The level of popularity you experienced in childhood and adolescence is still affecting you today in ways that you may not even realize. Learn about how psychologists study popularity and how these same concepts can be used in adulthood to be more successful at work, become better parents, and have a happier life.
How Does Popularity Predict Internalizing Symptoms?
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Del curso dictado por The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Psychology of Popularity
433 calificaciones
De la lección
How Does Popularity Change Our Mood, Feelings, and Behaviors? (Part 1)
We will discuss recent findings regarding the links between popularity and psychopathology.
Conoce a los instructores
Dr. Mitch PrinsteinJohn Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Author of Popular: The Power of Likeability in a Status-Obsessed World
UNC Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
[MUSIC]
Hi, welcome back.
We are talking about the ways that popularity effects longer term outcomes.
And we're now talking about internalizing symptoms.
So internalizing symptoms are things like depression, anxiety, loneliness, low
self esteem, or other types of distress that not a lot of people would see,
but we really might feel.
And in the time that we have, I'm going to focus specifically on
one form of internalizing symptoms, and that is depression.
It's actually really interesting.
There's something very unique about the transition to adolescence
that seems to be related to a dramatic increase in the prevalence of depression.
So, what we see actually from the prepubertal years Into pubertal
development, right around age 13, and this is seen in many nations around the world,
is that depression starts to become far more prevalent right around age 13 or so.
We also see a huge increase in the number of completed suicides.
In fact, six times as many youths are completing or successfully
committing suicide in adolescence as compared to earlier in childhood.
But, perhaps what's most interesting is that we see there's a gender difference
that really shows up at that age 13.
It's not only because of changes at puberty.
It's not just a biological reason.
But we see that there's something that's happening at that transition
where girls start to become far more likely to report depression.
And also, the vast majority of suicide attempts are by females.
Boys are more likely to complete suicide because of their use of more lethal means.
But girls are more likely to attempt suicide,
starting that transition at adolescence.
And there's been a lot of research across the world to demonstrate that,
by the age of around 20 to 25,
one out of every five young women has had a major depressive episode.
That's a remarkably high percentage of young women,
who are experiencing very severe episodes of depression.
It's remarkable how few people go to get treatment for
depression given how prevalent this is, how debilitating, and how dangerous.
We wouldn't ignore symptoms of a physical illness.
But we seem to have so many young women experiencing depression, and
we don't really attend to it as much as we would unfortunately.
What's interesting is that what we're finding is that we can understand a little
bit about this dramatic increase in depressive symptoms,
perhaps particularly among females, by looking at these young women's
experiences with popularity when they were younger in early childhood.
So there's been some research using a concurrent design.
In other words, looking at which kids might be popular,
rejected, neglected, controversial, and average, and
looking at the same exact time which kids are the most depressed.
And what you can see here is whether depression is reported
by adolescents themselves, by peers, or by teachers,
those kids who are rejected are much more likely to be experiencing depression.
Probably not a big surprise.
We talked before about the idea that a good number of rejected kids
are rejected-withdrawn.
And many kids who are experiencing depression might be
simultaneously withdrawn.
So what you're seeing here, with concurrent or contemporaneous findings is
suggesting that depression may be a predictor of rejection, or
rejection may be a predictor of depression.
So what we need to do is we need to look at more follow-forward
studies to see whether it is that rejection or other forms of
popularity in general might be related to increases in depression over time.
And there's actually been some research looking at exactly this.
Thinking about this with three different models, and this is actually one
of the areas of research that my research lab focuses on most closely,
so I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the research that myself and
my colleagues and students have done in our lab.
Specifically, I'm going to talk about three different models that help us to
understand why it is that popularity might predict depression over time.
One of those models has to do with cognitive vulnerability.
One has to go with cognitive dissonance.
And of course, we've previously talked about social information processing,
and the idea that there might be some kids who experience rejection and they go on to
experience rejection sensitivity or more critical self-referring attributions,
which really mirrors what we just talked about with externalizing symptoms.
But replaces hostile attribution bias with more of a depresogenic way
of processing social information.
So let's go ahead and talk about cognitive vulnerability.
There has been some research done by Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloiy many years ago,
that really highlighted that when we all experience a stressor, it is very
natural for us to make attributions for why that stressor occurred.
And we can attribute those to internal, global, or stable type for those reasons.
So for instance, let's say that you're in school and you fail a test.
If you were to fail that test, you might say, this has to do with me.
It's because of me personally that I failed the test.
I'm really stupid.
That would be an internal attribution that you're making.
It would also be perfectly appropriate to say, that teacher is kind of mean, or
that test was totally unfair.
That would be an external attribution.
We also can vary in terms of whether that attribution is global or specific.
