Hakan Stattin

Uppsala University | UU · Department of Psychology

Background: Variable-oriented analyses of time trends in the ease of communicating with mothers and fathers in the Swedish HBSC (Health and Behavior in School-aged Children) dataset show that communication problems with fathers, but not with mothers, positively predict mental health problems among adolescents. This similarity across years is likely...

Background: Studies that have examined time trends in adolescents' mental health have frequently been based on analyses of adolescents' psychosomatic symptoms. Adolescents' reports of psychosomatic complaints need to be seen in the light of their overall evaluations of their health. The objectives of this study were to apply a person-centred appro...

Background Studies of secular trends in mental unhealth indicate that adolescents in the Nordic countries, especially girls, have an increased reported prevalence of mental health problems the last decades. This increase needs to be seen in the light of the adolescents' assessments of their perceived overall health. Objective To investigate whethe...

This longitudinal study examines the role that students' political reputation in class plays in their future political activities offline together with other people. When aged 16, students were asked to nominate the classmates they considered politically knowledgeable and verbal in class, that is, as having a political reputation. This measure of p...

This study examines whether youth’s goals for their future societal engagement affect their future political activities. We hypothesized, first, that youth’s political interest would be a central predictor of their future political activities and, second, that their goals for future societal engagement would moderate their political interest. The g...

Since politically interested adolescents do not necessarily present humanistic, environmental and democratic values, this study addresses the hitherto ignored role that how these basic human values play in politically interested adolescents’ political values, attitudes and behaviors. A cluster analysis of 857 Swedish upper-secondary students (50.8%...

This study examines the conditions that make adolescents open to their parents’ attempts at political socialization. Based on a reformulation of the perceptual accuracy argument, that parents’ messages are filtered through correct perceptions of these messages by adolescents, the study suggests that adolescents who accurately recognize their parent...

This study examines the idea that youth’s perceptions of their political interactions with important others are influenced by their own political interest to a greater extent than the perceived political interactions that influence youth’s political interest. Hence, it was proposed that youth’s perceptions of important others’ (parents’, teachers’,...

The study examined the individual characteristics and consequences of psychological group processes that may lead some students to gain a reputation for being politically knowledgeable and verbal in class (a political reputation). Two normal samples of Swedish students were used, 13‐year‐olds (N = 835) and 16‐year‐olds (N = 795). Longitudinal data...

This study investigated the idea that youth’s perceptions of the frequency of family political discussions and of parental political support mostly derive from their own political interest, a form of projection bias. Tests were performed of whether the same bias applies to parents, and whether youth’s and parents’ perceptions of political discussio...

This study aimed to analyze affiliations with violent peers as an underlying mechanism that associates ethnic harassment with violent behaviors among immigrant youth ( N = 365; M age = 13.93, SD = 0.80), and also identify the risk factors in this relation. The results revealed that identification with an immigrant peer crowd at school made ethnical...

This study examined the political interest of young adults who over two years moved in or out of a romantic relationship or had a romantic partner at both ages. The sample comprised young adults in Sweden (n = 1335; Mage = 22.75, SD = 3.01). Among those who entered a romantic relationship, the partners seemed to adjust to each other’s political int...

Background The implementation of preventive interventions is considered a crucial aspect of their success. However, few studies have investigated which components of implementation are most important. Objective We aimed to understand whether the components of implementation integrity—adherence, quality of delivery, dose, and participants’ involvem...

The present study aims to investigate whether support from a friend protects against the negative effects of ethnic harassment on engagement in delinquent and violent behaviors among immigrant adolescents in Sweden ( n = 365; X = 13.93, SD = .80). We found that when ethnically harassed immigrant adolescents received friend support, they were less l...

Introduction. Self-harm in adolescence has consistently been associated with depressive mood. In this study we examined whether the link between depressive mood and self-harming behaviors was moderated by identifying with certain alternative subcultures (hardrockers, punks, and goths), and whether identification with these subcultures added more pr...

The present study aimed to examine whether ethnic harassment was related to violent behaviors among immigrant youth over time and to identify the risk factors. The sample comprised immigrant adolescents living in Sweden (N=365; Mage=13.93, SD=.80). Results showed that the more youth were ethnically harassed, the more they engaged in violent acts ov...

