, further research is also needed to address the potential moderating roles of wider school (e.g., school cli- mate), community (e.g., neighbourhood deprivation), and broader sociocultural contexts (e.g., ethnicity, cultural values) [27,39,60]. A future exploration of the themes of the present study at the individual, dyadic and group level will also enrich the picture of the reciprocal links between individual emotional functioning and social dynamics in the classroom. Equally, individual differences in temperament, other biological predispositions, and family experiences [61,62] are likely to relate to and interact with the variables in the present analysis. Thus, building on the present findings of differentiated pathways linking anger and anxiety with specific reputational and peer relationship outcomes, a richer understanding of externalis- ing and internalising psychopathology will be gained through more fine-grained analyses of these variables in relation to multiple individual and social-contextual factors. Supporting information

S1 Appendix. Pilot studies to validate self-report measure of emotional adjustment. (DOCX) Author contributions Conceptualization: Robin Banerjee, Mark Wright, Federica Bianco. Formal analysis: Robin Banerjee, Mark Wright, Federica Bianco. Investigation: Robin Banerjee, Mark Wright. Methodology: Robin Banerjee, Mark Wright, Federica Bianco. Project administration: Robin Banerjee. Resources: Robin Banerjee. Supervision: Robin Banerjee. Writing – original draft: Robin Banerjee, Mark Wright, Federica Bianco. Writing – review & editing: Robin Banerjee, Mark Wright, Federica Bianco.