That’s the difference between me and you: girls respond to the anxiety of same-sex peers but boys don’t

Abstract

Adolescent students often report experiencing anxiety in school. This may lead to negative consequences for their well-being. Given that students in a classroom tend to imitate the behavior of their peers (a process called homophilia), the current exploratory study (1) assessed the association between the anxious responses of a student and the level of anxiety of classmates and (2) examined whether this association differed for boys and girls of different ages. During two consecutives school years, 1044 Canadian students (415 boys and 619 girls) from six elementary schools and seven high schools completed questionnaires measuring different forms of normative anxiety (trait/state anxiety, test anxiety and anxiety sensitivity). Multilevel analyses revealed a same-sex peer effect of classmates’ anxiety only in girls, so that the anxious responses of girls were related to the anxiety level of other girls in the same class (b = 0.31, p <.001). This effect was similar for both elementary and high school girls (b = 0.07, p =.27). Interestingly, no association was found for boys for same-sex (b = 0.15, p =.10) or opposite-sex peers (b = -0.03, p = 1.00). Girls and boys seemed to differ in their sensitivity to the anxiety of their peers. More specifically, girls appeared to have a targeted responsiveness to the anxiety of the other girls in the classroom. This study reiterated the far-reaching effect of peers during adolescence and suggest that factors related to sex may reinforce anxiety in school settings.