It couldn’t last. One morning in seventh grade, a nasty note appeared on the tough girl’s locker — and someone told her the writer was her cautious friend.
“I would never, ever have done that,” said the friend, Bonnie Shapiro, 45, now a mother of two in Evanston, Ill., who works as a recruiter for a design agency. “But it didn’t matter.”
Brushing aside Bonnie’s denials, the tough girl to
ld her she was in for it. Sure enough, after school “she and her friends were outside waiting for me, and I had no one, no gang, no one there to support me,” Ms. Shapiro recalled.“I remember it all clearly — I remember what I was wearing: a yellow slicker, with a pink lining.”
Admiration turned quickly to fear. “She became that person for me,” Ms. Shapiro said, “and you just don’t forget.”
Almost everyone picks up a tormentor or two while growing up, and until lately psychological researchers have ignored such relationships — assuming them to be little more than the opposite of friendship.
Yet new research suggests that as threatening as they may feel, antagonistic relationships can often enhance social and emotional development more than they impede it. The relationships are not all made equal — a classroom rival is one thing, a hostile ex-friend another — and researchers say their psychological impact depends in part on how youngsters respond.
“Friendships provide a context in which children develop, but of course so do negative peer relations,” said Maurissa Abecassis, a psychologist at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. “We should expect that both types of relationships, as different as they are, present opportunities for growth.” Of course nobody would claim that hostile relationships are invariably healthy. The evidence that they can inflict more than flesh wounds is writ large and small (sometimes with accompanying photos) on social networking sites, as well as in schoolyard baiting and bullying.
So far this year, at least two teenage girls have committed suicide after repeatedly being attacked and insulted by a group of classmates. Being the target of a clique, or having a string of enemies, is especially treacherous, researchers say. And while suicide remains rare, antagonism is pervasive: studies have found that 15 to 40 percent of elementary schoolchildren have been involved in at least one such relationship — and that the rate in middle school and high school, where exclusion and gossip run highest, ranges from 48 to 70 percent.
Yet psychologists have found shortcomings in this early work. For one thing, most children (and adults) who have had rivals, antagonists or enemies are doing fine, thanks. For another, the results have been warped by a phenomenon called peer rejection: a small group of children are so different from their peers that they suffer far more than their share of bullying.
In a review of these types of studies in the current issue of the journal Developmental Psychology, Noel A. Card, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, corrected the combined results for peer rejection. “Once you factor out peer rejection,”” he said in an interview,, “the effects of antipathetic relationships on adjustment are pretty slight.”
This will come as small comfort to children and adolescents in the trenches, who may be swimming in foul text messages, threats or humiliating gossip. The sting is especially deep when good friends turn against one another.
In an earlier study, titled “We Were Friends, but ...,” Dr. Card found that soured friendships were a common, and particularly intense, form of mutual antagonism. One participant described what happened after a friend left her at a party, going home with someone else without saying anything: “The next day I confronted her, and we got into a fight and suspended from school. That’s when she started spreading rumors.”
Ms. Shapiro’s fight with her former friend was partly for show. The stronger girl pretended to hit her — and told her to run away holding her face, for the benefit of the other tough kids watching. It was terrifying nonetheless. “I ran all the way home,” she said. “All through high school I was scared of her, and we didn’t talk. I just avoided her.”
Source: Nytimes.com
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