CHD2220 Chapter 13 Type text All 100 etext due to Krantz not getting to it The Development of Friendship o Making Friends Social Comparison Social Comparison is the ability to describe rate and rank peers on various traits and attributes Unlike young children older children emphasize more abstract qualities in friendships such as peers likes and dislikes thoughts and feelings Children s social comparisons affect the way they interact with peers and make friends in several ways o 1 children mentally compare and evaluate their peers on dimensions relevant to their needs and motivations o 2 Children use social comparison to refine their perceptions of their own competencies Gossip the informal sharing of information and opinion on peers strengths and shortcoming Gossip by nature is a sysnthesis of truths and untruths elaborated and distorted by the emotions and biases of the participating Children o Friends use gossip to confirm and elaborate the basis of their relationship Reputation Peer Reputation the relatively stable characterization of a child shared by members of the peer group Reputation whether deserved or not can make or break a child in the pursuit of social acceptance and friends Children gradually learn that they can influence their own reputation by controlling the impression they make on other children o Keeping Friends One important skill for keeping friends is to manage one s emotions I the context of increasingly intimate and reciprocal relationships ex no emotional outbursts becoming sensitive to friends feelings providing emotional support in times of need etc will all help with keeping friends Another important skill is learning to attune or match their emotions and tempo of their behavior with that of their friends Ex if one kid is hyper you be hyper if one is excited you be excited If ones excited and your bored it wont work out Social Information Processing o Interpretation of social cues Attributions A few good social cues that are most popular or facial expressions body language and social skills CHD2220 Chapter 13 Type text They have shown that while girls have difficulty initiating entry into groups of their peers boys have difficulty knowing how to react to ambiguous provocations by their peers Virtually all children struggle with being teased or laughed at by peers This can challenge children s social cognitive skills Negative Attributional Bias Tendency to assume hostile Intent This is popular in aggressive rejected school age boys Besides trying to understand their peers children must try to understand their own behavior and its effects on others Attributional Style the characteristic way that children attribute intent to explain their own and others social behaviors This contains 2 important dimensions 1 Stability refers to whether children view their causes of their behavior as constant over time 2 Control refers to the degree to which they believe that they can change theire behavior to alter their social outcomes Ex when we ask a child why his peers refuse to include him in their baseball games he may say It s because I always have bad luck thus attributing his failure to an external stable cause beyond his control In contrast another child says I didn t try hard enough attributing his failure to an internal unstable cause that he can alter by simply trying harder next time The information processing view suggests that once a child interprets the problem or challenge in a particular social dilemma he or she must then consider possible solutions or courses of action to deal with the dilemma Popular children generate more novel responses than rejected or neglected children However high status children generate not only more responses but also generate better responses While the quality of first responses from popular from aggressive rejected and from neglected children did not differ the quality of later responses from rejected and neglected children s were more aggressive and inappropriate to the problem than were the responses of popular children Children evaluate potential solutions that he or she has generated and select the one that is most likely to solve the problem Children approach the process of evaluation in two ways Reflective reasoning when children consciously and deliberately search their repertoire for the best solution Automatic reasoning when children respond impulsively selecting the first thing that comes to mind or the solution that requires the least mental effort o Generating Responses o Evaluating Responses CHD2220 Chapter 13 Type text o Enactment In Boys evaluating responses for automatic reasoning aggressive and non aggressive rejected boys were less likely than rejected boys to provide positive responses and more likely to produce solutions that would escalate conflict However in the reflective condition while aggressive rejected boys continued to provide fewer positive responses non aggressive rejected boys no longer differed from non rejected boys Girls also tested the same for the child to enact or perform the behaviors required by the strategy the child selected having the best solution to a social problem in one s repertoire and selecting it does not ensure that the child will enact it competently or effectively Although Situational factors do have a great influence on children s social performance Ex stress makes their performance competent o Integration a summary of what is all listed above children s competent social behavior is the product of all information processing components interpreting cues generating responses evaluating and selecting the optimal response and enacting the response Therefore the studies that have related the sequential components of children s social information processing to social behavior have shown that the relationship only holds within particular types of situations Children who process information well in one situation are likely to actually perform more competently that situation However the relationship may or may not apply for the same children in a different social situations The term friendship implies that two or more children have mutually chosen each other as preferred play partners But as important as friendship is to social adjustment having or not having a friend does not tell us whether a child is generally liked or disliked by his or her peers Popular children Liked by most of their peers and disliked by no one Rejected children Disliked by most peers and liked by very
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