Search

The goal of this study was to examine the unique associations of aggression with peer status in a non-Western context. The moderating effects of peer community and teacher closeness at the classroom level and gender and grade at the individual level were considered. Participants were 1954 third to sixth grade students (M[subscript age] = 9.60 years, SD = 0.97; 49% girls) in South Korea. As in Western studies, overt aggression negatively predicted preference, relational aggression positively predicted popularity, and these associations were stronger in early adolescence than in middle childhood. "Whereas" the association between relational aggression and peer status was stronger for boys than girls and peaked in sixth grade. Peer community moderated the association between relational aggression and popularity. Specifically, relational aggression predicted popularity in non-communal classrooms, but not in communal classrooms. Future research should address cultural differences in social relatedness and their implications for fostering peer community in classrooms.

The goal of this study was to examine the prospective associations of prosocial behavior and aggression with social preference in classrooms and whether these associations were moderated by classroom levels of peer-perceived liking and disliking by the teacher. Participants were 2900 fourth-to sixth-grade students in South Korea (M[subscript age] = 10.02 years, SD = 0.84, 48.6% girls) who completed peer nominations at the beginning (Time 1) and end (Time 2) of their school year. The peer nominations included who they liked most and liked least in their classroom, who they saw as prosocial and aggressive, and who they thought was liked and disliked by their teacher. Nominations received were calculated for all individual students. To indicate the classroom levels of peer-perceived liking and disliking by the teacher, we calculated the total number of nominations given in the classroom and divided it by the maximum possible nominations. Multilevel analyses were conducted. At the level of the individual, social preference at Time 2 was positively predicted by prosocial behavior and negatively by aggression at Time 1, controlling for social preference at Time 1. These associations were moderated by the peer reputation as liked and disliked by the teacher. At the level of the classroom, social preference at Time 2 tended to increase over time in classrooms with high levels of peer-perceived liking by the teacher but decreased in classrooms with high levels of peer-perceived disliking by the teacher. Classroom levels of peer-perceived liking by the teacher moderated the positive association of prosocial behavior at Time 1 with preference at Time 2: this association was stronger in classrooms with higher levels of peer-perceived liking by the teacher. Thus, classroom levels of peer-perceived liking by the teacher had positive effects for individual students and the classroom as a whole. Future studies should address how teacher-student relationships can contribute to a positive classroom context that facilitates students' well-being, learning, and development.

Introduction: Individual social status among peers (i.e., acceptance and rejection) has important implications for students' social and academic development. The present study investigates the role of individual problem behavior and classroom norms in the development of acceptance and rejection among students with intellectual disabilities (ID) in special needs schools. Methods: School staff reported on problem behavior and social status of 1125 students with ID (M = 11.26 years, SD = 3.76; 31% female) in special needs schools at the beginning and end of a school year. Results: More individual problem behavior at the beginning of the year predicted students' lower acceptance and greater rejection at the end of the year, controlling for earlier problem behavior and other variables. The effect of problem behavior was independent of the prevailing classroom norms. Conclusion: Our findings show that behavioral problems pose a risk for social exclusion of students with ID among their peers in special needs settings.

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits predict behavioral problems in adolescence. But little is known about early modulatory factors. Behavioral Inhibition (BI) in particular has been suggested to protect against the development of CU-traits. This temperamental predisposition is characterized by heightened environmental sensitivity. The current prospective longitudinal study examined whether BI at 15 months of age predicted lower CU-traits across development to age 21. A longitudinal sample of normatively developing children (n = 125) was used. BI was assessed at 15 months using a standard stranger/robot paradigm. CU-traits were assessed at 2, 5, 9, 12, 14, 17, and 21 years with parent, teacher, and self-reports. Developmental pathways across all available data points were examined using Bayesian mixed models and k-means cluster analysis. Infant BI predicted lower CU-traits across development for girls, suggesting that BI buffers the long-term development of CU-traits for girls. CU-traits peaked in early adulthood. Boys scored higher and showed higher increases in CU-traits than girls from childhood onward. There was no gender difference regarding infant BI. Together, the findings demonstrated gender differences in the development of CU-traits, with a protective role of BI for girls. These results shed new light on the developmental trajectories and protective factors of CU-traits and provide starting points for interventions aiming at increasing children's responsiveness to external cues to prevent antisocial traits and conduct problems.

