Contact: Zack Plair

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State University’s Social Science Research Center will use more than $1.6 million to team with the Starkville-Oktibbeha County School District to study the effects of social rejection on aggression.

Funded by a National Institute of Justice grant, SSRC researcher and MSU associate professor of psychology Colleen Sinclair will lead an interdisciplinary team through the Social Relations Collaborative – a division of SSRC – that will study over three years how and when rejection triggers aggression in adolescents. Enlisting Starkville High School students as its primary research pool, Sinclair said the team would collect survey and experimental data throughout the process.

Part of the federal Office of Justice Programs, NIJ specializes in criminal justice research. This grant is part of NIJ’s School Safety Initiative.

“We as a society are just beginning to understand how bullying and aggressive behaviors impact victims emotionally and psychologically, especially long-term,” said David Shaw, MSU vice president for research and economic development. “I’m proud to see the research proposed by Dr. Sinclair and the Social Science Research Center recognized as a leading effort to understand and thus develop solutions for this pervasive problem.”

Though Sinclair said school shootings had “made headlines,” including the recent gun slayings at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, and Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, everyday instances of aggression on school campuses are underreported. Whether physical, social, verbal or sexual aggression, those instances can create a cycle where a person feels rejected, becomes ostracized and lashes out in retaliation, she added.

Sinclair said she hopes her team will not only identify factors that contribute to aggressive responses to bullying and rejection, but also find factors that contribute to positive or “pro-social” responses. That information, she added, could lead to more effective intervention programs to reduce both bullying and aggressive responses to rejection.

“People get rejected every day,” Sinclair said. “There’s not a person alive who hasn’t been rejected in one way or another. So, what makes those who lash out different from those who don’t? That’s what we’re looking into.”

Specifically, Sinclair’s team will look at a “multi-motive” theoretical model that suggests people who highly value relationships or consider the possibility of seeking alternative relationships are more prone to “prosocial” responses to rejection like seeking relationship repair or making new friends. However, the model suggests that chronic, pervasive rejection, such as bullying, or the perceived unfairness of the rejection, more likely causes social withdrawal or antisocial responses. Teens who feel alienated, “alone in the universe,” or hopeless that anything will change may have a higher tendency to lash out, Sinclair added, whereas teens who maintain empathy for others are likely less prone to aggression.

“Perceived groupness,” she said, is another key factor her team will study. In some situations where rejection has triggered aggression, Sinclair said, a person either feels like an entire group is against him or her or that the group to which that person belongs is being threatened by another group. With Starkville and Oktibbeha County school districts consolidating this year, she said her team will be interested to see how certain intergroup factors – gender, race, class – affect the study’s findings.

The study also will use “cutting-edge technology” to study cyberbullying, said SSRC Director Arthur Cosby, since the ever-evolving world of social media had created a “huge need to combat social media’s capacity to bully.”

Further, Cosby called Sinclair a “tremendous scholar” and complimented her team for landing the prestigious, highly-competitive NIJ grant.

“To make the world a better place, you first have to understand it,” Cosby said. “Knowledge from studies like this is how we do that.”

For more information on the collaborative’s research, visit http://advancedsocialpsychlab.weebly.com.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.