Sander Thomae
Biographic Data
| ID | 2925850 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sander Thomae |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sander |
| FAMILY NAME | Thomae |
| SIGNATURE | THOMAE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0838-6222 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Climate change and youth development: A view of an emerging field
Climate change is a defining challenge of our time, and it disproportionally impacts young people. This poses a call to action for developmental science. How does climate change shape youth’s psychological development and well-being? Can we use our expertise to empower youth to cope with and help mitigate climate change? The emerging field of research on climate change and youth development addresses these timely questions. Here I provide a conci…
Narcissism and Wellbeing: A Cross-Cultural Meta-Analysis
Do narcissists enjoy better or worse wellbeing than others? Psychological theories disagree. In an attempt to reconcile them, we conducted a comprehensive cross-cultural meta-analysis testing the core hypotheses that grandiose narcissism would be associated with better wellbeing and vulnerable narcissism with worse wellbeing. We also hypothesized that these associations would be explained by self-esteem and would be stronger in countries higher o…
Nostalgia Promotes Parents’ Tradition Transfer to Children by Strengthening Parent-Child Relationship Closeness
Parental tradition transfer to children is pivotal for their socialization, identity formation, and culture perpetuation. But what motivates parents to transfer traditions to their children? We hypothesized that nostalgia, an emotion strengthening interpersonal bonds, would promote tradition transfer through parent-child relationship closeness. We tested these hypotheses using cross-sectional (Studies 1 and 4), cross-lagged (Study 2 and preregist…
Towards an Understanding of Young Refugees’ Identity Dynamics Along the Migration Process: A Systematic Review
When and how behavior change can accelerate system change (and vice versa): Mapping reciprocal processes for climate change mitigation
System change and individual behavior change are often conceptualized as contrasting, mutually exclusive strategies for climate change mitigation, with system change usually considered more powerful, direct or urgent. We argue that this alleged duality is misguided and that system change and behavior change are fundamentally co-dependent: system change is often effective to the extent that it promotes individual behavior change and, vice versa, i…
Supporting youth emotionally when communicating about climate change: A self-determination theory approach
Communicating with adolescents about climate change can be challenging if we want to safeguard their emotional well-being. Here, we evaluate the emotional impact of climate change communication that is informed by self-determination theory (SDT). We conducted two experiments with samples of ethnically diverse adolescents from the United States to examine adolescents’ emotions when reading needs-aligned, needs-misaligned, and needs-neutral (contro…
Feeling anxious and being engaged in a warming world: Climate anxiety and adolescents' pro‐environmental behavior
BACKGROUND: Climate anxiety is increasingly prevalent among adolescents worldwide. Are climate-anxious adolescents prone to engage in pro-environmental behavior? Or might the association between climate anxiety and pro-environmental be curvilinear, such that high levels of climate anxiety become 'paralyzing'? And do these associations depend on whether adolescents believe that, with effort, the worst impacts of climate change can still be prevent…
Children’s overestimation of performance across age, task, and historical time: A meta-analysis
Children tend to overestimate their performance on a variety of tasks and activities. The present meta-analysis examines the specificity of this phenomenon across age, tasks, and more than five decades of historical time (1968–2021). Self-overestimation was operationalized as the ratio between children's prospective self-estimates of task performance and their actual (i.e., objectively measured) task performance. A total of 246 effect sizes from …
When sustainability aligns with adolescent motives: Development and validation of the Sustainability Motive-Alignment Scale (SMAS)
The sustainability motive-alignment hypothesis posits that adolescents will be motivated to act sustainably when they view sustainable behavior as aligned with their motives for autonomy and peer status. Based on this hypothesis, we developed the Sustainability Motive-Alignment Scale (SMAS), a brief self-report scale of individual differences in sustainability motive-alignment. In four studies across two relatively individualistic (U.S., Netherla…
