Psychology of Popularity

Report Submitted by

Ms. Muskaan Abdul Kadir Mulla

(209851)

For
Internal Assessment
In

Psychopathology
(PGPSY402)

MA Clinical Psychology

April 2021
 Weeks Topic Covered

Week 1 How is Popularity Affecting Your Life as

an Adult?

Week 2 How Do We Study Popularity

Scientifically?

Week 3 Why are Some People More Popular

Than Others? (Part 1)

Week 4 Why are Some People More Popular

Than Others? (Part 2)

Week 5 How Does Popularity Change Our Mood,

Feelings, and Behaviors? (Part 1)

How Does Popularity Change Our Mood,

Week 6
Feelings, and Behaviors? (Part 2)
 DECLARATION

I, Muskaan Abdul kadir Mulla (209851) studying MA Clinical Psychology

Course at Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil College, Vashi, Navi Mumbai. As a part of the
study and assessment, I’m submitting the assignment on PSYCHOLOGY OF
POPULARITY for the Course in PSYCHOPATHOLOGY (PGPSY402).

Further, I would like to declare that the tasks related to Course are done by
me alone under the guidance of Vaishnavi Ma’am.

Signature:

Student’s Name: Muskaan Abdul Kadir Mulla

Date: 19/04/2021
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my sincere thanks to my mentor Ms. Vaishnvi without

whom this coursera course wouldn’t have come forth. Special thanks to my
encouraging friends and my parents who supported me and motivated me to
continue with my efforts. To the amazing assistant professors Ms. Divya Pillai, Mr.
Rohit Iyer, Mr. Vishal who taught us every concept which helped me to complete
my course and report. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the Rayat
Shikshan Sanstha’s Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil College, Vashi to give me an
opportunity to showcase and pursue my interest.

Ms. Muskaan Abdul Kadir Mulla

Course Details

Name of the course: Psychology of Popularity

Institution: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Duration: 6 weeks

Syllabus

In week 1, I studied how popularity is changing your social information processing and DNA
expression.

In week 2, I studied about the ways that we have identified different subgroups of kids and adults
who have different popularity profiles.

In week 3, I studied what behaviors popular people engage in, and what types of specific
behaviors make people unpopular almost immediately. Implications for adult relationships will
be discussed.

In week 4, I studied why facial and body attractiveness plays a role in popularity and how
parents can make their children more popular.

In week 5, I studied recent findings regarding the links between popularity and psychopathology.

In week 6, I studied why popular people really do have better skills and life outcomes compared
to others.

Method of Assessment: Quiz

Report
Content covered weekly
 Week 1

How is Popularity Affecting Your Life as an Adult?

Children age 3 reliably measure popularity and can tell you which kids are the most popular,
least popular and which kids are not affiliating with their peers at all. As we pass through
childhood and enter adolescence there are actually some biological reasons why popularity starts
playing a big role. Adolescents' brains start to mature, but the whole brain doesn't mature at the
exact same time. It actually starts in the back and then the development of the brain kind of
moves up forward. So what that means is that the parts of the brain that are developing the most
are the parts that are below the cortex. In alternative words, the components that are shared with
most mammals. and people are quite instinctual drives and things that you just need for fast
rewards. And one of those pieces in the limbic system that's really important is the desire for
social rewards. And of course, when we think about adolescence, usually the things we
remember the most are not the things that happened with our parents or the things that happened
with our courses in high school. But we're really thinking about who was popular, how much
was I embarrassed in front of other peers? How much can I make sure that I'm meeting people to
be friends with or to date, and that becomes really important. So now if we see social media is
really pulling us all back into that adolescent world of caring about who responded to our
Facebook likes and posts and how many Twitter followers we have. And those photos we tend to
place up, and the way many of us have paid attention to it. It's quite in a very approach of taking
part in out this concept of recognition everywhere once more.

Some researchers, including Naomi Eisenberger, from UCLA. who set to try and do some
studies gazing individuals within the magnetic resonance imaging machine within the magnet.
Instead of getting real pain, they asked them to participate in some interactions where they were
getting excluded by others. It turns out they were very surprised to find that when people got the
signal to say that they were getting excluded. The part of their brain that lit up were the
components of the brain that illuminate once we expertise real physical pain. And this type of led
to the concept that there could be one thing known as social pain. we tend to experience social
exclusion within the very same approach that we tend to experience physical pain.
Some psychologists studied Social Information Processing. Nicki Crick and Ken Dodge were the
first to develop a model. There is a way of taking every single social experience of yours and
zooming it down into super slow mode. Step 1 cue encode event, step 2 cue interpret, step 3 goal
clarification, step 4 response construction, step 5 response decision.

Hostile Attribution Bias refers to the cue interpretation phase. People with a hostile attribution
bias that actually affects all the different areas of social information processing. Whereas
Rejection Sensitivity Bias refers to rejection sensitivity. People with rejection sensitivity bias
tend to themselves and get depressed and may get much more emotionally concerned about
things that happened to them that were rejected in some way.

