New article alert: Youth's Perceived Maturity and Antisocial Behavior

Doctoral student Erica Dalzell's Masters Thesis was recently published in Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology, titled Adolescents’ Perceptions of Physical Development Relative to Peers and Antisocial Behaviors. The paper ties developmental psychology's understanding of peer salience and peer comparisons with criminology's understanding of the relation between pubertal timing and antisocial behavior. In a large, nationally-representative sample of youth, the result suggest that when youth self-reported being more physically developed than their same-aged peers, they were more likely to engage in a host of antisocial behaviors. In other words, youth who think of themselves as more mature than their peers are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.