Cynthia Erdley

Professor
368 Williams Hall
207.581.2040
erdley@maine.edu

**Note to applicants: Dr. Erdley DOES NOT plan to recruit a graduate student at this time.

Research Interests

Broadly speaking, my research focuses on the ways in which children’s and adolescents’ peer relationship experiences are associated with their adjustment. For many years, I have also examined how particular social-cognitive processes, including attributions, social goals, strategy knowledge, and self-efficacy perceptions, are related to behavior, peer status, and psychosocial adjustment.

My lab is involved in a variety of studies investigating these issues. For example, we are examining how preschooler’s beliefs about whether social competence is fixed (entity theory), or malleable (incremental theory), impact their reaction to social failure, how peer acceptance and friendship (quality and quantity) predict to loneliness, depression, and social anxiety, and whether these associations vary by gender and developmental level. Other work is investigating relations among children’s attributions and goals in response to overt versus relational conflicts with friends, behavior style, friendship quality, social anxiety, and depression. We are also studying the role of certain peer processes (e.g., negative feedback seeking, susceptibility to peer pressure) in predicting depression in young adolescents. In other work with adolescents, we are examining the strategies youth might use when a peer who has been victimized comes to them for support and how effective these strategies might be in promoting more positive adjustment. Finally, our lab is beginning to examine the ways in which electronic forms of communication might impact social functioning and individual adjustment.

Selected Publications

Adrian, M., Zeman, J., Erdley, C. A., Lisa, L., & Sim, L. (2011). Emotional dysregulation and interpersonal difficulties as risk factors for nonsuicidal self-injury in adolescent girls. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 39, 389-400.

Kingery, J. N., Erdley, C. A., & Marshall, K. C. (2011). Peer acceptance and friendship as predictors of early adolescentsí adjustment across the middle school transition. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 57, 215-243.

Sim, L., Matthews, A., Lisy, Ludmila, Adrian, M., Zeman, J., & Erdley, C. (2011). Family conflict and internalizing symptoms in adolescent girls: The mediating role of specific emotion regulation skills. Emotional & Behavioral Disorders in Youth, 11, 91-97.

Erdley, C. A., Nangle, D. W., Burns, A. M., Holleb, L. J., & Kaye, A. J. (2010). Assessing children and adolescents. In D. W. Nangle, D. J. Hansen, C. A. Erdley, P. J. Norton (Eds.), Practitioner’s guide to empirically based measures of social skills (pp. 69-85). New York: Springer.

Erdley, C. A., Rivera, M., Shepherd, E., & Holleb, L. J. (2010). Social-cognitive models and skills. In D. W. Nangle, D. J. Hansen, C. A. Erdley, & P. J. Norton
(Eds.), Practitioner’s guide to empirically based measures of social skills (pp. 21-35). New York: Springer.

Kingery, J. N., Erdley, C. A., Marshall, K. C., Whitaker, K. G., & Reuter, T. R. (2010). Peer experiences of anxious and socially withdrawn youth: An integrative review
of the developmental and clinical literature. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 13, 91-128.

Adrian, M., Zeman, J., Erdley, C. A., Lisa, L., Homan, K., & Sim, L. (2009). Social contextual links to emotion regulation in an adolescent psychiatric inpatient
population: Do gender and symptomatology matter? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 50, 1428-1436.