[MUSIC] Hi, welcome back. We are talking about follow-forward studies that have tested a causal model to understand whether popularity in childhood may predict certain outcomes later on, either later in childhood, in adolescence, or even in adulthood. And what we're focusing on now specifically are studies that have looked at externalizing symptoms. So remember, those are symptoms like juvenile delinquency, illegal behavior, or other types of aggressive, oppositional behavior. And the question is, is being popular, or being rejected, something that predicts increases in that level of behavior? And actually there have been dozens and dozens of studies that have looked at this before. I'm just going to talk about a couple just to give you a flavor of what some of this research has suggested. And one of these is a study that was done by Tom Ollendick back in the early 90s. What he did was he went into fourth grade classrooms. He got information from kids using a peer nomination sociometric assessment, like we've previously talked about. Kids were asked to nominate those folks that were liked the most, and those peers that were liked the least, and from that information, he was able to compute five sociometric status categories of how well-liked kids were. Popular, Rejected, Neglected, Controversial, and Average. And then, since this was a follow-forward study, he stopped and waited. And about five years later, when these kids were in ninth grade, he went back and he got some information to see how these kids were doing in terms of externalizing symptoms. Now importantly, he controlled for how much these kids had already shown preliminary evidence of externalizing symptoms back when they were in fourth grade. So this allows us to see, does popularity or sociometric status category predict who might experience externalizing symptoms above and beyond their prior proclivities towards those types of symptoms? What you'll see here in this figure is that the findings were quite remarkable. He asked both kids themselves, now adolescents in the ninth grade, and also teachers to report how much kids were engaging in externalizing symptoms, using a clinical instrument designed to understand severe levels of aggressive and deviant behavior. And what you can see here really clearly is that the kids who were rejected back in fourth grade now had remarkably higher scores on both self-reported and especially on teacher-reported ratings of the kids' externalizing behavior. Now, you can see here that the kids who are controversial also had somewhat elevated rates, and again, remember, those controversial kids grow up to be peer-perceived popular or high-end social reputation or status. We'll get back to that a little bit later. But for now, really focus on those rejected kids and how dramatically higher their scores are even after controlling for prior aggression. What he also was able to do was look at the actual number of times that these kids had court offenses by looking at county records. Now what's nice about this is it's not based on anyone's self report or any teacher report that might be biased. It's specifically looking at an objective index of how much kids did deviant behavior, well, and they got caught, because they were brought into court. And what you can see here again is that fourth-grade peer status predicted ninth-grade outcomes, and again those rejected kids and controversial kids really grow up to show a lot more externalizing symptoms. Okay, here's another study that was done by Janice Kupersmidt and Charlotte Patterson also at around the same time, and what they did is they were looking at kids' behavior, their sociometric status, and then they waited a couple of years as they transitioned into adolescence. And they specifically looked at critical levels of difficulties in externalizing symptoms. So these are pretty severe demonstrations of aggression and deviancy. And what they found was when you look at these clinical symptoms, the rejected kids far and away are experiencing way, way more of these outcomes than others. In fact, about one out of every four rejected kids in childhood, a couple years later had clinical levels of symptoms. And again, this was after controlling for prior levels of aggression. So there seems to be something very unique about peer rejection that is predicting increases in these behaviors. So these were results that were done in the early 90s. Of course it's been a while since then and there's been a lot of research and theory to suggest maybe there's a way in which we can understand in a more sophisticated fashion, how is it that kids who are rejected or kids that are popular show these dramatic differences even years later? And one of the ways that people have looked at that is looking at something referred to as a transactional model. So let's talk about this for a second. A transactional model is referring to the idea that we as humans transact with our environment. So in other words, we elicit information from our environment, and our environment elicits responses from us. And that's a mutual reciprocal dialectic. If you walk into a room and you engage in certain behavior, people will change the way they were going to interact with you based on the types of behavior you presented when you walked in the room. Transactions can happen within an instant, or they could happen over the course of years. What you can see here on this figure is the idea that how it is that we're behaving, how we're developing our behavior, is something that changes over time. So you can see that arrow pointed to the right, showing you that that is going to develop over time. But also, what you can see is that our environment changes over time. I don't mean that there are different people in your environment, although sometimes there are. I mean that your environment expects different things from you. They expects you to behave differently, they respond to even the same behavior in different ways depending on how long they've known you or how old you are in the case of children and adolescents. So there is this mutual interaction that's occurring between your own behavior and how the environment works. So let's think about how that might apply to understanding the effects of popularity, and specifically, rejection. So what the theory suggests is that it might be that when we engage in social behavior, like for instance, if you're very popular, if you're very good at leadership and likability, and people really enjoy your presence. And that social behavior is going to lead to you becoming high status, popular. Because you are high status, you are going to get more opportunities in your environment. So let's think about this for kids. You're going to be invited more often to go to someone's house to play. You're going to be invited to parties. You're going to be invited to join others on the playground. And each time you're invited, your environment responds to you. It's going to give you another opportunity to learn social skills. So, if you're likable and you're invited to things more often, then at each of those invitations, you're learning how to share, you're learning how to negotiate conflicts, you're learning how to accept multiple invitations. In essence, you're learning how to become even better at social behavior. Well of course, that's going to lead you to become even more popular over time. And as you grow up, it's going to lead you to have advanced skills in how to handle different types of social situations of increasing sophistication. So what we might see is that those extra opportunities lead to more favorable regard among peers, which are going to lead to, ultimately, more development of social behaviors and so on. As kids grow up into adolescence, we'll see a lot of those ways in which social behaviors with peers starts to translate into the way that they can engage in social behaviors with potential romantic partners. And as kids go from adolescence to young adulthood, we'll see that transactional model continue to play a role because those same skills and extra opportunities are going to help us to transition into workplace behaviors, and ultimately behaviors within our committed longterm relationship and so on. So think about this exact same effect really quickly for rejection. The kids that are experiencing a little bit of aggressive behavior are going to be rejected right away. Remember, we talked about before, within even just three hours, kids are going to start to be turned off by them and not want to play with them anymore. And we saw in one of those previous videos, that they actually spend less time with others. They are shunned and rejected. What that means, in that moment or when occurring over weeks and months is that these rejected kids have fewer opportunities to know how to respond to invitations or how to interact with others. Because of that they become more rejected over time. They lose out on more opportunities to learn skills and so on and so on, and maybe for that reason we see these rejected kids going on have pretty severe outcomes years, even decades later. Because it set off a cascade of transactions that's really been affecting them in a cyclical fashion over and over for years. So we're going to talk a little bit more about how that might play a role, and how the transactional seems to look in data that have been looked at since the early 90s and how this is all playing a role specifically for externalizing symptoms.