Promoting adolescents' pro‐environmental behavior: A motive‐alignment approach
Most adolescents are concerned about climate change. What helps them to act on their concerns? This preregistered randomized experiment tested whether adolescents' pro-environmental behavior can be promoted by framing the behavior as compatible with their autonomy motive. Dutch adolescents (N = 319, ages 12-17, 57.7% girls, predominantly indicating "Dutch" or "bicultural" identities) viewed a campaign-style video that explained the causes of clim…
Children’s domain-specific self-evaluations and global self-worth: A preregistered cross-cultural meta-analysis
Which domain-specific self-evaluations are most central to children’s global self-worth? And does this differ between countries with different levels of collectivism–individualism? We conducted a preregistered cross-cultural meta-analysis to address these questions. We included 141 independent samples (21 countries/regions, 584 cross-sectional effect sizes), totaling 33,120 participants in middle to late childhood, a critical age for self-worth d…
Green teens: Understanding and promoting adolescents’ sustainable engagement
Young people are disproportionally impacted by heatwaves, floods, droughts, and other impacts of climate change. They also have unique potential to catalyze the transformative sustainable change that the world needs now. How can this potential be leveraged? In this perspective, we present the sustainability motive-alignment hypothesis to understand and harness young peoples’, especially adolescents’, potential for sustainable engagement. The hypo…
Does environmental education benefit environmental outcomes in children and adolescents? A meta-analysis
Young children’s overestimation of performance: A cross-cultural comparison
Western literature suggests that young children overestimate their performance across a range of tasks. Research in non-Western cultures, however, is lacking. In 2019, 101 Chinese (52% girls) and 98 Dutch (49% girls) children, ages 4 and 5, were asked to estimate how well they would perform on both a motor and a memory task. Children from both countries overestimated their performance to the same extent (ηp2 = .077 and .027 for the motor and memo…
Effort Self-Talk Benefits the Mathematics Performance of Children With Negative Competence Beliefs
Children with negative competence beliefs often achieve below their potential in school. This randomized field experiment tested whether engaging in positive self-talk may benefit these children’s mathematics performance. Participants (N = 212, Grades 4–6, Mage = 10.6) worked on the first half of a standardized mathematics test, engaged in effort self-talk (“I will do my very best!”), ability self-talk (“I am very good at this!”), or no self-talk…
The Apple of Daddy’s Eye: Parental Overvaluation Links the Narcissistic Traits of Father and Child
This study contributes to the literature on the parental correlates of children's narcissism. It addresses whether parental overvaluation may drive the putative link between parents' narcissism and children's narcissism and self-esteem. The cross-sectional design involved a community sample of 519 school-age children (age ranging from 9 to 11 years old) and their parents from an Italian urban context. Child-reported measures included narcissistic…
Narcissism and popularity among peers: A cross-transition longitudinal study
The dual-pathway model posits that narcissism can both benefit and compromise popularity, depending upon whether narcissists’ assertive or adversarial interpersonal tendencies surface in social interaction. A 5-wave longitudinal study followed Dutch adolescents (N = 322, 53% female, Mage = 12.2) who transitioned from primary into secondary school and examined how narcissism, along with self-esteem (measured at the end of primary school), contribu…
Was it meant to be mean?’ Young children's hostile attributional bias and intent attribution skills
Two studies investigated whether young children's hostile attributional bias (i.e., the tendency to assume that others have hostile intentions) may be explained by a lack of intent attribution skills (i.e., the ability to correctly infer others’ intentions). We also investigated whether these intent attribution skills depend on children's false‐belief understanding. Children who lack false‐belief understanding may base their attributions on the o…
Happy To Be “Me?” Authenticity, Psychological Need Satisfaction, and Subjective Well-Being in Adolescence
Adolescents have a strong desire to “be themselves.” How does experiencing authenticity—the sense of being one's true self—influence subjective well-being? What allows adolescents to experience authenticity? This research tests a working model of how authenticity is implicated in adolescents’ well-being. Using survey, diary, and experimental methodologies, four studies (total N = 759, age range = 12–17) supported the main tenets of the model. Aut…
