Adolescent peer victimization and subsequent cognitive-affective biases in threat attention, reactivity, and interpretation

Peer victimization (PV) in adolescence—verbal, social, and physical aggression—may disrupt normative developmental processes and is associated with psychosocial difficulties. Although previous research has established associations between early adversity and altered attention and cognitive-affective processing, the specific mechanisms of information-processing through which adolescent PV may affect later social functioning remain unclear.

Methods

We conducted a counterfactual multimethod study in a sample of young adults (age 22; n = 191; 47.1% female), comparing individuals with and without a history of PV between ages 11–20. Specifically we employed: (1) an eye tracking task using a free-viewing paradigm to assess spontaneous threat-related attention; (2) a longitudinal analysis of changes in hostile attribution and reactive aggression using baseline data collected prior to PV exposure and follow-up data in young adulthood; and (3) a morph-based task assessing facial emotion discrimination capabilities between happy and angry expressions.

Results

Relative to controls, victims exhibited a vigilance–avoidance attentional pattern and blunted affective responses; they showed reduced initial gaze allocation, repeated returns to angry faces, and a tendency to rate more angry faces as neutral. Over adolescence, a flatter decline in hostile attribution and a steeper drop in reactive aggression led to elevated hostile attribution and reduced reactive aggression.

Conclusions

These results suggest a victim profile characterized by impaired attentional processing with biased social threat perception, a more hostile view of the social world, and blunted affect. Our study offers preliminary evidence that adolescent PV may induce enduring changes in social information processing, with implications for maladaptive social cognition and increased risk for psychopathology.