 It's as sally close as the door, I guess that's my cue to welcome you all. For those of you who might not know me, my name is Bill Falls, and I'm the Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and it's my great pleasure to underscore great pleasure to welcome you here today to honor a colleague and friend of mine, Diana Murray Close, who is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Science, a 2016 recipient of the Dean's Lecture Award. The college started this Dean's Lecture Series 25 years ago as a way to recognize faculty who are both highly respected scholars and exceptional teachers. Faculty and students are invited to submit nominations and letters in support of their nominees, and then a faculty committee has a challenging task of selecting just two people to receive the award each year from the many, many nominations. Annie is a remarkable figure here at UBM, aside from being an impressive scholar, she's transformed the education of her students into a pleasurable and demanding journey, and I'll just give you a few quotes from her colleagues and students. Colleagues describe her as highly gifted and a skilled teacher with great mastery of the material and a contagious enthusiasm for the process of learning. Another, Annie creates a lively, friendly atmosphere. Students appear extremely comfortable in the classroom, approaching her both before and after class with questions. Annie has a wonderful and relaxed and warm style of interacting with students that communicates interest and concern about the material the students learning and the students as individuals. And finally, her extraordinary preparation and course content teaching materials and student guidelines and evaluation materials promote confidence in others about her abilities and intentions, her honest, open, fair, respectful, friendly manner encourages her students to be actively engaged in the learning process. Moreover, her great enthusiasm for the content material and methods she teaches is apparent and hard to resist. I want to say congratulations to Annie on this well-deserved honor and add that she's an amazing, amazing colleague, and I can say this upon personal experience because I was the department chair for nine years and as I was reflecting back, I think Annie was hired in the first year that I was department chair, Annie may have a dubious honor of being the first faculty member, but one of the first faculty members that I hired. And I wish I could take credit for her hiring and for all of her successes, but Annie is a real jewel and it really is a pleasure and it's very heartwarming for me to see her honored in this way with this well-deserved dean's lecture. But before I begin to cry, I would like to introduce Professor Rex Forehand, another amazing scholar, another person that I've had the pleasure of working with as department chair over those nine years. Rex is the Heinz and Rowena Hansbacher chair of psychology and he's one of only a few university distinguished professors, so quite an accomplished man and probably one of the kindest and gentlest man I've ever met. So I'm going to introduce Rex and he's going to say a few words about Annie. Thank you. As Bill said, I am Rex Forehand and today both Leigh Ann Holderman, who's a graduate student that works with Annie and I, we're going to make some introductory comments about her. I'd like to begin by submitting to you that the College of Arts and Sciences and Bill Joel, maybe you can do this, ever choose to rename this award. I think calling it the Annie Murray Close Award would be the ideal name for it. Annie truly is both an outstanding teacher and a contributor to science and her field. However, perhaps what's even more important is her total dedication to her students and the learning process. Today, what I'd like to do is to talk about two of the teaching aspects of Annie's record. First, how she learned psychological science into the classroom and then second, how she brings students into her own psychological science laboratory. In regard to the classroom, Annie teaches at all three levels of the university, something to be truly acknowledged. She teaches large undergraduate courses about 150 or more students. She teaches smaller 200 level courses, 25 to 35 students, and then even smaller faculty graduate seminars, sometimes about such small. In all of these teaching endeavors, she's highly committed to making psychology as a science, both accessible and exciting to students. She's committed to helping students learn the process of psychology, and not just the facts. I think that's a very important comment. Someone who's dedicated not to teaching a bunch of facts, but rather the process of psychology. She does this through innovative teaching methods such as in-class writing and reflections, through a dedication to teaching students how to write in the discipline of psychology and by making questions and issues in psychology relevant to diverse groups of students. And perhaps most importantly, she is always available and responsive to students' needs and is enthusiastic about teaching. I will say that she's not only available and responsive to student needs, but also to co-faculty members. I was in the office only yesterday asking her advice which she imparted and it was beautiful. As one student recently wrote, Dr. Murray Close serves as a role model of a lifetime student. Her passion for learning influences the students in a enduring, informative way, offering far more benefit than the content of any course possibly could. Comments such as these emerge from freshmen through advanced level graduate students and outstanding quantitative evaluations from students and peers echo these types of comments. Turning to the second aspect of Annie's teaching that is bringing students to a psychological science laboratory, Annie has an active lab with over 65 undergraduate students who worked in that lab in the past seven years. She's had as many as 15 students. Mind