Hateful Children: Guess What You Have No Friends
01/30/11 03:55 PM
http://www.sciencenews.or...ships_sometimes_illusory_
“The common prevalence of unbalanced relationships, where children believe themselves to be friends with someone who actually dislikes them, is surprising,” says James Olsen, a psychologist at the University of Memphis in Tennessee.
Unbalanced relationships of this sort comprised 12 percent of third to sixth graders’ classroom relationships in a university-affiliated elementary school, Olsen and his colleagues report in a paper published online January 13 in Personal Relationships. That figure exceeded the nearly 10 percent of kids’ relationships in which each child dislikes the other.
One-quarter of classroom relationships consisted of two-way friendships. Remaining pairings mainly included cases in which one child acknowledged another as a friend or as especially disliked, but the second child expressed no opinion about the first.
Not so surprisingly, aggressive and otherwise socially troubled third to sixth graders often believed they were friends with kids who disliked them, the researchers say. On the other side of the equation, kids who got labeled as buddies by a classmate they disliked got along well with others and had plenty of genuine friends.
