Report Playground politics -- what drives rejection amongst children?

tom_mai78101

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Children learn how to make friends and interact with others in the first few years of school. Unfortunately, rejection is part of daily life in a classroom and we can all remember the bitter feeling of being left out by classmates. Some children suffer widespread rejection at school and this can this can have a long-term effect.

In an effort to reduce negative relationships, research has traditionally focused on the behaviour of the disliked child, asking, 'What did they do to warrant rejection?' Blaming rejection on a child's behaviour, however, does not explain why an aggressive child might sometimes be a popular classmate. In addition, the bad behaviour of a rejected child may not actually be the cause, but rather the consequence, of being rejected.

New research, published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, approaches this subject in a different way. It asked the children doing the rejecting, the 'rejecters', for the reasons they disliked certain children. The study revealed the act of rejection is complex - the behaviour of the rejected child is only partly, or not at all, to blame.

"We find that the rejected child's behaviour does not lead directly or inevitably to rejection", says Francisco Juan García Bacete, a Professor in the Department of Developmental, Educational and Social Psychology and Methodology, at the Jaume I University, Spain. "Instead, what actually leads to rejection are the rejecters' interpretations of the child's behaviour, and whether they think it will have a negative impact on themselves or their social group."


Read more here. (Eureka Alert)
 
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