you, we get mental credit for this. 15 students making in one given semester making her lab one of the most popular and largest of any in the department. Students consistently rave about experiences in her lab including Annie's willingness to give her time and meaningful advice as well as always helping, always displaying a helping attitude to individual students. As one student said, Dr. Murray Close is enthusiastic about psychology and research available for anyone who seeks advice, invested in her mentee's success and provides support to help students achieve their potential and the fruits of her labor are apparent is not one but two of her graduate students have already received the award for GTA of the year for the entire university. I would imagine that that's unprecedented in the history of this university. In addition, both undergraduate and graduate students have published with her and co-authored convention presentations with her and many of the undergraduates have gone on to outstanding graduate programs around the country and the graduate students to leading faculty positions in prestigious universities. So let me close by reading what one student wrote. A student who happens to be here sitting on the front row. I honestly cannot express in words how much Dr. Murray Close has impacted my life. She pushed me to be a better researcher and academic and helped me discover my passion. She is unlike any other professor or mentor I've ever had because she truly cares for her students and strives to do anything in her power to help them succeed. Above all, Dr. Murray Close is a kind, warm, genuine person who is respected and loved by our students. I think that all I could add to this is the following. Can we ask for anything more than that from a faculty member at the university? I'd now like to turn the podium over to Leanne Hoverman, an advanced level graduate student who's both had classes with Annie and who's worked in her life. Leanne? Thank you, Raphs. Hi, everybody, and thank you so much for coming today. I really can't think of someone more deserving of the Dean's Lecture Award than Annie. I have worked with her as a graduate student for almost three years, and it has really been one of the most rewarding times of my life. Even from the first time we met to talk about her research, I knew that the Social Development Lab was the perfect fit for me. Annie really is a phenomenal mentor and teacher to her graduate and graduate students alike. She is always willing to help, whether it's with research questions or struggles in class, offering advice on professional development, or even editing a 50-page master's thesis draft for the fourth time group. I have watched Annie help the students in our lab understand the tough concepts of her groundbreaking research and help all of us to become more proficient scientists. One of the things I really appreciate a lot about Annie is that she really makes learning approachable and fun. Through lab discussions, funny video clips, and in-class activities, students always take away a lot from these experiences with her. I can definitely say that I wouldn't be where I am today in my graduate career without Annie. She's helped me with everything from getting my NSF fellowship to advice on class papers and even getting the wording of IRB amendments just right. And you kept me going through endless master's revisions and I know my upcoming comprehensive exams will be way more overwhelming without her guidance. It's for reasons like this, along with many more, that I am so happy she's being recognized with the Dean's Lecture Award today. Annie is truly dedicated to the academic, professional, and personal development of her students, and I really admire how invested she is in her students' success. I've always felt extremely lucky to have Annie as my mentor throughout the crazy whirlwind of graduate school and to be able to learn from her how to be a dedicated researcher and educator. And I know that many others would say the same. UVN is truly fortunate to have Annie as a member of the faculty. Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Annie Marie Kloes and her top, Beyond Mean Girls, understanding the development of relational aggression. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, who came today. It's really, really an honor to receive this award. And before I get started, there are several people that I want to thank. First, I would like to thank our amazing Dean, Bill Falls. As he mentioned, he was the chair of the Department of Psychology when I was hired and he has been a phenomenal leader in my nine years at UVM and hopefully will continue to be our leader as we move forward. Now, Bill I think is a great Dean to have presenting this award because in my experience in the department, he was always a champion for the idea that our scholarship informed our teaching and our teaching informed our scholarship. And I think as somebody who's in the field of psychology where there are big grant dollars to be had, not every university will emphasize this and not every chair will encourage you to invest in your students and in your teaching and Bill always has done that. So it's, I appreciate that. It's been wonderful working in a department with you as a chair and now in a college with you as the Dean with knowing that this is something that you value and that you encourage us to invest in these values. I want to thank the College of Arts and Sciences support staff, Sally Bartlett in particular for helping put this together. I want to thank Rex. He nominated me for this award and gave that incredibly touching introduction and has also served as a mentor to me in a lot of ways since I've come to UVM. And so he comes to my office for advice but I think I go to his office for advice much more. So thank you for all of that advice that you've given me. I think in a lot of ways I feel like this award is something that I share with the students that I've had the privilege to work