A wide variety of methodological choices and situations can affect the quality of peer nomination measurements but have not received adequate study. This article begins by focusing on systematic nominator missingness as an example of one such situation. We reanalyzed findings from a recent study by Bukowski, Dirks, Commisso, Velàsquez, and Lopez in the year 2019 [see EJ1235048] and compared the results to recent findings of Babcock, Marks, van den Berg, and Cillessen published in the year 2018 [see EJ1163382] to show that systematic nominator missingness can, indeed, have an impact on nomination measures. From there, we discuss the importance of considering sources of error and the ways that sources of error are analyzed. Ultimately, we argue that systematic nominator missingness is one of several potential sources of error that have largely been ignored in the literature, and that analyzing and reporting these sources of error would strengthen the foundations of peer nomination research.

This study aimed to shed light on the prevalence of chronic peer victimisation among Dutch elementary school children and factors associated with (non-)disclosure of such experiences by victims. 5,961 students from 73 schools participated (51.5% male; M[subscript age] = 9.96; 77.7% native Dutch). Results showed that 12.3% of all children were victimised chronically, of which 29.4% did not disclose. Multilevel logistic regressions indicated that girls, older and native Dutch children were more likely to disclose. Moreover, experiencing depressive symptoms prompts disclosing victimisation. Anxiety, high emotion regulation skills, and perceptions of cohesion in the classroom were negatively associated with disclosure. The disclosure was not related to frequency or duration of victimisation, self-perceived social acceptance, self-worth, impulse control, or perceived classroom climate. Our study reveals information on the prevalence of peer victimisation and its disclosure, based on a nationwide study conducted in 2016-2017. It gives important insights into factors associated with disclosing victimisation experiences.

The goal of this study was to advance the conceptualization and measurement of adolescent popularity by exploring the commonly used composite score (popularity minus unpopularity). We used standardized peer nominations from 4,414 early adolescents (ages [approximately equal to] 12-14 years) from three samples collected in two countries. Popularity and unpopularity were strongly related, but not linearly; scatterplots of the two variables resembled an L-shaped right angle. Subsequent analyses indicated that either including popularity as a curvilinear term or including both popularity and unpopularity as separate terms explained significantly more variance in social and behavioral correlates than linear, bivariate analyses using popularity, unpopularity, or composite popularity. These results suggest that researchers studying adolescent popularity should either separate popularity and unpopularity or treat composite popularity as curvilinear.

Current theories of loneliness posit that biases in social information processing play a key role in the development and maintenance of loneliness. However, this assumption has rarely been tested in longitudinal research in adolescence. The current study concentrated on two constructs associated with such biases, that is, fear of negative evaluation and self-esteem. More specifically, we examined whether changes in loneliness were associated with simultaneous changes in fear of negative evaluation and self-esteem. A sample of Dutch adolescents (N = 1,174; 50% female) in Grades 7 to 10 completed well-established measures of loneliness, fear of negative evaluation, and self-esteem on four measurement occasions with yearly intervals. Correlations among both initial levels and rates of change for these three variables were examined using a Parallel Process Model (PPM). Adolescents scoring high on loneliness scored high on fear of negative evaluation, but low on self-esteem. Changes in loneliness were accompanied by changes in the same direction for fear of negative evaluation and in the opposite direction for self-esteem. These findings indicate that fear of negative evaluation and low self-esteem could indeed play a role in the development and maintenance of loneliness. Future research will need to clarify how exactly these variables can hamper re-affiliation efforts and lead to sustained loneliness over time.

This study explored the content and nature of teachers' knowledge and perceptions of their students. The knowledge and perceptions of seven Dutch secondary school teachers regarding the same 33 students in one second-year school class were studied. Each teacher was invited to tell (in 60 s per student) how he/she perceived and what he/she knew about, each individual student. Interview data were analysed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Results showed within- and between-teacher differences in the content, amount and evaluative nature of their knowledge and perceptions. In addition, there were within- and between-student differences in how their teachers knew and perceived them. The results suggest that teachers' knowledge and perceptions of their students varies per teacher-student combination and substantiate an interpersonal nature of teachers' knowledge and perceptions. To understand the function of teachers' knowledge and perceptions of students for teaching, future research should focus on how different knowledge and perceptions lead to differential educational trajectories for individual or specific groups of students.

