Unpopularity is the opposite of popularity. Therefore, it is the quality of lacking acceptance or approval by one's peers or society as a whole.
Early development The importance of peer relations in an adolescent's normal psychosocial development has been well-researched. The impact of peers is hardly surprising, given that high school students spend the majority of their days with peers rather than with adults, both during and outside of class.Brown, B. (1990). Peer groups. In S. Feldman & G. Elliott (Eds.), At the threshold: The developing adolescent (pp. 171–196). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. More importantly, peer groups provide contexts separate from the home for experimentation. This makes peers particularly crucial in the development of a sense of identityBrown, B., Clasen, D., & Eicher, S. (1986). Perceptions of peer pressure, peer conformity dispositions, and self-reported behavior among adolescents. Developmental Psychology 22, 521-530. and a capacity for intimacy.Sullivan, H.S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. New York: Norton.
But while normal peer relations are an enjoyable alternative to the home,Larson, R. (1983). Adolescents' daily experience with family and friends: Contrasting opportunity systems. Journal of Marriage and the Family November, 739–750. a subset of adolescents experiences this social network as distinctly unpleasant. These adolescents are considered unpopular or deviant even early in childhood, and are rejected as such. In adolescence, they are uncharacteristic of any crowd and lack the close friendships of their more popular peers. There has been considerable research documenting the effects of peer rejection, such as low academic achievement, delinquent behavior, and mental health problems in adulthood.Savin-Williams, R., & Berndt, T. (1990). Friendship and peer relations. In S. Feldman & G. Elliot (Eds.), At the threshold: The developing adolescent (pp. 277–307). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Other research has focused on identifying stable subgroups of unpopular adolescents. A common distinction is that made between aggressive, withdrawn, and aggressive–withdrawn individuals.Hymel, S., Bowker, A., & Woody, E. (1993). Aggressive versus withdrawn unpopular children: Variations in peer and self-perceptions in multiple domains. Child Development 64, 879–896.
However, less is known about how these traits lead to aggressive or withdrawn children to become unpopular and to experience later adjustment problems. Indeed, the very causality of this relationship is uncertain, and it is suggested that both behavioral traits and unpopularity are as stable as they are due to various reinforcement processes. Because peer relations are so essential to developing identity and intimacy, the normal psychosocial maturation of unpopular adolescents lags behind their peers. Attempts to "catch up" by reentry into the dominant network of peer groups are then likely to fail and result in even greater rejection. In seeking to compensate for the lack of peer relations, furthermore, the unpopular adolescent may be forced to turn to other sources of support that cannot replace the peer group and may, in fact, encourage the adolescent's unpopular traits. Indeed, unpopular adolescents may be unable to achieve a genuine sense either of identity or intimacy either in their initial peer relations, or in their attempted compensation involving family members, antisocial contacts, or fantasy.
Types of unpopularity
Neglected Children who are neglected are not actively rejected by their peers, they are simply ignored. Usually, the neglected child does not enjoy being at school, but the long-term harm does not necessarily result. The child does the best at rebounding from this neglect if they have "a supportive family and outstanding talent (eg., in music or the arts)" to use as a support system from which to move on.
Aggressive-rejected Aggressive-rejected children are unpopular because, as the name would suggest, are aggressive and confrontational towards others. This type of unpopularity can result in psychological harm to the rejected child and an "increased risk of depression and uncontrolled anger over the years of middle childhood"
Children who are categorized as being aggressive-rejected are the children who are likely to become bully victims: People who are attacked or harassed, who then go and attack or harass someone else. They are victims who then become bullies.
Withdrawn-rejected Withdrawn-rejected children are rejected by their peers because they are "timid and anxious." This type of unpopularity can also result in psychological harm to the rejected child and give them an "increased risk of depression and uncontrolled anger over the years of middle childhood"
Emergence in interaction with traditional peer groups To understand the stability of peer rejection, it is first necessary to trace unpopularity back to the original interactions between future antisocial adolescents and their popular peers. Rubin, Chen, McDougall, Bowker, and McKinnonRubin, K.H., Chen, X., McDougall, P., Bowker, A., & McKinnon, J. (1995). The Waterloo Longitudinal Project: Predicting internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescence. Development and Psychopathology 7, 751–764 examined the predictability of both withdrawal and aggression. The researchers argued that early social withdrawal as well as aggression can preclude unpopular children from normal levels of social and emotional competence. At the time their study began, withdrawal (often confused with shyness) was not generally considered to predict maladjustment in adolescence and adulthood.Parker, J.G., & Asher, S.R. (1987). Peer relations and later personal adjustment: Are low accepted children at risk? Psychological Bulletin 102, 357–389. Rather than make specific hypotheses, then, the study's aim was to confirm that withdrawn as well as aggressive children suffer from more adolescent maladaptations than popular peers, and also to show that the particular social and emotional problems of each of the two groups are unique.
