{"id":124,"date":"2011-01-05T15:26:36","date_gmt":"2011-01-05T15:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/?p=124"},"modified":"2011-04-13T11:43:58","modified_gmt":"2011-04-13T11:43:58","slug":"peer-rejection-and-social-understanding-a-vicious-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/?p=124","title":{"rendered":"Peer rejection and social understanding: A vicious cycle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tweet<\/a><\/p>

Banerjee, R., Watling, D., and Caputi, M. (In Press). Peer relations and the understanding of faux pas<\/em>: Longitudinal evidence for bidirectional associations. Child Development.<\/em><\/p>\n

Peer rejection and social understanding:\u00a0 A vicious cycle<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many research studies over the last twenty-five years have helped us to trace children\u2019s development of social understanding, particularly how they come to make sense of people\u2019s behavior in terms of their thoughts and feelings.\u00a0 But, surprisingly, we do not yet know much about how this kind of social understanding maps on to the relationships children have within their peer groups.\u00a0 This study is the first to provide strong evidence of a vicious cycle whereby early peer rejection seems to make it harder for children to develop a mature understanding of complex social situations, which in turn makes it likely that the children end up becoming more rejected.<\/p>\n

We worked with one group of children aged 5-6 years old and one group of children aged 8-9 years old, and followed them over three school years.\u00a0 Once a year, children completed a measure of one aspect of social understanding \u2013 the understanding of situations where one person commits a faux pas (unintentionally insults another person) \u2013 as well as a survey that helped us gauge the extent to which each child was rejected within his or her class at school. By focusing on the characteristics of each individual child, we were able to see how early differences in peer rejection (at ages 7 and 8 years) predicted poorer later social understanding (at age 9 and 10 years).\u00a0 Furthermore, this analysis helped us see how those who still struggled with the social understanding task at age 10 ended up with higher levels of peer rejection at age 11.<\/p>\n

These findings were consistent with our expectations that being rejected by one\u2019s peers makes it much harder to learn about the more subtle aspects of social interaction.\u00a0 And in turn, failure to develop this kind of sophisticated understanding can ultimately lead to even more rejection.\u00a0 These findings are important because they extend our theoretical understanding of children\u2019s social reasoning.\u00a0 Adding to some existing work showing the importance of the family context, our study highlights the importance of children\u2019s peer relations in the development of social understanding.<\/p>\n

From a practical point of view, too, these results can help us develop strategies for supporting children who are socially rejected at school.\u00a0 Increasingly, educational programs are being designed to support \u2018social and emotional learning\u2019, and the evidence from our study suggests that work which improves children\u2019s understanding of commonplace social events (such as unintentional insults) could be of great importance in helping rejected children to develop more positive relationships with their peers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TweetBanerjee, R., Watling, D., and Caputi, M. (In Press). Peer relations and the understanding of faux pas: Longitudinal evidence for bidirectional associations. Child Development. Peer rejection and social understanding:\u00a0 A vicious cycle Many research studies over the last twenty-five years have helped us to trace children\u2019s development of social understanding, particularly how they come to Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publication-announcement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":208,"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialdevelopment.psychologyresearch.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}