This study investigated how teachers' self-efficacy for intervening in social dynamics and teacher-student relationships directly impact students' self-esteem, and indirectly buffer the negative association between both bullying and victimization and students' self-esteem. Teachers play a key role in shaping the peer relations in the classroom, and they might also be able to lessen the negative impact of bullying and victimization on students' self-esteem. Multilevel regression analysis on a sample of 59 Dutch teachers and 1,490 of their 5th grade students indicated that student-reported bullying and victimization were negatively related to students' self-reported self-esteem. Better student-perceived student-teacher relationships were related to higher self-esteem for all students, with additional increases in self-esteem for victims but decreases in the self-esteem of bullies. Teacher-reported self-efficacy was only related to lower self-esteem in bullies. Implications of these results and suggestions for further research are discussed.

In this study, we examined the effects of loneliness, social support, and stress resilience on alcohol consumption and problems among university students in their final years of education during the COVID-19 pandemic. We surveyed 437 students with a pre-pandemic history of heavy episodic drinking across five waves from February 2021 to May 2023. Our findings showed that stress resilience significantly reduced alcohol-related problems over time. Those who frequently drank before the pandemic experienced a slower decline in problems, suggesting a delay in maturing out. Men reported higher hazardous drinking, yet gender did not influence trajectories. Loneliness initially correlated with increased drinking problems, without long-term effects, and social support had no significant impact. Our results highlight that stress resilience is essential for preventing alcohol problems, reveal the persistence of hazardous drinking into later university years, and suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic shifted typical drinking patterns in the Netherlands, marked by significant post-lockdown rebounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To classify CVI subtypes and compare the added value of an extensive test battery over a limited test battery in subtype classification of cerebral visual impairment (CVI) in children. Methods: Seventy-five children with a clinical diagnosis of CVI (median [IQR] age: 9 [7–12] years) were identified from the medical records. The extensive test battery included visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, ocular alignment, eye movement analysis, visual field analysis, optic nerve head evaluation, and evaluation of visual perception. The limited test battery included visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, ocular alignment, and evaluation of visual perception. Principal component analysis (PCA) followed by cluster analysis was done, for both test batteries separately, to determine the optimum subtype classification for CVI. Results: Fifty-one participants with an extensive test battery with mild to moderate visual impairment were included in the main analysis. This resulted in four CVI subtypes for the extensive test battery (subtle characteristics, higher-level visual function deficits, lower-level visual function deficits, and higher- and lowerlevel visual function deficits) and three CVI subtypes for the limited test battery (subtle characteristics, higher-level visual function deficits, and higher- and lower- level visual function deficits). There were significant differences between the subtypes for 9 out of 10 measures of the extensive and all 4 measures of the limited test battery (p  <  0.05). The subtle characteristics subtype (extensive n  =  19, limited n  =  15) showed near normal lower and higher-level visual functions in both test batteries. The higher-level visual function deficits subtype (extensive n  =  18, limited n  =  24) showed near normal visual acuity combined with significant visual perceptual deficits in both test batteries; accompanied by visual pathways defects and abnormal eye movement behavior in the extensive test battery. The higher- and lower- level visual function deficits subtype (extensive n  =  4, limited n  =  12) showed both higher and lower-level visual function deficits in both test batteries, but application of the extensive test battery revealed additional visual pathways defects and abnormal eye movement behavior. The lower-level visual function deficits CVI subtype (extensive n  =  10) was a new subtype identified by the extensive test battery. This subtype showed lower-level visual function deficits together with abnormal eye movement measures. Conclusion: This data-driven study has provided meaningful CVI subtype classifications based on the outcomes of various key functional and structural measures in CVI diagnosis. Comparison of the extensive test battery to the limited test battery revealed the added value of an extensive test battery in classifying CVI. The outcomes of this study, therefore, have provided a new direction in the area of CVI classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the importance of critical thinking skills for students when they enter university is widely endorsed, previous research has shown that incoming students show great variation in levels of critical thinking skills. The pre-university track of secondary education plays a major role in preparing students to think critically at university. The present study aims to investigate the way in which secondary education teachers think about and foster critical thinking skills to prepare their students for university. Semi-structured interviews with nine teachers showed that teachers do not have an unambiguous picture of critical thinking skills. Instead, teachers varied in their perceptions of the importance of critical thinking skills for university and in the practices they employ to foster these skills. It appears that teachers' perceptions and practices, firstly, depend on their images of university which are often based on their own study experiences, and secondly reflect the way they think about the cultivation of critical thinking skills and the transition to university. These results indicate that whether certain critical thinking skills are more or less encouraged in secondary education depends on the teacher.