Thin Images Reflected in the Water: Narcissism and Girls’ Vulnerability to the Thin‐Ideal
The purpose of this research is to test how adolescent girls’ narcissistic traits—characterized by a need to impress others and avoid ego‐threat—influence acute adverse effects of thin‐ideal exposure. Participants (11–15 years; total N = 366; all female) reported their narcissistic traits. Next, in two experiments, they viewed images of either very thin or average‐sized models, reported their wishful identification with the models (Experiment 2),…
Emotional contrast or compensation? How support reminders influence the pain of acute peer disapproval in preadolescents
When children experience habitual peer difficulties, adults often remind them that many people care about them. How do such reminders of support impact children's emotional responses to acute experiences of peer disapproval? Intuitively, support reminders would exert compensatory effects attenuating the emotional impact of acute disapproval. Theory suggests, however, that support reminders might also lead to contrast effects magnifying the emotio…
My child is God’s gift to humanity: Development and validation of the Parental Overvaluation Scale (POS)
Although it is natural for parents to value their children, some parents "overvalue" them, believing that their own children are more special and more entitled than other children are. This research introduces this concept of parental overvaluation. We developed a concise self-report scale to measure individual differences in parental overvaluation, the Parental Overvaluation Scale (POS; Study 1). The POS has high test-retest stability over 6, 12…
Dashed Hopes, Dashed Selves? A Sociometer Perspective on Self‐esteem Change Across the Transition to Secondary School
The transition from primary to secondary school challenges children's psychological well‐being. A cross‐transitional longitudinal study (N = 306; mean age = 12.2 years) examined why some children's self‐esteem decreases across the transition whereas other children's self‐esteem does not. Children's expected social acceptance in secondary school was measured before the transition; their actually perceived social acceptance was measured after the t…
Using Experimental Designs to Understand the Development of Peer Relations
In the past decades, tremendous advances have been made in our understanding of peer relations. A description is emerging of how peer relations develop. Surprisingly, though, we know less about why peer relations develop as they do. Experimental designs provide opportunities to learn about causal processes in peer relations, yet they have not been used frequently in this field. The aim of this paper is to encourage greater use of experimental des…
Arousing “gentle passions” in young adolescents: Sustained experimental effects of value affirmations on prosocial feelings and behaviors
When people reflect on their important values, they may become more attuned to the needs of others. Two longitudinal field experiments examined whether a subtle value-affirmation manipulation can initiate relatively enduring increases in young adolescents' prosocial feelings (Study 1; Mage = 12.9) and prosocial behaviors (Study 2; Mage = 12.9). Participants completed a brief writing exercise that affirmed the values they deemed either most import…
Arousing “gentle passions” in young adolescents: Sustained experimental effects of value affirmations on prosocial feelings and behaviors
When people reflect on their important values, they may become more attuned to the needs of others. Two longitudinal field experiments examined whether a subtle value-affirmation manipulation can initiate relatively enduring increases in young adolescents' prosocial feelings (Study 1; Mage = 12.9) and prosocial behaviors (Study 2; Mage = 12.9). Participants completed a brief writing exercise that affirmed the values they deemed either most import…
My child is God’s gift to humanity: Development and validation of the Parental Overvaluation Scale (POS)
Although it is natural for parents to value their children, some parents "overvalue" them, believing that their own children are more special and more entitled than other children are. This research introduces this concept of parental overvaluation. We developed a concise self-report scale to measure individual differences in parental overvaluation, the Parental Overvaluation Scale (POS; Study 1). The POS has high test-retest stability over 6, 12…
Dashed Hopes, Dashed Selves? A Sociometer Perspective on Self‐esteem Change Across the Transition to Secondary School