with. So thank you to the graduate students that have worked with me in my lab. We have several here today including Leanne. Thank you for your introduction as well. Nicole who I have worked, I don't know how many years it's been but she was an undergraduate in my lab and she's now in her fourth year of our PhD program here. It's been many, many years. She's been here working with me almost as long as I've been here. And also a couple of graduate students who've moved on and can't be here today. Erin Schollberg and Julia McQuade. These are students who've been real collaborators on a lot of the research that I'm going to talk about today and certainly have shaped the way that I have thought my research in the field. And then finally, thank you to the undergraduate students that I have found to be so interesting in the classroom and in particular the undergraduate students that I have the privilege of working with in my lab and I see a number of you here today. It's, it's, there's no way that we would be able to do the work that we do without the tireless hours that our students invest in helping us with this research. So I'll leave it there and get started. So the title of my talk is Beyond Mean Girls, Understanding the Development of Relational Aggression. Now psychology researchers have been fascinated by the question of who is going to be likely to hurt or harm others. In fact, when we look at research on aggression there's a lot of it. It's actually one of the most well researched topics in psychology. And I became interested in understanding what aggression might look like in girls. Now if we look at the historical perspectives on aggressive girls, for decades researchers documented higher levels of aggression in boys than in girls. So for example, in their seminal book The Psychology of Sex Differences, Maccabee and Jacqueline argued that aggression was one of those very rare social behaviors where sex differences are actually evident. More recently, researchers like Keenan and Shaw have argued that strict norms against aggression have led girls to move away from aggressive behaviors across development. And a lot of this research really supports a popular view that we have of girls. So the saying that girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Now this traditional view that girls are not aggressive has been challenged in the past several decades and there's been an increasing understanding that girls may often engage in aggressive behaviors and that this may be particularly likely to occur during adolescence. If we think about how this is portrayed in the popular media for example, we see movies that have documented high levels of aggression in girls. The old school movie Heathers, for those of you who are my generation, and more recently movies like Mean Girls that really depict girls engaging in pretty malicious and nasty behaviors. There have been increasing numbers of books, popular press books, that are intended to help parents navigate the nasty and aggressive peer groups that their daughters might find themselves in. And there have been news stories and magazine articles in sources like CNN that offer advice on topics like how not to raise a mean girl. Now this increased view that or this increased interest in the possibility that girls might actually be aggressive with some frequency engaging these kinds of behaviors has not just emerged in films and in popular press books but it's become very popular in psychology research as well. And in fact, researchers have argued in the past 25 years or so that girls are often aggressive and that these aggressive behaviors are especially likely to be exhibited during adolescence. Now if we think about how we define aggression researchers have defined aggression as behaviors that are intended to hurt or harm others. And these behaviors can include a variety of different forms of aggression. Much of the research that has led to this conclusion that boys are more aggressive than girls has been very specific in its focus. And in particular, it has tended to focus on physical forms of aggression. So when we're talking about physical aggression we're talking about behaviors that are intended to damage a person's physical well-being. So things like hitting or kicking or punching are all great examples of physical aggression. What some researchers have argued is that girls do engage in aggression pretty frequently. They just don't engage in physical aggression. Instead, they may be more likely to engage in other non-physical aggressive behaviors including things like relational aggression. And we define relational aggression as behaviors that target or damage relationships. So things like gossip, social exclusion and rumor spreading are great examples of relational aggression. Now, why would girls decide to use relationally aggressive behaviors rather than physically aggressive behaviors? Theorists have provided a couple of different explanations for why this might be the case. One is that girls are socialized to be more focused than boys on interpersonal relationships. So when girls are selecting aggressive behaviors they may decide or choose to use behaviors that are consistent with these values that are especially interpersonal in nature that are damaging these interpersonal relationships. An idea that I've already mentioned briefly is that girls may also select relational aggression rather than physical aggression because there are strong socialization pressures against physical aggression in girls. So when they're selecting a particular behavior they want to be aggressive they may be especially likely to choose behaviors that they think are relatively socially appropriate and acceptable for them. So gossip may be more tolerated among girls than going and hitting somebody. And then finally some theorists have argued that girls' physical lower physical strength especially after puberty may make physical aggression a less appealing option. So they may turn or