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Bullying fosters interpersonal distrust and degrades adolescent mental health as predicted by Social Safety Theory

Nature Mental Health volume 2, pages 328–336 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Social Safety Theory predicts that socially threatening experiences such as bullying degrade mental health partly by fostering the belief that others cannot be trusted. Here we tested this prediction by examining how peer bullying in childhood impacted adolescent mental health, and whether this effect was mediated by interpersonal distrust and several other commonly studied mediators—namely diet, sleep and physical activity—in 10,000 youth drawn from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study. Youth bullied in childhood developed more internalizing, externalizing and total mental health problems in late adolescence, and this effect was partially mediated by interpersonal distrust during middle adolescence. Indeed, adolescents who developed greater distrust were approximately 3.5 times more likely to subsequently experience clinically significant mental health problems than those who developed less distrust. Individual and school-based interventions aimed at reducing the negative impact of bullying on mental health may thus benefit from bolstering youths’ sense of trust in others.

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Fig. 1: Frequency of peer bullying (at age 11) and mental health problems (at age 17).
Fig. 2: Peer bullying, distrust and mental health problems from age 11 to 17 years.
Fig. 3: Path diagram of the main model.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of the present study are publicly available from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK Data Service) by application, under license. For further information on how to obtain the dataset, visit the UK Data Service website (https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/) or the relevant website of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/cls-studies/millennium-cohort-study/).

Code availability

Details of all the variable names, their processing and the full output of the R code are available on the Open Science Framework website (https://osf.io/zjq9a; ref. 5 in the Supplementary Information). D.I.T. accessed the data and wrote the code.

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Acknowledgements

D.I.T. was partially supported by Alphablocks Nursery School Ltd. G.M.S. was supported by grant #OPR21101 from the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research/California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine.

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  1. School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Dimitris I. Tsomokos

  2. Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    George M. Slavich

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Tsomokos, D.I., Slavich, G.M. Bullying fosters interpersonal distrust and degrades adolescent mental health as predicted by Social Safety Theory. Nat. Mental Health 2, 328–336 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-024-00203-7

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