The kids who were aggressive, but
not rejected about 40% of them had this diagnosis.
But clearly, the big concern was when you
had the combination of being both aggressive and rejected.
So in this case, you can see that about two-third of the kids,
years later had a diagnosis for externalizing disorder.
That's a remarkably high amount and it really, clearly demonstrates,
there's something about the combination of rejection
with aggression that's more important than either one of those alone.
So a lot of the research has really been looking at externalizing symptoms in boys,
but, at least here in the United States, there's been growing concern about
the number of externalizing symptoms among girls.
So it seems that within about a ten year period towards the end of last millennium,
we saw that the rate of externalizing symptoms in girls has increased
quite dramatically, we've seen a huge increase in delinquent crimes.
Specifically, among girls at a pace,
much higher than the increase in those same crimes among boys.
We've seen actually, assaults and person directed aggression
increasing 155% among girls, which again is much higher than among boys.
And we've also seen huge increases in other kinds of crimes among
girls in particular, especially when it comes to weapon carrying or
getting into physical fights.
So because of that, some of the research that I did, actually back when I was
a graduate student with my Adviser Annette La Greca and
was to try and understand whether some of the results that people have found for
boys might also apply to girls.
And what my adviser had were some data for girls in grades four through six.
So these would be kids who are about 12 years old down to about 8,
9 years old or so.
And data were then available for them six years later when they towards
the end of adolescence in their former schooling.
And what we actually found was that the girls that were aggressive or
more likely to show severe adolescent aggression six years later, but
the results were actually very clear that it was the combination of aggression and
pure rejection.
So here peer rejection was changing the nature of the relationship between
childhood and adolescent aggression.
That combo was a very powerful predictor of adolescent aggression.
And interestingly, the effects were just as strong for girls as we've seen for
boys in many prior studies.
So next, what we'll talk about is what exactly is happening with these rejected
aggressive kids that may be playing a role in their externalizing outcomes so
many years later.
Stay tuned.