decide to use relationally aggressive behaviors instead. Now if we look at the early research regarding sex differences in relational aggression there does appear to be evidence indicating that girls are more relationally aggressive than boys. It's a very preliminary research as we'll talk about in a little bit. But one of the interesting things that was found in some of this early work was that in studies that expanded their definitions of aggression and began to assess and measure relational aggression in addition to physical aggression the percentage of girls that were identified as aggressive was not much lower than the percentage of boys that had been identified as aggressive in those studies that had just looked at physical aggression. So an important implication of this work is that those studies that exclusively focused on physical forms of aggression likely missed a large percentage of aggressive girls. They were not identified as aggressive because the definition of aggression was so narrow. Now my colleagues and I have also found support for the idea that relational aggression may be particularly prevalent for girls during the transition to adolescence. This is a graph from a study that we conducted with late elementary school children followed over time. And what this demonstrates is that across time, that's the x-axis, the y-axis is levels of relational aggression. Relational aggression increased in frequency. But this was only true for the girls in our sample. So the boys, which are the gray line at the bottom, remain stable and constant in their levels of relational aggression. We've recently replicated this finding in a Taiwanese sample as well, where again, late elementary school girls but not late elementary school boys exhibited increases in relational aggression over time. Now interestingly, several researchers from other labs have reported that relational aggression decreases in frequency across high school. So it appears that these behaviors may peak around early to late elementary school, maybe early middle school, and then decline in frequency. And there seems to be some evidence that this increase in pre-adolescence is particularly evident for girls rather than for boys. So I have tried to make a case thus far that adolescent girls may be at risk for engaging in these relational aggressive behaviors. But I want to take a step back now and make the case that we really shouldn't be stopping there with our research on relational aggression. That we need to move beyond the view that relational aggression is a female form of aggression. And we need to move beyond the view that this is something that just happens in adolescence and then goes away. Instead, I want to provide some evidence suggesting that these are behaviors that are prevalent across the life course, and that boys do this too. So starting with this first idea is relational aggression really a female form of aggression? Now, although some of the early preliminary studies did seem to provide some support that girls were more relationally aggressive than boys, this conclusion has been challenged in recent years. And in particular, Noel Card and his colleagues published a meta-analysis in 2008. For those of you who don't know, meta-analysis is a statistical technique where you can take findings from a variety of studies and combine them. Card and colleagues assembled 107 studies, including over 50,000 participants, and they examined sex differences in mean levels of relational aggression. The first thing that they found was that physical and relational aggression were more strongly correlated for boys than for girls. So it was more likely the case that if a boy was relationally aggressive, he was likely to be physically aggressive as well. They also found that boys engaged in relational aggression at almost the same rates as girls. Now, this finding that boys and girls engage in similar rates of relational aggression is not specific to studies with samples in the United States. So this has been replicated across a variety of different countries. I have a graph here that shows you the proportion of seven to 10-year-old boys and girls from nine different countries who reported that they had engaged in relational aggression in the past month. So the boys are in purple, the girls are in green. What might jump out to you at first is that there are clearly differences across cultures or across countries in levels of relational aggression, so Kenya is particularly high, Sweden is especially low, but there are no consistent sex differences in these behaviors. So what are the implications of this? One important implication is that relational aggression may be occurring in boys pretty frequently, but it may be unnoticed because it's co-occurring with more visible and overt aggressive behaviors. So the teacher may be much more likely to notice the child who's hitting another child than the child who is spreading rumors or gossip about another child. In addition, we were probably too quick as a field to write off these behaviors as something that are really, you know, these are female type of behaviors and boys don't do these. In fact, it's probably more likely that these behaviors are relevant and salient for boys as well as for girls. Now, in addition to the focus on girls, the majority of relational aggression research has really focused in on the developmental period of adolescence. Most studies have recruited participants from late elementary school, middle school, or high school. However, these behaviors emerge much earlier than adolescence. For example, my collaborator, Dr. Jamie Ostroff and I have conducted observational studies of preschool children and documented relational aggression in three to five-year-old kids. Now, relational aggression in three to five-year-olds looks a little bit different than it does in adolescence. You see things that tend to be very direct and easily observable, so turning your body away from a peer to indicate that