The transition from primary to secondary school challenges children's psychological well‐being. A cross‐transitional longitudinal study (N = 306; mean age = 12.2 years) examined why some children's self‐esteem decreases across the transition whereas other children's self‐esteem does not. Children's expected social acceptance in secondary school was measured before the transition; their actually perceived social acceptance was measured after the t…
Using Experimental Designs to Understand the Development of Peer Relations
In the past decades, tremendous advances have been made in our understanding of peer relations. A description is emerging of how peer relations develop. Surprisingly, though, we know less about why peer relations develop as they do. Experimental designs provide opportunities to learn about causal processes in peer relations, yet they have not been used frequently in this field. The aim of this paper is to encourage greater use of experimental des…
Trumping Shame by Blasts of Noise: Narcissism, Self-Esteem, Shame, and Aggression in Young Adolescents
This experiment tested how self-views influence shame-induced aggression. One hundred and sixty-three young adolescents (M = 12.2 years) completed measures of narcissism and self-esteem. They lost to an ostensible opponent on a competitive task. In the shame condition, they were told that their opponent was bad, and they saw their own name at the bottom of a ranking list. In the control condition, they were told nothing about their opponent and d…
Looking Again, and Harder, for a Link Between Low Self‐Esteem and Aggression
Recent field studies have revived the hypothesis that low self‐esteem causes aggression. Accordingly, we reanalyzed the data from a previous experiment and conducted a new experiment to study direct physical aggression in the form of blasting a fellow participant with aversive noise. We also conducted a field study using a measure of indirect aggression in the form of a consequential negative evaluation. High narcissists were more aggressive than…
Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Hurt: Longitudinal Effects of Exposure to Violence on Children’s Aggressive Behavior
Children witness violence at home, at school, in their neighborhood, and in the media. Children may also experience violence, as a victim, at home, at school, and in their neighborhood. A longitudinal study tested whether children who are exposed to a heavy dose of violence come to regard it as normal behavior and subsequently behave more aggressively themselves. Participants were 777 children (8 to 12 years old) who completed questionnaires twic…
Turning shame inside-out: “Humiliated Fury” in Young Adolescents
The term "humiliated fury" refers to the anger people can experience when they are shamed. In Study 1, participants were randomly exposed to a prototypical shameful event or control event, and their self-reported feelings of anger were measured. In Study 2, participants reported each school day, for 2 weeks, the shameful events they experienced. They also nominated classmates who got angry each day. Narcissism was treated as a potential moderator…
Arousing “gentle passions” in young adolescents: Sustained experimental effects of value affirmations on prosocial feelings and behaviors
When people reflect on their important values, they may become more attuned to the needs of others. Two longitudinal field experiments examined whether a subtle value-affirmation manipulation can initiate relatively enduring increases in young adolescents' prosocial feelings (Study 1; Mage = 12.9) and prosocial behaviors (Study 2; Mage = 12.9). Participants completed a brief writing exercise that affirmed the values they deemed either most import…
Using Experimental Designs to Understand the Development of Peer Relations
In the past decades, tremendous advances have been made in our understanding of peer relations. A description is emerging of how peer relations develop. Surprisingly, though, we know less about why peer relations develop as they do. Experimental designs provide opportunities to learn about causal processes in peer relations, yet they have not been used frequently in this field. The aim of this paper is to encourage greater use of experimental des…
Dashed Hopes, Dashed Selves? A Sociometer Perspective on Self‐esteem Change Across the Transition to Secondary School
The transition from primary to secondary school challenges children's psychological well‐being. A cross‐transitional longitudinal study (N = 306; mean age = 12.2 years) examined why some children's self‐esteem decreases across the transition whereas other children's self‐esteem does not. Children's expected social acceptance in secondary school was measured before the transition; their actually perceived social acceptance was measured after the t…
Emotional contrast or compensation? How support reminders influence the pain of acute peer disapproval in preadolescents
