School Bullying and Peer Victimization

Body mass index, peer victimization, and internalizing symptoms from late childhood through early adolescence: Disaggregation of within-person and between-person effects.

“…Peers' negative views toward adolescents with high BMI are commonly manifested as repeated bullying behaviors, including hitting, pushing, appearance-based teasing and criticism, spreading rumors, making appearance comparisons, and social exclusion (Pont et al, 2017;Puhl et al, 2011). Victimized adolescents are more likely to have internal characterological (e.g., I'm not cool) and behavioral (e.g., I did something stupid) self-blame, which may in turn lead them to believe that they deserve peers' abuse and to become submissive to bullying behaviors (Kochenderfer-Ladd et al, 2009). Indeed, extensive research has indicated that being physically and emotionally bullied severely thwarts adolescents' needs of belonging and relatedness, ultimately leading to higher levels of depressive and anxious symptoms (Chang et al, 2017;Jeong et al, 2016;Pryor et al, 2016).…”