Describing the Dark Side of Preadolescents' Peer Experiences: Four Questions (and Data) on Preadolescents' enemies

“I Hated Her Guts!”: Emerging Adults’ Recollections of the Formation, Maintenance, and Termination of Antipathetic Relationships During High School

“…Furthermore, these children expected a hypothetical victim to retaliate more often when the provocateur was an enemy than a friend or neutral acquaintance. Similarly, Parker and Gamm (2003) found that middle school students tended to overestimate their mutual antipathies' negative characteristics and underestimate their positive characteristics. Thus, it might be expected that following the formation of an antipathetic relationship, real behaviors (i.e., aggression and avoidance), high rates of retaliation, and biased perceptions (i.e., hostile attributions of ambiguous events) may maintain and intensify the enmity.…”

“…Prevalence estimates from the six studies (reviewed above) using mutual negative sociometric nominations ranged from 8% to 67% of children and adolescents being involved in at least one antipathetic relationship. Perhaps most relevant to this study are the estimates from the adolescent sample of Abecassis et al (2002), who found that 17% of adolescents had same-gender antipathies and 13% had other-gender antipathies (results averaged across genders), and from Parker and Gamm (2003), who found that 58% of adolescents had at least one mutual antipathy. Although the prevalences from these two findings are quite different, it should be noted that they are both considerably higher than findings with young children (e.g., Hayes, Gershman, & Bolin, 1980, found only two individuals who mutually disliked one another among 78 preschoolers).…”

Mutual antipathies during early adolescence: More than just rejection

“…Some of the recent research on mutual antipathies has followed this same line of reasoning and many researchers have presented analyses in which they both do and do not statistically control for rejection (e.g., Abecassis, Hartup, Haselager, Scholte, & Van Lieshout, 2002;Parker & Gamm, 2003;Rodkin, Pearl, Farmer, & Van Acker, 2003;Schwartz, Hopmeyer-Gorman, Toblin, & Abou-ezzedine, 2003). Consistent with research on rejection, which has been found to be associated with a variety of negative outcomes such as academic difficulties, victimisation, internalising problems, externalising problems, and immaturity (Bagwell et al, 1998;DeRosier & Thomas, 2003;Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 1998), studies have shown that having a mutual antipathy is independently associated with psychosocial adjustment problems.…”

“…Antipathies may also serve a self-protective function. Being rejected by a disliked peer may be more easily dismissed and discounted than a more diffuse rejection by classmates that one cannot pinpoint (Parker & Gamm, 2003).…”

Popularity breeds contempt: The evolution of reputational dislike relations and friendships in high school

“…Research on child/adolescent developmental psychology has shown that negative peer relationships are correlated with maladjustment, including aggression and victimization, peer rejection, peer acceptance, perceived popularity, social preference, and other interpersonal processes and behaviors (Card, 2010; Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 1998; Witkow, Bellmore, Nishina, Juvonen, & Graham, 2005). In developmental psychology research, negative relations form a social context of “antipathetic relationships” (i.e., mutual dislike at the dyad level) that are distinct from group-level “peer rejections” (i.e., sum of nominations of being disliked by peers that reflect a collection of opinions about a target individual) (Card, 2010; Parker & Gamm, 2003). The constructs of antipathetic relationships and peer rejection are modestly correlated but still confound each other, methodologically and conceptually.…”