Bullying and victimization are manifest in the peer social world, but have origins in the home. Uncertainty surrounds the mechanisms that convey problems between these settings. The present study describes the indirect transmission of hostility and coercion from parents to adolescent children through emotional dysregulation. In this model, derisive...

It has been commonly assumed that post-adolescent youth have fewer political discussions with parents than do adolescents, due to transitional events in young adulthood and the emergence of new age-appropriate socializing agents, like peers, colleagues, and romantic partners. We proposed a contrasting view that post-adolescent youth have more frequ...

In Sweden, as in many other European countries, poor neighborhoods with ethnically diverse inhabitants and high crime rates have grown up around big cities in the last decades. We hypothesized that, compared with adolescents in advantaged neighborhoods, adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods would perceive their schools as relatively safe, due...

Research on ethnic victimization to date has done little to identify the reasons why adolescents victimize their peers due to their ethnic background. To address this limitation, we examined: (1) the extent to which prejudiced attitudes within adolescents’ close and larger social networks determine their engagement in ethnic harassment, and (2) the...

This study examined age-related changes in friend similarity on delinquency to determine whether deviant behavior homophily peaks during mid-adolescence. A community sample of 1,663 male and 1,826 female Swedish youth from Grade 5 (M = 11.21 years) to Grade 10 (M = 16.25 years) provided self-reports of delinquency. Friendships were identified from...

Few issues in research on adolescence have received so much interest as the developmental significance of puberty, and if being early or late in developing compared with same-sex peers —labeled pubertal timing—has consequences for psychosocial adjustment in adolescence and later in life. This entry discusses the psychosocial adjustment of early and...

The aim of this special issue is to understand better the many changes in adolescent psychopathology have taken place over the last decades. The factors associated with adjustment problems and psychopathology in adolescence today are not necessarily the same as the factors that predicted problems and psychopathology in the past. But the basic strat...

In the literature, bully-victims report a wider range of adjustment problems than "pure" bullies or victims. This may not be confined to the school context, but might be found in other settings as well. Involvement in mutually hostile interactions across everyday settings may more reflect adolescents' characteristic way of handling conflicts with o...

We proposed that having mutually hostile interactions with others is a strong environmental stress factor that, together with diverse psychosocial problems, characterizes adolescents who self-harm. Using cluster analysis, this study examined the naturally occurring patterns of hostility conditions and psychosocial difficulties in a normative sample...

Different interpersonal experiences are related to delinquency and depressive mood. In many studies, delinquency has been associated with exposing others to hostility, while depressive mood has been associated with being a victim of others’ hostility. In this study, we proposed that adolescents with a co-occurrence of high delinquency and depressiv...

How parents and adolescents perceive each other’s life values is a key to understanding successful value transmission. In the value socializations literature, it has been proposed that parents’ values become internalized when children correctly perceive their parents’ values and decide to adopt them as their own. In the current study, we propose th...

Political interest is a key for the survival and development of democracies. Therefore, it is important to establish when political interest develops. We examined changes in political interest—when and in which directions—among youths between 13 and 28 years of age. We followed five age groups of Swedish youths over 2 years, with a total of 2621 pa...

In this study we adopted an agentic perspective and used self-determination theory to analyze the role of political interest in youth's sociopolitical development. Inspired by this theoretical framework, we identified indicators of the needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence within the political sphere. We followed two age cohorts (Swedish...

The utility of psychopathic traits predicting various forms of antisocial behavior has been demonstrated extensively. However, there are mixed results concerning which of the three psychopathic personality dimensions—callous and unemotional traits, grandiose and manipulative interpersonal style, impulsive-irresponsible behavior—is the best predicto...

Although puberty is a universal developmental process and the developmental sequence of pubertal changes tends to be similar for boys and girls, there are considerable individual differences in the timing of puberty. In this article, we reviewed well-cited empirical studies concerning pubertal timing and its developmental significance for mental he...

Teachers are thought to play an important role in fostering youth civic engagement; however, the current literature is limited with regard to providing concrete suggestions as to what teachers can do to promote youth civic engagement and why teachers have an impact on youth. To address these limitations, we simultaneously tested three alternative e...

Using a longitudinal design, we asked 2 age cohorts of adolescents (15- and 18-year-olds) whether they, during the last year, had experienced events that had increased their civic interest and about details of their experiences. Based on self-determination theory, we predicted that the adolescents who reported having experienced events of this kind...