This study examined associations between perceived popularity trajectories and changes in proactive and reactive aggression in middle adolescence. The sample included 1,374 adolescents from 5 cohorts who were followed from Grade 7 to Grade 9 (49% males, M[subscript age] = 12.67 years, SD = 0.67). Popularity trajectories were identified based on initial status and changes in status over time, and linear mixed effects models tested group differences in changes of aggression. The results partially confirmed our expectation that changes in popularity were associated with specific developmental patterns of proactive and reactive aggression and also varied as a function of status already achieved. Specifically, adolescents in groups characterized by gains in status increased in proactive aggression, and those in groups characterized by losses in status decreased in proactive aggression. A more nuanced pattern of group differences emerged for reactive aggression. Changes in reactive aggression were only found for groups characterized by changes in unpopular status. Taken together, these findings suggest that proactive aggression has universal benefits for popularity in middle adolescence, whereas reactive aggression has differential costs. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

In peer nomination research, individuals who do not provide nominations (nonparticipants) are often included on rosters as potential nominees. This can present ethical questions regarding informed consent, but psychometric consequences of excluding nonparticipants from rosters are unknown. In this investigation, Study 1 simulated both random and systematic missingness with a sample of 1,630 Dutch adolescents, comparing the reliability and correlation matrices of nomination measures when nonparticipants were included and excluded as nominees. Study 2 began with a two-school sample that already included systematic nonparticipation (˜19% missingness among 599 7th grade nominees) and examined how findings would differ if students who had not provided nominations were excluded as nominees. Results showed that the impact of including versus excluding nonparticipants as nominees may vary depending on the type of missingness (Study 1) or in different peer groups (Study 2). Both studies demonstrated that the choice of including versus excluding nonparticipants can affect reliability and intercorrelations in peer nomination data, and provide some evidence that excluding nonparticipants as nominees may compromise peer nomination data quality.

The goal of this study was to examine differences in university success between first-year students by analyzing three domains simultaneously: students' academic achievement, critical thinking disposition, and social-emotional adjustment to university life. Participants were 307 students who completed an online questionnaire. Latent class cluster analysis revealed three patterns of success: (1) average-achieving well-adjusted students (64%), (2) high-achieving average-adjusted students (14%), and (3) low-achieving low-adjusted students (22%). Follow-up ANCOVAs indicated that low-achieving low-adjusted students most strongly experienced that their social life hindered their study, whereas average-achieving high-adjusted students experienced the least interference from their study on their social life. These results indicated that student success is a multi-domain concept, with subgroups of first-year students showing specific patterns of success. The results of this study help to understand the feasibility of and tensions between domains of student success and provide suggestions for universities to adjust their support to specific student needs.

