Forged through association: the moderating influence of peer context on the development and behavior of temperamentally-dysregulated children

The moderating effects of five characteristics of peers--their effortful control, anger, sadness, aggression, and positive peer behavior--were investigated in two separate series of analyses of preschooler's social behavior: (a) the relation between children's own effortful control and social behavior, and (b) the relation between children's shyness and reticent behavior. Latent variable interactions were conducted in a structural equation framework. Peer context anger and effortful control, albeit with unexpected results, interacted with children's own characteristics to predict their behavior in both the EC and shy model series; these were the only significant interactions obtained for the EC model series. The relation between shyness and reticent behavior, however, showed the greatest impact of peer context and, conversely, the greatest susceptibility to environmental variations; significant interactions were obtained in all five models, despite the limited range of peer context sadness and aggression observed in this study.