Long-term follow-up studies of selective parent training (PT) programs are scarce, particularly in the case of effectiveness trials conducted within regular care settings. This study evaluated the 2-year effects of 4 programs: Comet, Incredible Years, Cope, and Connect and differences in the rate of change among programs were investigated using Lat...

A common view is that self-harmers are individuals who are exposed to or have been exposed to stressors and hostility in everyday settings. A strand of research has also found that self-harmers expose other people to their hostility. Extending these findings, this study examined whether adolescent self-harmers are simultaneously exposed and expose...

The link between sexual maturation, or pubertal timing, in girls and adolescent depressive symptoms is well-documented, but the underlying processes remain unclear. We examined whether sexual harassment, which has previously been linked to both pubertal timing and depressive symptoms, mediates this link, using a two-wave longitudinal study includin...

We aimed to analyze the impact of several parenting factors on the relationship between psychopathy and antisocial behavior. Nine hundred youths and their mothers reported on parent–youth interactions, and youth self-report measures of psychopathy, delinquency and violent behavior were taken. Multiple regression was used to test for the significanc...

This study tests the hypothesis that adolescents with romantic partners are less similar to their friends on rates of alcohol abuse than adolescents without romantic partners. Participants (662 girls, 574 boys) ranging in age from 12 to 19 years nominated friends and romantic partners, and completed a measure of alcohol abuse. In hierarchical linea...

Objective: Inadequate parent supervision during the early adolescent years forecasts a host of conduct problems, including illicit alcohol consumption. Early pubertal maturation may exacerbate problems, because girls alienated from same-age peers seek the company of older, more mature youth. The current study examines overtime associations between...

The present study was designed to examine best friend influence over alcohol intoxication and truancy as a function of relative perceptions of friendship satisfaction. The participants were 700 adolescents (306 boys, 394 girls) who were involved in same-sex best friendships that were stable from one academic year to the next. Participants completed...

There is strong evidence that depression anticipates later drinking problems among adults. These associations have not been consistently documented during adolescence, perhaps because little attention has been given to individual differences in peer relationships, which are the primary setting for adolescent alcohol consumption. This study investig...

We evaluated the effectiveness of 4 parent-training programs for children with externalizing problems. We tested the effectiveness of 3 behavioral programs (Comet, Cope, and Incredible Years) and 1 nonbehavioral program (Connect) in reducing child behavior problems and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, in improving positive...

Immigrant youth are at risk of experiencing harassment in school; however, we have only limited understanding of what makes youth harass their peers on ground of their ethnic origin. To address this major limitation, we examined (a) whether youth’s negative attitudes toward immigrants impact their engagement in ethnic harassment over time and (b) w...

The purpose of this study is to examine the adolescents who cross the boundaries of legality, also including illegal political means in their political action repertoire. The data comprised of questionnaire responses from middle and late adolescents in a Swedish city of around 130,000 citizens. Analyses of covariance, EXACON, and logistic regressio...

Immigrant youth are at risk of experiencing harassment in school; however, we have only limited understanding of what makes youth harass their peers on ground of their ethnic origin. To address this major limitation, we examined (a) whether youth's negative attitudes toward immigrants impact their engagement in ethnic harassment over time and (b) w...

Children involved in mutually hostile interactions at home are at risk of experiencing adjustment problems in other everyday life contexts. However, little is known about whether the pattern of mutual hostility at home is reproduced by high-conflict youths in other interpersonal contexts. In this study, we examined whether adolescents involved in m...

This study examined changes in authoritarian parenting practices and family roles in Sweden over the last 50 years. Data came from 3 cohorts (1958, 1981, and 2011) of young to middle-age adults living in a suburb of Stockholm who answered questions about how they were raised (N1958 = 385, N1981 = 207, N2011 = 457). The results showed a dramatic dec...

Researchers have proposed several theoretical models to account for the well-established link between pubertal timing and social adjustment. The early models are general and pay little attention to mechanisms or contextual conditions, while newer models concentrate on interpersonal and contextual conditions. A recent theoretical approach—combining...