The study, called the Waterloo Longitudinal Project, followed a group of 88 mostly middle-class male and female children from grade 2 (average age 7 years) to grade 9 (age 14). As a result of attrition, only 60 of the subjects remained in the study for the full seven years. The main independent variable in the study was a classification of second-grade children by social type. To differentiate between the aggressive, withdrawn, and socially competent second-grade children, the researchers constructed aggregates of several measures. On one scale, the Revised Class Play method pioneered by Masten, Morison, and Pellegrini,Masten, A.S., Morison, P., & Pellegrini, D. (1985). A revised class play method of peer assessment. Developmental Psychology 21, 523–533. children were asked to nominate peers who best fit into each of the three social categories. Three of the seven items designed to measure isolation were deleted, however, because they seemed to record peer rejection rather than withdrawal, and in two cases (e.g. "someone who has trouble making friends") were as applicable to aggressive children as to their withdrawn peers—underscoring the tendency of the two groups of unpopular children to overlap. Other indicators added to the aggregate measures of aggression, withdrawal, and social competence were a peer-assessed sociometric rating of each child's popularity, teacher ratings, and observations by the researchers during 15-minute play sessions. The dependent measures consisted of questionnaire items regarding each ninth-grade adolescent's delinquency and substance abuse, perceived security in both family and peer groups, loneliness, and self-regard.
In their analysis, Rubin et al. performed a regression analysis to determine the relative importance of each of the second-grade social categories in predicting "externalizing" outcomes (such as delinquency and substance abuse) and "internalizing" outcomes (insecurity, loneliness, and low self-regard). Aggression was found to be the only significant predictor of ninth-grade delinquency, while social withdrawal was a significant predictor of negative self-regard, loneliness, and felt peer-group insecurity. Aggression thus predicted only externalizing outcomes, and withdrawal only internalizing outcomes. No significant interaction was found between the two forms of unpopularity, suggesting that relatively "pure" samples of aggressive and withdrawn children had indeed been isolated. Social competence, meanwhile, was predictive of substance use (and of feeling peer-group insecurity, though to a lesser extent than withdrawal). The researchers conjectured that this externalizing outcome might be indicative of natural experimentation rather than unchecked abuse of drugs (which might indeed be associated with peer rejection).
The results of this study support the idea that both social withdrawal and aggression lead to maladaptations later in adolescence, and that these difficulties are different for each type. In particular, the association between withdrawal and negative internalizing behavior was confirmed. In fact, Hymel, Rubin, Rowden, and LeMare,Hymel, S., Rubin, K.H., Rowden, L., & LeMare, L. (1990). Children's peer relationships: Longitudinal prediction of internalizing and externalizing problems from middle to late childhood. Child Development 61, 2004–2021. in an earlier assessment of the same longitudinal sample, note that the relatively high attrition in the population selected against children viewed as more isolated and less socially competent, suggesting that the difficulties experienced by withdrawn children could be even more severe than indicated. This research, as well as the earlier analysis of the sample, attests to the stability of both forms of unpopularity.
It is likely that the mechanisms that emerge to sustain withdrawal and aggression share some similarities. Both traits may begin as an interaction between a child's relationships and disposition either to be wary or to act out. If these tendencies are sustained, the child is rejected by peers. This precludes the development of social skills comparable to those of their peers, and unpopular children, withdrawn as well as aggressive, may come to be seen as deviant. For withdrawn adolescents, internalized problems are expressed as insecurity and hesitancy, which elicits increasingly strong rejection. Aggressive adolescents while worrying less about their relations with others,Parkhurst, J.T., & Asher, S.R. (1992). Peer rejection in middle school: Subgroup differences in behavior, loneliness, and interpersonal concerns. Developmental Psychology 28, 231–241. have deficits in social information processing, which may lead these adolescents to falsely attribute hostile motives to their peers.Dodge, K.A., & Coie, J.D. (1987). Social-information-processing factors in reactive and proactive aggression in children's peer groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53, 1146–1158. Not surprisingly, such adolescents evoke feelings of anger, fear, and frustration from their peers, which can also lead to increasing rejection. Thus while withdrawal causally meshes with hindered self-esteem,Simmons, R., Rosenberg, F., & Rosenberg, M. (1973). Disturbance in the self-image at adolescence. American Sociological Review 38, 553–568. aggression is part of a reinforcing interplay with hampered impression formation.Hill, J., & Palmquist, W. (1978). Social cognition and social relations in early adolescence. International Journal of Behavioral Development 1, 1–36.
Support and reinforcement by family members