you're excluding them or spreading gossip or rumors about a peer right in front of them. An excellent illustration of relational aggression in younger children was provided by a candid camera scenario with children sharing ice cream. I want to show you a brief clip of this. The floor just asked them, who is the most patient? And they didn't realize that meant that they get their ice cream cold last. Now, the boy gets his first and he's left alone with the two girls. Listen. So, don't you get yours? No, I don't. Do you want to say, I want to be a friend now? Okay. No, I'm still doing the thing. Hey, sir. Can I have a... I'll be your best friend. No, you can't have a friend. I mean, I'll never talk to you. Okay? I'll be your best friend. No. I'll never want to be a real friend. So, I'll be like, all right, maybe he's getting another one. I'm going to tell him on you. She'll have it. He's the only one who would be a friend. Kids are one bite. I'm going to fight. I'm going to tell him on you one. You can't talk to him. You can't. Don't expect it. Do you have it yet? No. I'll stop it there, but if you want to see more, that whole clip is available on YouTube. So, we see these behaviors in younger children, and they don't... these behaviors do not disappear after adulthood either. We've conducted a number of studies with college students where we've documented relational aggression, and in fact, in one of our recent studies, we found that relational aggression was more common than physical aggression among college students. In a striking illustration of the relevance of these behaviors for older adults, Trumpeter and colleagues documented that relational aggression was very prevalent in assisted living facilities. In their study, they found that 41% of residents, these are on average 85-year-old participants, were targets of relational aggression in the past several months. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times last year, Jennifer Wiener discussed the experience of her grandmother, who upon moving into an assisted living facility was excluded from lunch tables and bridge games. She reports, The notion that a threat to seniors is their peers is somewhat new and usually played for laughs. It goes against a truism handed down from mothers to daughters for generations. This too shall pass. Mean girls are not girls or mean forever. High school doesn't last forever. Everyone grows up. But Nana's experience suggests otherwise. It says that the cruel, like the poor, are always with us. That mean girls stay mean. They just start wearing support hoes and dentures. Now, given evidence that relational aggression occurs across developmental periods, an important question is what developmental outcomes might be associated with these behaviors. Many parents and teachers are particularly concerned about the targets of relational aggression, those individuals who are relationally victimized. And in fact, pure victimization is a significant problem in our nation's schools. We recently investigated the prevalence of victimization generally in a nationally representative sample of high school students. We found that approximately 20% of 9th to 12th graders reported that they had been repeatedly victimized, including being the target of rumors at school in the past 12 months. These numbers are disturbing, given our findings that victimized youth were at heightened risk for a variety of negative outcomes, including being more likely to feel sad, to have thoughts of suicide, and to have actually attempted suicide. Relational victimization may also affect the physical ways that youth respond to stress. In recent years, researchers have hypothesized that adverse experiences, things like growing up in poverty, might get under the skin by altering levels of physiological stress arousal. And although it's very limited, some preliminary research findings indicate that victimized youth also exhibit disruptions in physiological stress arousal. But very little work to date has assessed this association with respect to relational forms of victimization. In one study that I'm working on in my lab right now, my colleagues and I examined whether relational victimization predicted dysregulated stress arousal in a sample of 8 to 12-year-old kids. We asked teachers to report on participants' levels of relational victimization, and to assess physiological stress arousal, we measured participants' skin conductance. So this is essentially a measure of how much participants are sweating, and it serves as an index of the activation of the sympathetic nervous system or the fight-or-flight response. We measured this before, during, and after a stress interview where we asked participants to recount a recent experience where they had been relationally victimized. So they had, for example, felt left out. Here's an example of the experience of relational victimization that one 11-year-old girl reported in our study. A lot of kids in my class have birthdays in March and April, and they've been having birthday parties that they've been talking about, but they don't invite me and some of my friends, even though we're really good friends with them. One of my friends had her birthday party last Sunday, I think, and they were talking about it. It was based on chocolate stuff, and it seemed really fun, and they were going to play with them. And it was a sleepover, and it was all the stuff I really liked, and they just kept talking and talking about it. We found that for girls only, relational victimization was associated with heightened levels of skin conductance. And interestingly, this effect emerged across conditions, so pre-stressor, during the stressor, and after the stressor. Just to explain what I have up here. Below, we're seeing individuals with relatively low levels of relational victimization. In orange, individuals with relatively high levels of victimization. On the x-axis, we have pre-stressor, stressor, and post-stressor. And you see elevated levels