Social Aggression among Girls

October 26th, 2009 By: Erin Willer in Adolescent Development, Articles, Classroom Management, School Safety

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Social aggression among girls includes behaviors such as social ostracism, gossip, talking behind backs, verbal attacks, glaring and eye-rolling, and manipulating relationships. Victimization is related to a number of mental health outcomes such as depression, loneliness, and poor self-concept (Crick & Bigbee, 1998; Crick & Gropeter, 1996; Paquette & Underwood, 1999). Teachers are all too familiar with the impact that outcomes such as these can have on students’ school performance and attendance.

Ever since beginning my research on social aggression, teachers often have asked me what they should do to help students cope with the ill effects of social aggression. I often have been at a loss for words when faced with this question, given that little research has been conducted in order to verify effective strategies that teachers can use inside or outside of their classrooms. As a result, my most recent research has involved designing and testing a method that includes three activities intended to help girls both talk about and cope with their emotions surrounding social aggression (Willer, 2009). The three activities are based in the fields of narrative psychology and therapy and involve helping girls cope through storytelling, art, and metaphor.¹

The first step in helping girls cope is to encourage them to tell their stories of social aggression. Pennebaker’s (1997) research suggests that communicating about stressful events is an effective sense-making process that helps reduce emotional and intrusive thoughts, and therefore, negative emotional outcomes. In other words, when girls experience social aggression, they are apt to ruminate about what has occurred, why it happened, and the impact it will have on their relationships. Such continuous and intrusive thinking can contribute to negative health outcomes. Giving language to their thoughts and feelings through storytelling, however, is an effective means of engaging in catharsis, gaining insight into what happened, and feeling a sense of control over what has occurred. Thus, the first activity in the coping method involves teachers allowing students to tell their stories of social aggression.

Teachers should keep in mind that telling these stories may be difficult for their students. Young people may not be developmentally and cognitively advanced enough to productively process stressful experiences such as social aggression and the complex emotions that may result. Therefore, after allowing girls to tell their stories of social aggression, teachers can engage students in two metaphor drawing activities designed to help them productively process their experiences with social aggression. Using metaphor and art can aid in storytelling, especially for children, because they are “ways to visually communicate thoughts and feelings that are too painful to put into words” (Malchiodi, 2003, p. ix).

The first metaphor drawing activity involves encouraging students to externalize social aggression. Therapists use externalization as a sense-making method that focuses on seeing the problem as the problem rather than the person as the problem (White & Epston, 1990). Therefore, the goal of this activity is to have girls draw a metaphor that represents their feelings about their experiences with social aggression. For example, a participant in my study drew a duckling who lost her family to represent how her experience with gossip made her feel all alone. Another girl drew a person who was about to be hit by a car to represent the fear she felt when her peers were excluding her. After students draw metaphors such as these, teachers can encourage them to use their drawings to orally explain and further process their emotions.

The second metaphor drawing activity provides another means for helping girls communicate about and cope with their experiences with social aggression. The purpose of this activity is to help students productively reframe their experience with social aggression by drawing a redemption metaphor (McAdams, Diamond, de St. Aubin, and Mansfield, 1997). This technique is based on research that has found that people who are able to see the redeeming qualities or the bright side of a bad situation tend to be healthier than those individuals who tend to focus on the negative aspects. Therefore, teachers can have students draw a metaphor that represents something positive that came out of the negative experience with social aggression. For example, one participant in my study drew two peas in a pod to represent how she became closer with the girl who was socially aggressive as a result of having to work through their problems. Another girl drew an eagle to represent the freedom she felt when she broke off her friendship with the girl who spread lies about her. Again, teachers can have students use their drawing as a tool to orally communicate and process their feelings.

Social aggression can be debilitating, both socially and emotionally for girls. Through simple communication processes, including storytelling and drawing, however, teachers may be able to offer girls healing and hope.

Erin Willer is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Communication Studies at the University of Denver who has experience as a high school teacher. Her research has been published in the journal Communication Studies and is due to be published next year in Personal Relationships and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Erin also has received Top Four Paper Awards from the Interpersonal Communication Division of the Western States Communication Association.

End note:
¹Although these activities can be effective ways of helping girls communicate about and cope with social aggression, it is important that teachers take precautions before deciding to implement them. Talking about social aggression the classroom can be risky for students. Any given classroom is comprised of both victims and perpetrators, and therefore, teachers need to be careful not to set students up for revictimization.

References

Crick, N. R., & Bigbee, M. A. (1998). Relational and overt forms of peer victimization: A multiinformant approach. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66, 337-347.

Crick, N. R., & Grotpeter, J. K. (1996). Children’s treatment by peers: Victims of relational and overt aggression. Developmental and Psychopathology, 8, 367-380.

Malchiodi, C. A. (2003). Handbook of art therapy. New York: The Guilford Press.

McAdams, D. P., Diamond, A., de St. Aubin, E., & Mansfield, E. (1997). Stories of commitment: The psychological construction of generative lives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 678-694.

Paquette, J. A., & Underwood, M. K. (1999). Gender differences in young adolescents’ experiences of peer victimization: Social and physical aggression. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 45, 242-266.

Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions (rev. ed.). New York: Guilford.

White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. Adelaide, South Australia: Dulwich Centre.

Willer, E. K. (2009). Experimentally testing a narrative sense-making metaphor intervention: Facilitating communicative coping about social aggression with adolescent girls. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln.

Tags: Adolescent Development, aggression, bullying

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