Peer sexual harassment, appearance esteem, and emotional problems: Testing a mediation model across early adolescence

This study used a longitudinal sample of early adolescent boys and girls (ages 10-12; N = 1113) to test a theoretically and empirically informed model suggesting that exposure to peer sexual harassment (age 10) predicts more emotional problems (age 12), and that lower appearance esteem (age 11) mediates this relation. On the within-person level, which is the level on which the processes theoretically should play out, we found no support for the proposed mediation model for boys or for girls. Unexpectedly, we found that following times of more exposure to peer sexual harassment than usual, early adolescents instead experienced higher appearance esteem and fewer emotional problems than usual. More research is needed to replicate and understand these unexpected findings.