Students around the globe still experience bullying daily. Teachers play a key role in supporting victimized students and they could do so using their classroom seating arrangement. Common teacher strategies are to separate victims and bullies and to seat victims close to supportive others, but research has not examined whether these strategies support victims' wellbeing. Therefore, the current study tested an intervention in which victims in experimental classrooms were seated far away from their bullies and next to their best friends, whereas a random seating arrangement was implemented in control classrooms. The underlying reasoning was that victims would experience a sense of safety next to their best friend and to limit bullies' opportunities to harass the victim. The outcomes were classroom comfort, internalizing problems, academic engagement, and victimization frequency. We used a sample of 1746 Dutch upper elementary school students (Mage = 10.21) of whom 250 students reported to be chronically and frequently victimized (Mage = 9.96 years). Ethical and practical reasons rendered the conditions similar regarding victims' distances to their bullies. Consequently, the intervention in the end tested the effect of victims sitting next to their best friend. Several mixed‐effects models showed that no support was found for the effectiveness of this intervention. Additional exploratory analyses testing the effect of victims' continuous distances to their bullies on their wellbeing also found no effects. These findings suggest that changing victims', bullies', and best friends' seats do not improve victims' classroom wellbeing. Alternative explanations, directions for future research, and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer status is associated with social functioning throughout childhood and adolescence, but little is known about its' long‐term implications. This study examined longitudinal associations of childhood and adolescent popularity with social behavior and status in emerging adulthood. In line with concurrent associations of popularity with social behavior, we hypothesized that childhood popularity would be associated with a positive, prosocial profile, and adolescent popularity would be associated with a powerful and forceful profile. As research has shown curvilinear associations of popularity with aggression in childhood and adolescence, we also examined whether longitudinal associations were curvilinear. Peer‐nominated popularity was measured at 9 and 16 years of age for 118 longitudinal participants. At age 24, they participated in a survey and an online video call session together with three unfamiliar peers, after which everyone in the session rated each other's social behavior. Results showed significant curvilinear associations of childhood and adolescent popularity with emerging adult social behavior and status. Childhood popularity was associated with positive, prosocial behavior and status indicators, showing that in addition to high childhood popularity, also low childhood popularity was associated with higher peer‐reported positive, prosocial behavior. High adolescent popularity was associated with both positive, prosocial, and powerful and forceful behavior and status indicators, with especially low adolescent popularity associated with lower levels of these behaviors and status in emerging adulthood. Childhood and adolescent popularity were thus uniquely and differentially associated with social behavior and status in emerging adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to determine how trajectory clusters of social status (social preference and perceived popularity) and behavior (direct aggression and prosocial behavior) from age 9 to age 14 predicted adolescents' bullying participant roles at age 16 and 17 (n = 266). Clusters were identified with multivariate growth mixture modeling (GMM). The findings showed that participants' developmental trajectories of social status and social behavior across childhood and early adolescence predicted their bullying participant role involvement in adolescence. Practical implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Missing data are a persistent problem in psychological research. Peer nomination data present a unique missing data problem, because a nominator's nonparticipation results in missing data for other individuals in the study. This study examined the range of effects of systematic nonparticipation on the correlations between peer nomination data when nominators with various levels of popularity and social preference are missing. Results showed that, compared to completely random nominator missingness, systematic missingness of raters based on popularity had a significant impact on the correlations between various peer nomination variables. Systematic missingness based on social preference had a smaller impact. These results demonstrate varying (and potentially large) effects of systematically missing nominators on studies using nomination data. It is important that researchers using peer nomination data explore whether nominators are missing in any sort of systematic way and include these results as part of each study. Future research into the nature of systematic nominator missingness could make it possible to use advanced methodologies, such as multiple imputation, in an attempt to minimize the issues associated with systematic missingness.

This study addressed the moderating role of classroom descriptive norms for overt and relational aggression, social withdrawal, prosocial behavior, and academic reputation in the association of behavior with social preference and popularity in early adolescence. Participants were 1,492 fifth-grade students ([x-bar][subscript age] = 10.6 years, 52.7% boys) from 59 classrooms who completed unlimited peer nominations for status and behavior. Classroom descriptive norms were computed as the average proportion of classroom nominations received for the different social behaviors. Multilevel analyses revealed that the negative association between overt aggression and social preference was attenuated in classrooms with high norms for overt aggression. The negative association between academic reputation and social preference was enhanced in classrooms with high norms for academic reputation. Classroom norms did not moderate the associations between behavior and popularity. The type of behavior and the type of status should be considered when examining classroom descriptive norms and behavior-status associations.

Although peer nomination measures have been used by researchers for nearly a century, common methodological practices and rules of thumb (e.g., which variables to measure; use of limited vs. unlimited nomination methods) have continued to develop in recent decades. At the same time, other key aspects of the basic nomination procedure (e.g., whether nonparticipants should be included as nominees, the consequences of pairing code numbers with names on rosters) are underdiscussed and understudied. Beyond providing a general introduction to peer nomination methods and their utility, the current article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of various methodological choices facing researchers who wish to use peer nomination methods, in addition to other considerations that researchers must make in collecting peer nomination data (e.g., establishing reliability and validity, maximizing participation rates, computerized assessments). This article provides recommendations for researchers based on empirical findings (where possible) and the typical practices used in the recent published literature.

As a part of classroom management, teachers face the question of how and where to seat their students. However, it is far from clear what considerations teachers have when making seating arrangements. Therefore, in this study seating arrangement considerations from 50 teachers in grades 4-6 of elementary school were assessed. In Phase 1, teachers were interviewed about their goals and considerations for classroom seating arrangements. Teachers mentioned between 2 and 19 reasons for placing students at specific places in the classroom, with mostly academic considerations. They mainly preferred arrangements in small groups to promote student cooperation. In Phase 2, teachers completed a questionnaire about seating arrangements. This allowed us to examine individual differences between teachers related to gender, years of experience, and beliefs, and the concurrence between the interview and questionnaire data. Teachers reported multiple and various considerations for seating arrangements. Correlations with their general student-oriented or subject-oriented beliefs and personal characteristics were low. The concurrence between measurement methods also was low. The discussion focused on teacher awareness of classroom seating arrangements as an important part of classroom management and a tool for prevention and intervention.

