Miguel Freitas

Miguel Freitas holds a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology. Peer relations during youth are a well-established context for socioemotional development. During is PhD, his work focused on adolescents lacking close, dyadic friendships within the peer group and display anxious, shy behaviors when interacting with peers and withdraw from the social scene. Using a longitudinal design and sophisticated statistical techniques (growth curve modeling), our study was one of the first that revealed distinct developmental trajectories of withdrawn youth, with significant heterogeneity in psychosocial adjustment (loneliness, depressive symptoms, peer adversity).
Recently, he has explored how different social experiences – e.g., having friends, friendship quality, being prosocial or, on the other hand, suffering peer exclusion and bullying – might combine to buffer or to exacerbate the impact of anxious withdrawal, contributing to maladaptive or more well-adjusted developmental pathways.