of skin conductance across all three conditions. No association emerged between relational victimization and skin conductance for boys. Now, what are the implications of these findings? Well, the possibility is that, like other adverse experiences, relational victimization may get under the skin via alterations in physiological stress arousal. I think it's important to note that these elevations were not specific to the stressor task. We had thought that they probably would be. But instead were pervasive across resting and stressor conditions. This seems to suggest that relationally victimized youth may have a fight-or-flight stress response that's sort of in overdrive or hyperaroused, even in contexts that we would think are not stressful. It's also interesting to note that these effects emerged for girls, but not for boys. So one potential implication is that these experiences may be particularly problematic for girls. Growing body of research indicates that perpetrators of relational aggression may experience a variety of negative outcomes as well. One of the most well-documented negative outcomes associated with relational aggression is rejection by peers. Probably not surprisingly, kids find these behaviors objectionable and aversive, and they may not like the perpetrators very much. We've also found that relational aggression tracks with internalizing problems. So in our longitudinal research, increases in relational aggression predict increases in depressive symptoms over time. A number of researchers have argued that when youth engage in these behaviors, it generates a fair amount of interpersonal stress, and that, in turn, may serve as a risk factor for things like depression. Relational aggression is related to risky behaviors, things like substance use. And then finally, it's important to acknowledge that many aggressors are also victims. So in some of our longitudinal research, we have found that at least a subset of aggressors become increasingly victimized over time. So even though we may often identify a child and think that the main concern that we're dealing with is the fact that they're perpetrating aggressive behaviors against peers, it is not uncommon to then find out that these are people who are also, at times, the recipient of aggressive behaviors. Now, traditionally, we've thought of aggression as a pretty bad negative behavior and something that aligns with bad outcomes, both for perpetrators and for victims. However, in recent years, evidence has emerged suggesting that at least some relational aggressors hold very enviable positions in their peer group, in particular, that these youth are popular. And we measure this by asking kids who in your class is popular, and they can tell you. Now, popularity is something that is often associated with a variety of superficial traits, physical attractiveness, significant material wealth, being great examples. And in some longitudinal research, evidence has emerged indicating that youth who use relational aggression and are perpetrators of these behaviors become increasingly popular over time. So this is an example of one study by Amanda Rose and her colleagues that followed third, fifth, seventh, and ninth graders over time, and they found that for the seventh and ninth grade girls, relational aggression predicted increased popularity. These associations did not emerge for the younger girls, and they did not emerge for the boys at any of the grades. These findings raised the possibility that youth, and maybe especially girls, see relational aggression as a behavior that they can use to climb the social ladder, to achieve popularity. Now, one of the things that we've documented in my lab is that there are individual differences in how much kids care about being popular. So some kids think this is really important, really want to be at the top of the social hierarchy. Others are less concerned about that. We found that those youth who have a reputation for being really invested in becoming popular are at risk for being more relationally aggressive. Interestingly, associations between relational aggression and popularity appear to be bi-directional in nature. In other words, not only does relational aggression predict increases in popularity, but popularity predicts increases in relational aggression. This is again, citing the study by Amanda Rose and her colleagues that followed the third, fifth, seventh, and ninth graders. She found that for fifth, seventh, and ninth graders, as well as for girls and boys, higher levels of popularity predicted increased use of these behaviors over time. It's possible that once a child achieves high status and becomes popular in the peer group, he or she turns to relationally aggressive behaviors to defend that social position and to maintain that social power. It's also possible that peers don't really do anything when a popular child is relationally aggressive. One of the mechanisms that may stop a lot of kids from engaging in relational aggression, which is the knowledge that if I do this, there's probably going to be retaliation. People aren't going to like me. There are going to be negative effects. That may not happen for popular kids because their peers may be afraid to have negative reactions to these behaviors. The findings raise the troubling possibility that popularity itself may be corrosive. An otherwise nice, well-adjusted child who becomes popular may increasingly start to use these behaviors to maintain status and because they can. In fact, evidence does support the idea that popular relational aggressors don't suffer from all of those negative outcomes to the same degree that their less popular peers do. This is an example of a graph from, again, a study by Amanda Rose, documenting associations between relational aggression and internalizing problems. I have on the x-axis here levels of relational aggression going from a standard deviation below to a standard deviation above the mean and then on the y-axis