Overview
- Researchers tracked 543 Lithuanian middle-school students ages 10 to 14 over one semester, assessing academics, emotional well-being, problem behaviors, social media use, and weight concerns.
- Participants identified their best friends and classmates viewed as popular, enabling calculation of popularity-weighted norms for each classroom.
- Best friends predicted internal dysfunction and academic outcomes, including emotional problems, lack of emotional clarity, problem behaviors, and low school achievement.
- Popular peers predicted public-facing behaviors, with adolescents mirroring high-status classmates in social media use and appearance or weight concerns.
- Authors urge targeted interventions that bolster friendship dynamics for emotional or academic difficulties and shift status norms among popular students to address social media and body image pressures.