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 4 / 13 and less leadership behaviour. We also tested the hypothesis that the internalising profile of shy behaviour would be more tolerated (i.e., less likely to predict lower peer acceptance) in classroom environments where the relative frequency of positive peer interactions is higher. In contrast, disruptive and aggressive behaviour were expected to be more tolerated in classrooms with a higher rate of negative reported peer experiences. We focused on the developmental period from middle childhood through to early adolescence, given that peer group acceptance is a major social goal at this time [33] and that this is a potential window of vulnerability ahead of an epidemi- ological rise in clinically significant social and emotional difficulties [34]. In addition, given that both emotional characteris- tics and social behaviour have been closely linked to children’s cognitive appraisals of themselves [35], we controlled for judgements of self-worth across various domains. We also examined whether the pattern of results differed for boys and girls, given the well-known gender difference in both the emotional and the relational domain [36,37]. Method Participants The sample was drawn from a large population of school children in three local authorities (school districts) that were involved in national English or Welsh government projects on mental health and socio-emotional difficulties. Schools from

these local authorities had the opportunity to participate in a programme of longitudinal research on emotional adjustment and peer relations. In total, 94 classes of pupils from 22 primary schools and 4 secondary schools completed the online self-report and sociometric measures described below at the first time point during the first half of the school year, and 60 of those classes completed the measures again at a second time point at the end of the school year. We focus here on the latter 60 classes, comprising 1439 children (50.2% girls) with sociometric data at both time points. The pupils were aged between 7 and 13 years, with the mean and median year group being Year 5 (age 9–10 years). The 60 classes with data at both time points were not significantly different from the 34 classes without follow-up data on any of the self-reported social experience and emotional adjustment measures (all p > .05), except that the former scored higher than the latter on negative peer experiences (p = .002). Measures Emotional adjustment, social experiences, and self-perceptions. This brief online self-report measure comprised 43 items, including five neutral filler items. There were 7 items on anger (e.g., “I feel angry”), 7 items on depressive symptoms (e.g., “I get so upset that I feel like crying”), and 8 items on anxiety (e.g., “I spend time worrying about things”), rated from 0 (‘Almost never’) to 3 (‘Nearly all the time’). All of the above subscales demonstrated satisfactory internal

consistency: anger, ɑ = .81; anxiety, ɑ = .81; depression, ɑ = .82. The items tapped negative emotions associated with internalising and externalising difficulties (see Supporting Information, S1 Appendix). Children also completed 5 items on positive/prosocial peer experiences (e.g., “Other pupils say kind things to me”) and 5 items on negative/victimising peer experiences (e.g., “Other pupils say nasty things about me to other people”), taken from an adaptation of the Social Experience Questionnaire [38] to be measured on the same scale as the other items [39]. Cronbach’s alphas were good, .77 ≤ ɑ ≤ .84. In addition, children completed a brief measure of evaluative self-perceptions, with 6 items broadly addressing each of the subscales from Self-Perception Profile for Children [40] (e.g., “I like the kind of person I am”, “I am good at schoolwork”) rated from 0 (‘Not at all true’) to 3 (‘Very true’) ɑ = .68. Overall mean (SD) scores were 1.90 (.69) for positive peer experiences, .75 (.71) for negative peer experiences, .88 (.62) for anger, .84 (.60) for anxiety, .72 (.63) for depressive symptoms, and 2.10 (.56) for self-worth. The Supporting Information (S1 Appendix) details two pilot studies establishing strong convergence between the anger, anxiety, and depressive subscales and more elaborate existing measures, and a confirmatory factor analysis of the data from the first time point of the present study corroborated the factor structure of the self-reported emotional experiences items, with all items within each subscale loading significantly

onto their respective latent factors (standardised coefficients range from .365 to .689; all ps < .001) and satisfactory model