So we might say well, I'm really not good at that subject or
I had a bad day on that particular day.
What happened on that test is something that really doesn't have to do with me as
a person, it just had to do with a very narrow specific event.
That would be adaptive.
But in the face of a negative event, a negative stressor,
saying that had to do with you in a global fashion,
it means that you are globally stupid, or bad at test taking, or not good at school.
That would be something that is
more detrimental to engage in that type of attribution.
And finally, many of us might experience a negative stressor and say well you know,
I had a bad day or that's something
I might not be doing well this particular semester or this particular week.
But some of us might say after a negative event that characterizes how we are over
a long period of time, so it's a stable type of attribution.
Well, all of us sometimes experience a negative stressor and
we make internal global stable attributions, and that's okay.
That happens to all of us every once in awhile.
But what Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson found was that there are some people that
most of the time seem to make internal global stable attributions for
negative events.
In addition, they seem to make external, specific,
and unstable attributions for positive events.
So in other words, if they get an A on a test or if they are asked out by someone
they're attracted to, they might say well this is probably an accident.
it probably had nothing to do with me, they must have been drunk or something.
I am sure that wouldn't ever happen to me again, and
it was probably only because I was wearing the particular clothes on that day.
I'm not really someone that gets that kind of attention.
So these are discounting the positive type of people and
accentuating the negative type of people.
But specifically in the way they attribute these events.
This is referred to as a depressogenic attributional style.
A global tendency to make these types of attributions most of the time.
Well, it might be that being rejected by peers is particularly important for
predicting depression, if you possess that type of depressogenic attributional style.
So, a vulnerability-stress hypothesis that has been suggested by many,
also including recent work by Ben Hanken,
has suggested that when we experience a negative event like, maybe peer rejection,
it's going to predict depression only among the subset of people that tend to
interpret negative events through a depressogenic attributional style.
And that's exactly what we looked at in a recent study.
What we did was, we looked at those kids who were rejected and
those kids who were not.
And we looked at that in terms of their overall social preference score.
So you can see that the higher their social preference score,
the more likely they are to be depicted here in a solid line.
We call them peer accepted.
And those who were rejected, we have depicted here in the dotted line.
And what you see here for these two lines are for boys.
And among those boys who were rejected,
it was particularly those who has a depressogenic attributional style
that showed the highest rates of depressive symptoms.
But perhaps most dramatically what you see here
is that we've found that the interaction between peer rejection and
cognitive vulnerability was further moderated by gender.
There's something about girls in particular who are rejected.
So you can see that in the green dash line, and also have a depressogenic
attributional style, that have the highest levels of depression compared to anyone.
So you can there that that combination, particularly for girls,
was more potent than that same combination for boys.
In other words, the green dashed line and the blue dashed line are crossing,
suggesting a significant interaction effect.
There's something about a depressogenic attributional style and
peer rejection that is particularly problematic for girls as compared to boys.
It might be that that has something to do with cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is when we have two conflicting beliefs that lead to distress.
In other words, we might engage in certain behaviors that we really don't
think are important, and then we wonder,
well why am I engaging in this behavior if I don't think it's important?
That causes the sense of dissonance.
So what dissonance produces in us is a sense that we need to resolve
that discrepancy.
Either we need to change our opinions, so it matches our behaviors, or
we need to change our behaviors so it matches our opinions.
Well it might be that cognitive dissonance, and
the inability to resolve cognitive dissonance is another reason why we might
see the prediction of depressive symptoms from peer status.
So what we did in our lab was we looked at those kids that were rejected by peers,
and again we were trying to understand whether those kids might be at risk for
depressive symptoms years later.
But what we did was, we asked kids how important do you think it is for
you to be liked and popular within your grade?
Some kids told us, I don't care, it's not important to me.
I have other friends or I really don't like the popular kids, and
I don't have strong feelings about being popular.
But there were some that said it's very important to me to be popular, and
we call that peer importance.
And what we found was, in the situation in which you are both rejected by peers,
and you thought it was very important to be liked by peers,
that was most predictive of depression.
And the reason why perhaps, is because unlike other forms of cognitive
dissonance, it's hard to change your behaviors in that situation.
In other words, if you really feel it's important to be popular and
you're not, it's really hard to suddenly become popular and change that so
you're kind of stuck.
You're rejected and you really want to be popular and because there's no way out of
that dissonance, it leads to depression over time and
that's exactly what our findings demonstrated.
So what we're going to talk about next, are not just ways that popularity might
play a role because of these cognitive factors like attributions and dissonance.
But also because there are ways that some kids who are rejected by peers,
actively engage in behaviors that makes other people reject them even further, and
that might be something that leads to depression even more strongly.
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