“…The risky families model suggests that childhood adversity influences psychological distress in adulthood through resultant social impairments and deficits in emotion regulation (Repetti et al, 2002), such as poor social skills, impulsivity (Sheikh, 2017b), reactive aggression, behavioural problems, excessive reassurance-seeking, constricted emotions, attenuated empathy, contextually inappropriate displays of affection, and externalising behaviours, all of which are associated with peer rejection (Ban & Oh, 2016;Barnes et al, 2016). Chronic stress (i.e., the cumulative load of day-to-day stresses) in childhood caused by socioeconomic and psychosocial adversity (Sheikh, 2017b) may foster social and behavioural impairments such as low self-esteem (Mossakowski, 2015;Varga, Piko, & Fitzpatrick, 2014), cynicism regarding others' intentions and behaviours, uncontrolled behaviours in social interactions, and mistrust, all of which affect may the quality and quantity of social relationships over the life course (Coleman, Zawadzki, Heron, Vartanian, & Smyth, 2016;Etherington et al, 2016;Goodwin-Smith et al, 2017). In contrast, individuals with good emotion regulation have the ability to respond to ongoing demands with a range of socially acceptable responses such as cooperation and conciliation (Kim & Cicchetti, 2010).…”