internalizing symptoms. So in general, as relational aggression increases, symptoms of internalizing also increase. But you can see here that that's really only true for youth who are low in popularity or average in popularity. For youth who are high in popularity, there's no association. So you do not see elevated levels of internalizing symptoms among highly-relationally aggressive youth. Okay. Now, a critical question in relational aggression research is what risk factors might be associated with the perpetration of these behaviors. And one of the things that we've been focused on in my lab in the... Well, it's been a while now, the last nine years, I guess, is low levels of physiological stress arousal. Now, there are two different theories regarding why low physiological stress arousal may serve as a risk factor for aggression. From a fearlessness theory perspective, low arousal reflects a relatively fearless temperament. So individuals who have low levels of arousal may be pretty unconcerned about the negative consequences of aggressive behavior, not so worried about punishment, not so worried about things like retaliation from victims. So, again, many of the things that stop most of us from engaging in aggression, hopefully, may not stop these youth. From a stimulation-seeking theory perspective, some individuals may have what you can almost think of as chronically underaroused stress systems. And they're motivated to increase their arousal to more comfortable levels. They seek out stimulating experiences, things that feel exciting, things that feel fun. And aggression and relational aggression can serve that purpose. Now, to test this idea that low stress arousal may predict relational aggression, in a study from my lab, we collected data with female children and adolescents who were attending a residential summer camp. We got counselor reports of relational aggression over the summer. And to assess participants' physiological stress arousal, we again measured their skin conductance as well as their heart rate. Well, they played an online ball toss and game cyberball. I've got an example of this here in the lower right-hand corner. The little thing at the bottom is the participant's hand. They get thrown the ball, and then they can select which player they would like to throw the ball to. In our variant of cyberball, participants are excluded, so they're thrown the ball after they've been thrown the ball twice. They don't get it anymore, and they sit and watch the other players play the game. We found in this study that low stress reactivity was associated with relational aggression. And I'm going to sort of jump here to what the implications of this might be. So from a fearlessness theory perspective, this may suggest that relational aggressors may not be very responsive to punishment. So if you're trying to intervene with these kids, threatening punishment may not work very well. From a stimulation-seeking theory perspective, these findings might suggest that relational aggressors are looking for something fun and exciting to do, and they might benefit from having more appropriate alternatives when they're seeking stimulating experiences. So some researchers have pointed to things like rock climbing as a possibility. Now obviously this is just a snapshot of research in this field, but I want to briefly touch on what I think are some of the most important future directions where we need to go from here. First question or future direction that I see is the need to examine relational aggression across the life course. So we need to better understand how these behaviors develop across adulthood and the context where they're prevalent in adulthood, for example. Now, as I talked about earlier when we talked about popularity, relational aggression is a behavior that some people might use to achieve status and power in social groups. It raises the possibility that this could be very relevant to the workplace, for example. We also need long-term longitudinal studies where we follow these kids into adulthood. So we don't really know if these behaviors are usually outgrown or if people persist in them into adulthood, into old age. And if people do persist and the behaviors continue, what are the consequences of that? I think it's also going to be important for researchers to address more sophisticated questions regarding sex differences in relational aggression. So we've talked about the fact that across a large number of studies, rates of relational aggression are pretty similar in males and females. And yet, some of the risk factors and outcomes associated with these behaviors seem to differ. So this suggests that the meaning of the behaviors might be different in particular engendered peer groups of younger kids, like pre-adolescent kids. And then finally, and this is where Leanne is going to change the field, we need people to go out and develop intervention programs for relational aggression. It's not necessarily the case that programs that have been developed to address physical aggression are easily going to translate to addressing these behaviors. We see different risk factors for relational and physical aggression. We see different outcomes sometimes for relational and physical aggression. So the assumption that you could take a program that's already in existence and apply it to this behavior, well, we have some research to suggest, actually, that it's not a great assumption and that we probably need to be a little bit more specific in the interventions that we're developing. All right, I've already said thanks to a variety of people, so I won't repeat myself. But I do, again, want to thank Bill and Rex and my lab. Also, I didn't mention when I started, but collaborators and mentors, people here at UVM, as well as people that I work with at other institutions. And then the grant funding sources for my research, including NSF, a faculty research support award, and CAPTR. All right, I'm going to end there. Thank you.