Motivation and emotion development in human psychology

¶ … Psychology

Peer Rejection

The issue of peer rejection and the effects it can have on individuals and the communities of which they are part are touched on briefly on page 413, chapter 12 of the textbook, but they are not really explored in depth. The website education.com discusses these issues in greater depth in an article found at the URL http://www.education.com / reference/article/consequences-peer-rejection/, and cites studies that have found that rejected students are seven times more likely to fail a grade than are popular students, and furthermore that they are four times more likely to drop out of school before the tenth grade (education.com 2010). There is a much more in depth discussion of the problems that rejected children face than is provided in the textbook, yet at the same time there is still a relative lack of an explanation for how social rejection leads to the decreased academic performance and other issues that have been correlated with peer rejection on a sustained scale.

This suggests that the causal mechanisms of the phenomenon are not really understood; there is a great deal of correlations that has been found between early behavioral problems and later peer rejection, and between peer rejection and feelings of loneliness, depression, and at times ultimately aggression, but research has apparently been unable to establish direct causal links between these observations (education.com 2010). It would be interesting to conduct research into this area to examine and describe exactly how the psychological effects of peer rejection lead to the academic failures and the specific types of depression it causes.

Functions of Emotions

Though the text does go into some detail about the practical functions that emotions serve on page 336 in chapter 10, it is rather brief and perfunctory when addressing these practical functions. Though this issue is not particularly confusing, it is also not very well explained in the textbook, and so a website was found that provides more information on the subject. At the URL http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content= a713751220~frm=titlelink, the abstract of an in-depth research article can be found that details the wide array of literature documenting the evolutionary functions served by emotions, and that also notes the relative lack of information concerning emotions' developmental functions. This could possibly explain why there is not a great deal of depth in the textbook regarding these functions; the text is more concerned with developmental issues than with evolutionary phenomena, and the developmental functions of emotions have not been as thoroughly researched (informaworld.com 2010). This site provides more information than is given in the text, yet is still somewhat brief due to the lack of research on the subject.