PRESENTATION TYPE: Individual Poster CATEGORY/THEME: Development and Testing of Interventions TITLE: A start towards bridging the gap between research and practice: The one-year findings from a National comparison of parenting programs. ABSTRACT BODY: Introduction:Over the past decades several group based parenting programs have been develop...

In this study, we examined subgroups of adolescents based on their levels of psychopathic traits and anxiety. Participants were 914 youths from a community sample, with a mean age of 14.28 (SD = .94) years. We used adolescents' self-reports of psychopathic traits and their parents' reports of the adolescent's anxiety to identify distinct subgroups...

Prior research has indicated that shy adolescents are more motivated to form friendships online than to form friendships offline. Little is known about whether having friendships found exclusively online may impact self-esteem and forming offline friendships for these adolescents. This study therefore aimed to provide insight into the moderating ro...

Ethnically harassed immigrant youth are at risk for experiencing a wide range of school adjustment problems. However, it is still unclear why and under what conditions experiencing ethnic harassment leads to school adjustment difficulties. To address this limitation in the literature, we examined two important questions. First, we investigated whet...

Adolescents' hyperactivity, impulsivity, and attention problems (HIA) have been shown to make parents feel powerless. In this study, the authors examined whether these feelings were dependent on parents' experiences with their older children. Two models that offer different predictions of how parents make use of their earlier experiences when raisi...

Although the receipt of peer sexual harassment in schools has been linked to deliberate self-injury, the direction of association over time has not been tested. Two longitudinal studies examined whether receipt of peer sexual harassment within schools predicts engagement in deliberate self-injury or vice versa. Differences between boys and girls we...

We tested the peer-socialization/contextual-amplification explanation for the link between early female puberty and problem behaviour. We propose that in cultures with high tolerance for adolescent heterosexual involvement, early puberty should be linked with problem behaviour—not in other cultures. We compared girls in two cultures (Slovakia and S...

Introduction Programs targeting parent-child interactions have been shown to reduce children’s conduct problems, delinquency, substance use, and depression, across the life span (see Sandler, Schoenfelder, Wolchik, and MacKinnon, 2011). These programs are supposed to work by increasing positive parenting behaviors and decreasing negative parenting...

PRESENTATION TYPE: Individual Poster CATEGORY/THEME: Research, Policy and Practice TITLE: Are they doing equally good job? Child outcomes of parenting programs for different sectors of care ABSTRACT BODY: Introduction: Parenting programs are frequently used today to reduce child problem behavior. In Sweden they are typically delivered by thr...

We tested whether parents can reduce affiliation with delinquent peers through 3 forms of peer management: soliciting information, monitoring rules, and communicating disapproval of peers. We examined whether peer management interrupted 2 peer processes: selection and influence of delinquent peers. Adolescents' feelings of being overcontrolled by p...

Previous research has shown a consistent positive association between non-suicidal self-injury and depressive symptoms. However, the direction of the effects has not been examined. To understand whether non-suicidal self-injury predicts depressive symptoms or vice versa, we examined the relations between non-suicidal self-injury and depressive symp...

To what extent do adolescents and their friends socialize each others’ attitudes toward immigrants? Can friends’ positive attitudes toward immigrants counter adolescents’ negative attitudes toward immigrants, and do friends’ negative attitudes decrease adolescents’ positive attitudes? These questions were examined by following a large (N=1,472) fri...

To what extent do adolescents and their friends socialize each others’ attitudes toward immigrants? Can friends’ positive attitudes toward immigrants counter adolescents’ negative attitudes toward immigrants, and do friends’ negative attitudes decrease adolescents’ positive attitudes? These questions were examined by following a large (N = 1,472) f...

Studies have shown that parents reduce control and support in response to youths’ drinking. Why they react this way, however, is still unknown. From cognitive dissonance theory, we derived hypotheses about parents’ reactions. We used a longitudinal, school-based sample of 494 youths (13 and 14 years, 56% boys) and their parents. General Linear Mode...

This study examines selection and influence related to delinquent behaviors of immigrant and nonimmigrant adolescents attending three majority-immigrant schools (54% to 65.2% immigrant) and four minority-immigrant schools (11.1% to 25.1% immigrant) in one community. The sample included 1,169 youths (50.4% male; 24.2% immigrant) initially between th...