When children experience habitual peer difficulties, adults often remind them that many people care about them. How do such reminders of support impact children's emotional responses to acute experiences of peer disapproval? Intuitively, support reminders would exert compensatory effects attenuating the emotional impact of acute disapproval. Theory suggests, however, that support reminders might also lead to contrast effects magnifying the emotio…
My child is God’s gift to humanity: Development and validation of the Parental Overvaluation Scale (POS)
Although it is natural for parents to value their children, some parents "overvalue" them, believing that their own children are more special and more entitled than other children are. This research introduces this concept of parental overvaluation. We developed a concise self-report scale to measure individual differences in parental overvaluation, the Parental Overvaluation Scale (POS; Study 1). The POS has high test-retest stability over 6, 12…
Thin Images Reflected in the Water: Narcissism and Girls’ Vulnerability to the Thin‐Ideal
The purpose of this research is to test how adolescent girls’ narcissistic traits—characterized by a need to impress others and avoid ego‐threat—influence acute adverse effects of thin‐ideal exposure. Participants (11–15 years; total N = 366; all female) reported their narcissistic traits. Next, in two experiments, they viewed images of either very thin or average‐sized models, reported their wishful identification with the models (Experiment 2),…
Happy To Be “Me?” Authenticity, Psychological Need Satisfaction, and Subjective Well-Being in Adolescence
Adolescents have a strong desire to “be themselves.” How does experiencing authenticity—the sense of being one's true self—influence subjective well-being? What allows adolescents to experience authenticity? This research tests a working model of how authenticity is implicated in adolescents’ well-being. Using survey, diary, and experimental methodologies, four studies (total N = 759, age range = 12–17) supported the main tenets of the model. Aut…
Was it meant to be mean?’ Young children's hostile attributional bias and intent attribution skills
Two studies investigated whether young children's hostile attributional bias (i.e., the tendency to assume that others have hostile intentions) may be explained by a lack of intent attribution skills (i.e., the ability to correctly infer others’ intentions). We also investigated whether these intent attribution skills depend on children's false‐belief understanding. Children who lack false‐belief understanding may base their attributions on the o…
Narcissism and popularity among peers: A cross-transition longitudinal study
The dual-pathway model posits that narcissism can both benefit and compromise popularity, depending upon whether narcissists’ assertive or adversarial interpersonal tendencies surface in social interaction. A 5-wave longitudinal study followed Dutch adolescents (N = 322, 53% female, Mage = 12.2) who transitioned from primary into secondary school and examined how narcissism, along with self-esteem (measured at the end of primary school), contribu…
Effort Self-Talk Benefits the Mathematics Performance of Children With Negative Competence Beliefs
Children with negative competence beliefs often achieve below their potential in school. This randomized field experiment tested whether engaging in positive self-talk may benefit these children’s mathematics performance. Participants (N = 212, Grades 4–6, Mage = 10.6) worked on the first half of a standardized mathematics test, engaged in effort self-talk (“I will do my very best!”), ability self-talk (“I am very good at this!”), or no self-talk…
The Apple of Daddy’s Eye: Parental Overvaluation Links the Narcissistic Traits of Father and Child
This study contributes to the literature on the parental correlates of children's narcissism. It addresses whether parental overvaluation may drive the putative link between parents' narcissism and children's narcissism and self-esteem. The cross-sectional design involved a community sample of 519 school-age children (age ranging from 9 to 11 years old) and their parents from an Italian urban context. Child-reported measures included narcissistic…
Does environmental education benefit environmental outcomes in children and adolescents? A meta-analysis
Young children’s overestimation of performance: A cross-cultural comparison
Western literature suggests that young children overestimate their performance across a range of tasks. Research in non-Western cultures, however, is lacking. In 2019, 101 Chinese (52% girls) and 98 Dutch (49% girls) children, ages 4 and 5, were asked to estimate how well they would perform on both a motor and a memory task. Children from both countries overestimated their performance to the same extent (ηp2 = .077 and .027 for the motor and memo…