Week 2

How Do We Study Popularity Scientifically?

A person tells you how popular they are through 1. A self report but it has its biases some tend to
overreport and some underreport themself. 2. Parent report with consent 3. Teacher-report but it
was seen that even teachers are biased toward the kids who are smart and intelligent. 4.
Observations and 5. Peer report.

Another way of asking peers about children’s popularity is by giving them a play rating scale to
students with their name in the start indicated with smiley faces, how much do you really like
playing with this child. There were very clear patterns seen. Kids as young as 3 years old,
showed patterns where some kids did not frequently like to play with few kids.

5 Categories of “Sociometric Popularity” are popular, neglected, rejected, controversial and

average.

John Coie and Janis Kupersmidt studied what happens if you take kids who are very popular,
really rejected, or neglected, controversial or average and you introduce them to new peers/new
context. So for the first 2 weeks they observed there was no relationship between how well the
kids were liked in this new play group, and how well liked they were in their previous schools
but after the third week, they found that after three hours of these kids playing together, all the
kids were starting to fall back into their old patterns. These were kids that never had met each
other before and they only had played now for three hours, over one hour for each of three
weeks. And by the end of week three the popular kid was now the popular kid in this play group.
The rejected kid was now the rejected kid in this play group and so on.

So a new form of popularity in adolescence can be determined by measuring social preference,

measuring sociometric status and by measuring social reputation.

Week 3

Why are Some People More Popular Than Others? (Part 1)

Some factors that make people popular more quickly than others are behavior, physical
appearance, intelligence and family factors. But how do we assess these behaviours? Statistics
show the kids who are rejected are very aggressive, kids who are rejected fall into a subcategory
called rejected aggressive and the others are those that are rejected withdrawn, and you can see
that those rejected kids are also much more likely than others to be withdrawn and they are not
very good at social skills. The controversial kids are pretty aggressive too but what makes them
controversial is that they are really uniquely able to be aggressive, but also sociable, highly
sociable at the exact same time. Some behaviours of popular kids are athletic ability,
cooperativeness, leadership, friendship skills and positive social interaction. Behaviours of
rejected kids are easily angered, physically aggressive, unhappy, tensed and anxious. Behaviours
of neglected kids are unhappy and less disruptive than others. And lastly behaviours of
controversial kids are funny and make kids laugh.

Types of aggression are

1. Forms
- overt, physical (hits, threatens or pushes others)
- Relational (damage a relationship, damage a social reputation)

2. Functions
- proactive and reactive.

Functions of aggression are reactive aggression and proactive aggression. In reactive aggression
there is a response to frustration which could be internally derived or externally provoked and
uncontrolled (hot blooded). In proactive aggression there is goal oriented and dominance.

Week 4

Why are Some People More Popular Than Others? (Part 2)

Some factors why facial attractiveness so strongly related to popularity among youth are 1. The
role of physical attractiveness and 2. Fitness related evaluation theory. People also do look over
the body mass index and body socialization. And ofcourse same thing happens in boys rather
than focusing on obesity, they focus on lean muscularity. When it comes to popularity we
strongly value body shapes, even children experience stigma towards normal bodies and fewer
have idealized shapes anymore.

Moving on to the connection between intelligence and popularity. The youngsters WHO area
unit the smallest amount well-liked, in alternative words, people who area unit rejected, tend to
have the lowest levels of ratio and conjointly very cheap levels of college accomplishment
significantly people who area unit rejected and conjointly aggressive. analysis has suggested
people who are a unit terribly intelligent appear to possess sensible social downside finding
skills. Overall, the results showed that there is one thing regarding being intelligent that's
powerfully rewarded once youngsters are a unit young, in all probability as a result of it's doing
specifically what it's that adults need youngsters to try to do. however if those youngsters do not
find out how to faux that they are not making an attempt thus exhausting and currently adopting
new peer values, they're punished, and therefore the information suggests that they will increase
in distress and clinical symptoms as a result.

Research does show that parents too determine how popular you are. As they have their own
social skills because of parent's own psychopathology. As well as other possible factors that
might be genetically transmitted or models within the parent environment that might lead to kid's
social competence, and might lead to popularity.

Week 5
 How Does Popularity Change Our Mood, Feelings, and Behaviors? (Part 1)

Effects of popularity on later outcomes which includes outcomes like Externalizing,

Internalizing, health risk behaviours and adult outcomes . Externalizing includes aggression,
delinquency, deviant behavior, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, school
truancy. Internalizing includes depression, anxiety, self-esteem. Health risk behaviors include
substance use and sexual risk. Adult outcomes include relationship satisfaction, employment and
health.

Research and theory suggest that there's a way in which we can understand about sophisticated
fashion. How is it that kids who are rejected or kids that are popular show these dramatic
differences even after so many years. And one of the ways that people have looked at that is
looking at transactional model. A transactional model refers to the idea that we humans transact
with our environment, we elicit information from our environment, and our environment elicits
responses from us. And that's a mutual reciprocal dialectic. The theory suggests that it might be
that when we engage in social behavior, like for instance, if you're very popular, if you're very
good at leadership and likability, and people really enjoy your presence. And this social behavior
is going to lead you to becoming high status, popular because you are high status, you are going
to get more opportunities in your environment.