This chapter examined the longitudinal effects of quitting, starting, or staying in organised sports activities over time among adolescents. Three-year longitudinal data from 428 adolescents were analysed using latent growth curve modelling. The findings provide compelling evidence regarding the effects of stability of and changes in sports partici...

A crossed-lagged regression model was tested to investigate relationships between friendship support, bullying involvement, and its consequences during adolescence. Students, 12-16 years (N = 880), were administered questionnaires twice, one year apart. Using structural equation modeling, a model was specified and higher levels of support from frie...

In the present research on parenting and adolescent behavior, there is much focus on reciprocal, bidirectional, and transactional processes, but parenting-style research still adheres to a unidirectional perspective in which parents affect youth behavior but are unaffected by it. In addition, many of the most cited parenting-style studies have used...

Background In spite of the proven effectiveness of parenting based programs to prevent adolescent risk behaviors, such programs are rarely implemented in Mediterranean countries. Objective This pilot study was aimed at assessing the feasibility and the effects of a parenting based universal prevention program (Connect) in Italy. Methods Our sample...

Geographic proximity is a determinant factor of friendship. Friendship datasets that include detailed geographic information are scarce, and when this information is available, the dependence of friendship on distance is often modelled by pre-specified parametric functions or derived from theory without further empirical assessment. This paper aims...

This study examined developmental trends of peer selection and socialization related to friends' alcohol use in early-, middle-, and late-adolescent peer networks, with the primary goal of identifying when these mechanisms emerge, when these mechanisms exert their strongest effects, and when (or if) they decrease in importance. Gender and reciproci...

Peer influence on adolescent delinquency is well established, but little is known about moderators of peer influence. In this study, we examined adolescents' (targets) and their peers' psychopathic personality traits as moderators of peer influence on delinquency in peer networks. We used three separate dimensions of the psychopathic personality: g...

This study examines homophily among adolescent friends. Participants were drawn from a community-based sample of Swedish youth who ranged from 11 to 18years old. A total of 436 girls and 338 boys identified their closest friends and described their own delinquent activities, intoxication frequency, achievement motivation, and self-worth. Correlatio...

Friend influence over alcohol intoxication and delinquent behavior was examined as a function of relative peer acceptance in a 3-year study of Swedish youth (N = 184 girls, 145 boys). Participants were in the first year of secondary school (7th grade, M = 11.7 years old) or the first year of high school (10th grade, M = 15.3 years old) at the outse...

Girls' early pubertal timing has been linked in many studies to behavioral problems such as delinquency and substance use. The theoretical explanations for these links have often involved the girls' peer relationships, but contexts have also been considered important in some explanations. By integrating two theoretical models, the peer-socializatio...

Hyperactivity, impulsivity, and attention problems (HIA) in children and adolescents are stressful for parents. In this study, we used theories of parents' perceived power and attributions for youths' behaviors to develop a model to understand parents' reactions to their youths' HIA. We followed 706 youths (376 boys and 330 girls, aged 10-12 years...

Multiethnic societies typically aim to have immigrant and native youths mix and be friends, preferably in all contexts in which they spend time. Schools and neighbourhoods are the two settings where youths spend the most time with peers during adolescence. The present study explored the in- and out-of-school peer groups of 174 immigrant junior high...

Socially anxious children and adolescents have previously been found to have friends with similarly socially anxious, withdrawn behavioral characteristics. How peers might socialize social anxiety over time has, however, not been thoroughly investigated. We examined this in a sample of 834 youths (339 girls and 495 boys; M=14.29), followed for 3 ye...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how children's involvement in bullying (as bullies, victims and bully‐victims) is related to longer term levels of various internalizing problems such as depression and self‐harm. Design/methodology/approach – A prospective longitudinal design was used based on data from the Swedish Seven Schoo...

Understanding Girls' Problem Behavior presents an overview of recent studies by leading researchers into key aspects of the development of problem behavior in girls. Integrates interdisciplinary research into girls' problem behaviors (e.g. aggression, antisocial behavior, rule breaking). Unique in seeking to understand girls' problem behaviors in t...

The predictive effects of peer victimization and harsh parenting on deliberate self-harm were examined. As derived from the experiential avoidance model, the study also tested whether these links were moderated by individual self-regulation approaches. Data were collected at two points in time from 880 junior high school students (mean age=13.72) i...