Children’s domain-specific self-evaluations and global self-worth: A preregistered cross-cultural meta-analysis
Which domain-specific self-evaluations are most central to children’s global self-worth? And does this differ between countries with different levels of collectivism–individualism? We conducted a preregistered cross-cultural meta-analysis to address these questions. We included 141 independent samples (21 countries/regions, 584 cross-sectional effect sizes), totaling 33,120 participants in middle to late childhood, a critical age for self-worth d…
Green teens: Understanding and promoting adolescents’ sustainable engagement
Young people are disproportionally impacted by heatwaves, floods, droughts, and other impacts of climate change. They also have unique potential to catalyze the transformative sustainable change that the world needs now. How can this potential be leveraged? In this perspective, we present the sustainability motive-alignment hypothesis to understand and harness young peoples’, especially adolescents’, potential for sustainable engagement. The hypo…
Supporting youth emotionally when communicating about climate change: A self-determination theory approach
Communicating with adolescents about climate change can be challenging if we want to safeguard their emotional well-being. Here, we evaluate the emotional impact of climate change communication that is informed by self-determination theory (SDT). We conducted two experiments with samples of ethnically diverse adolescents from the United States to examine adolescents’ emotions when reading needs-aligned, needs-misaligned, and needs-neutral (contro…
Feeling anxious and being engaged in a warming world: Climate anxiety and adolescents' pro‐environmental behavior
BACKGROUND: Climate anxiety is increasingly prevalent among adolescents worldwide. Are climate-anxious adolescents prone to engage in pro-environmental behavior? Or might the association between climate anxiety and pro-environmental be curvilinear, such that high levels of climate anxiety become 'paralyzing'? And do these associations depend on whether adolescents believe that, with effort, the worst impacts of climate change can still be prevent…
Children’s overestimation of performance across age, task, and historical time: A meta-analysis
Children tend to overestimate their performance on a variety of tasks and activities. The present meta-analysis examines the specificity of this phenomenon across age, tasks, and more than five decades of historical time (1968–2021). Self-overestimation was operationalized as the ratio between children's prospective self-estimates of task performance and their actual (i.e., objectively measured) task performance. A total of 246 effect sizes from …
When sustainability aligns with adolescent motives: Development and validation of the Sustainability Motive-Alignment Scale (SMAS)
The sustainability motive-alignment hypothesis posits that adolescents will be motivated to act sustainably when they view sustainable behavior as aligned with their motives for autonomy and peer status. Based on this hypothesis, we developed the Sustainability Motive-Alignment Scale (SMAS), a brief self-report scale of individual differences in sustainability motive-alignment. In four studies across two relatively individualistic (U.S., Netherla…
Promoting adolescents' pro‐environmental behavior: A motive‐alignment approach
Most adolescents are concerned about climate change. What helps them to act on their concerns? This preregistered randomized experiment tested whether adolescents' pro-environmental behavior can be promoted by framing the behavior as compatible with their autonomy motive. Dutch adolescents (N = 319, ages 12-17, 57.7% girls, predominantly indicating "Dutch" or "bicultural" identities) viewed a campaign-style video that explained the causes of clim…
Nostalgia Promotes Parents’ Tradition Transfer to Children by Strengthening Parent-Child Relationship Closeness
Parental tradition transfer to children is pivotal for their socialization, identity formation, and culture perpetuation. But what motivates parents to transfer traditions to their children? We hypothesized that nostalgia, an emotion strengthening interpersonal bonds, would promote tradition transfer through parent-child relationship closeness. We tested these hypotheses using cross-sectional (Studies 1 and 4), cross-lagged (Study 2 and preregist…
Psychology (26 works) · Social Psychology (25 works) · Developmental psychology (23 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (7 works) · Narcissism (7 works) · Personality Traits and Psychology (7 works) · Behavioral Health and Interventions (6 works) · Environmental Education and Sustainability (6 works) · Self-esteem (6 works)