Types of rejected children are rejected-aggressive, rejected-withdrawn and rejected-other so

aggressive behavior might be why they were rejected. Sir John Coie and his colleagues did a
study which is, how important this idea of social behavior and rejection interacting with each
other might be for predicting externalizing symptoms. What they found was a comparison, we
can say that those kids who are neither aggressive, nor rejected about 18% of them had
experienced some diagnosis. If you're neither aggressive nor rejected in this particular
community, 18% likelihood of having this diagnosis years later. The kids who were rejected, but
not aggressive about a third of them have this diagnosis. The kids who were aggressive, but not
rejected about 40% of them had this diagnosis.

Research has shown that there is something about these rejected aggressive kids that makes their
rejection more likely to be stable. Results have demonstrated that of the kids who are aggressive
and not rejected or not aggressive and rejected, they're very unlikely to be doing okay years later
and it's very likely that these kids are going to continue to be rejected and aggressive even years
later and it's possible that the aggressive form of rejection is the most stable form of peer
rejection. Some results to suggest that also may be true. It might be the case that these rejected-
aggressive kids have worse social skills than the kids who are rejected-withdrawn or rejected
others. Interestingly, rejected aggressive kids are the worst at predicting how rejected they are. A
lot of rejected kids know that they're rejected, but it turns out that that's mostly the rejected
withdrawn kids. The kids who are rejected-aggressive have no idea that they're rejected in many
cases. These kids actually think that they're very well-liked and that everyone likes them and
really, enjoys the way they interact with others.but it also suggests that these kids have a really
difficult time with social skills and understanding where they fit within the network. And that
might be something that is particularly important for understanding why they go on to have such
dire outcomes.

Week 6

How Does Popularity Change Our Mood, Feelings, and Behaviors? (Part 2)

Popularity related health risk behaviors may include substance use, sexual risk behavior, self-
injurious behaviors, weight-related behaviors. and these behaviours are being studied as they are
associated with health outcomes and mortality in adolescence & adulthood and co-occur with
other psychiatric symptoms.

Health risk behaviors can be associated with positive and negative peer experiences, social
reputation may be most relevant for understanding health risk behaviors, Implications for peer
influence. May be important since popular kids (high in social reputation) can be so influential.
The thing that's really interesting about this is that it's those really high status kids that end up
being very influential within their environment. So the fact that they're the ones at most risk for
health risk behaviors has major implications for all the less popular kids in school. Because they
are the ones that are setting the norm that everyone else is going to follow.

Learning outcome: Knowledge gain or Skill acquired

Week No. Knowledge Gained Skill Mastered

I How is popularity affecting your Introduction to popularity.

life as an adult?
Is popularity important for us.

How popularity affects us thousands of

times a day.

What is hostile attribution bias and

rejection sensitivity bias.

II How do we study popularity Who can accurately tell you about a

scientifically? child’s popularity?

Asking peers about children’s popularity

5 categories of sociometric popularity.

Does popularity change when moving to a

new context?

A new form of popularity in adolescence.

III Why are Some People More Social behaviors that make people popular
Popular Than Others? (Part 1) so quickly.

Forms of aggression that are related to

popularity and rejection.

Functions of aggression that are related to

popularity and rejection.

IV Why are Some People More Why is facial attractiveness so strongly

Popular Than Others? (Part 2) related to popularity among youth.
 Body attractiveness and popularity.

Can smart kids be popular?

How did your parents determine how

popular you were.

V How Does Popularity Change The effects of popularity on later

Our Mood, Feelings, and outcomes.
Behaviors? (Part 1)
How does popularity predict delinquency?

Different types of rejected children.

Rejected-aggressive children and their

difficulties.

Popularity predicts internalizing

symptoms.

Depression predicts peer rejection.

VI How Does Popularity Change Popularity and its relation with health risk
Our Mood, Feelings, and behaviors.
Behaviors? (Part 2)
Popular teens are not as risky as we
thought.

Results
Performance in weekly assignment
 Week No. Type of assessment Marks secured

I Quiz 100%

II Quiz 100%

III Quiz 100%

IV Quiz 100%

V Quiz 100%

VI Quiz 100%

Secured grade/ marks: 100%

Conclusion

In this course I got to learn about popularity, is popularity important for us, how popularity
affects us thousands of times a day, what is hostile attribution bias and rejection sensitivity bias,
asking peers about children’s popularity, 5 categories of sociometric popularity, a new form of
popularity in adolescence, social behaviors that make people popular so quickly, forms of
aggression that are related to popularity and rejection, functions of aggression that are related to
popularity and rejection and much more. This course had a quiz as an evaluation. The experience
of this course was great as it was the interesting topic I came across.

Muskaan Abdul Kadir Mulla

(209851)
Date: 19/04/2021