Research in social sciences has been questioned in the past decade due to the failure to replicate earlier work. To improve the trust in results, best practices that reduce data‐analytical flexibility have been proposed, such as preregistration. Another more recent such development regards the multiverse approach. The current study sought to demonstrate the benefits of applying the multiverse approach within developmental psychology. Using the relation between self‐esteem and peer victimization in adolescence as an example, we examined how both the concurrent as well as longitudinal association was impacted by data‐analytical decisions, such as the operationalization of variables, treatment of outliers, inclusion of covariates, and paths estimated in the model. Indeed, through the multiverse approach, we showed that and how these decisions matter for the model fit and estimates of the associations. We were thus able to illustrate that the multiverse approach increases transparency, makes it possible to examine the robustness of effects and can help advance theory building. Limitations of this approach as well as recommendations for other researchers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A paradox of testosterone effects is seen in adolescents versus adults in social emotional approach‐avoidance behavior. During adolescence, high testosterone levels are associated with increased anterior prefrontal (aPFC) involvement in emotion control, whereas during adulthood this neuro‐endocrine relation is reversed. Rodent work shows that, during puberty, testosterone transitions from a neuro‐developmental to a social‐sexual activating hormone. In this study, we explored whether this functional transition is also present in human adolescents and young adults. Using a prospective longitudinal design, we investigated the role of testosterone on neural control of social emotional behavior during the transitions from middle to late adolescence and into young adulthood. Seventy‐one individuals (tested at ages 14, 17, and 20 years) performed an fMRI‐adapted approach‐avoidance (AA) task involving automatic and controlled actions in response to social emotional stimuli. In line with predictions from animal models, the effect of testosterone on aPFC engagement decreased between middle and late adolescence, and shifted into an activational role by young adulthood—impeding neural control of emotions. This change in testosterone function was accompanied by increased testosterone‐modulated amygdala reactivity. These findings qualify the testosterone‐dependent maturation of the prefrontal‐amygdala circuit supporting emotion control during the transition from middle adolescence into young adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Theories propose that low self‐esteem and problematic eating behaviors (PEBs) negatively impact each other. While previous studies suggested bidirectional associations between self‐esteem and PEBs, they did not separate within‐person from between‐person associations. Therefore, this prospective study investigated the within‐person bidirectional associations between self‐esteem and four PEBs in adolescence, while accounting for between‐person differences. Method: We used two independent longitudinal samples of Dutch adolescents, each including three annually collected waves of data. Sample 1 consisted of 1856 adolescents (Baseline: 50.4% males; Mage = 13.79 years, SDage = 0.72), with measures of self‐esteem, emotional eating, restrained eating, and loss of control (LOC) while overeating. Sample 2 consisted of 555 adolescents (Baseline: 49.7% males; Mage = 13.13 years, SDage = 0.68), with measures of self‐esteem and LOC eating. The data were analyzed using random intercept cross‐lagged panel models (CLPMs). Results: Within persons, lower self‐esteem was associated with higher emotional and restrained eating (both Sample 1) one year later, and vice versa. Self‐esteem did not predict, nor was predicted by, LOC while overeating (Sample 1) or LOC eating (Sample 2). Between persons, self‐esteem was negatively correlated with all PEBs (Samples 1 and 2). Discussion: We found within‐person bidirectional associations between low self‐esteem and emotional and restrained eating (but not LOC while overeating/LOC eating), and between‐person correlations between low self‐esteem and all PEBs. These results have theoretical and practical implications. Within‐person processes clarify underlying mechanisms that explain the occurrence of PEBs; between‐person associations are important to identify adolescents at risk of PEBs. Public Significance: While theories indicate that low self‐esteem and PEBs are inversely associated within individuals, empirical studies have not disentangled within‐person processes from between‐person differences. This study addressed this disparity, finding that lower self‐esteem was bidirectionally associated with higher emotional and restrained eating (but not LOC eating) within persons. These findings suggest that enhancing self‐esteem is a viable option for prevention and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]