"It's a really subtle form of bullying where it focuses on damaging a person's sense of social planks, usually in friendship groups and between friends.
Identifying Relational Aggression
This type of behavior is often covert, unlike outright physical aggression, and has the intent of damaging a girl's self-esteem and social relationships. Relational aggression can be proactive—used as a means to an end—or reactive—occurring as a retaliatory response.
Relational aggression refers to harm within relationships that is caused by covert bullying or manipulative behavior. Examples include isolating a youth from his or her group of friends (social exclusion), threatening to stop talking to a friend (the ''silent treatment''), or spreading gossip and rumors by e-mail.
Girls, as opposed to boys, are more likely to focus on relational issues and connection-building in social situations. Girls are more likely to engage in relational aggression to harm peers because of their social concerns.
Relational aggression can take the form of the following mean girl behaviors: Intentionally excluding peers from a friend group or clique. Spreading rumors and gossip.
Definition. Relational aggression is defined as a type of aggression that is "intended to harm others through deliberate manipulation of their social standing and relationships".
behavior that manipulates or damages relationships between individuals or groups, such as bullying, gossiping, and humiliation.
Adolescent girls often perpetrate aggression by gossiping and spreading rumours about others, by attempting to ruin relationships and by manipulating and excluding others. Further, males and females engage in reactive and proactive relational aggression differently.
Relational aggression appears to be more common in girls than boys, perhaps, researchers say, because the average girl is more socially developed and more verbal than a boy of the same age.
That social and relational aggression is a female thing feels obviously true. Except it's not. Academic journals (where experts publish peer reviewed studies) show that boys also participate in social bullying and relational aggression about as much as girls do.
Relational aggression begins early in childhood and begins to increase between ages 8 and 11, with girls more likely to use this form of aggression than boys (Archer and Coyne, 2005).
While boys became angry more often than girls, girls were significantly more likely to use indirect aggression when angry, such as persuading the peer group not to be friends with a child, or telling lies about another child (Lagerspetz et al.).
Children who are highly socially competent often use relational aggression to reinforce social norms, many of which are endorsed by teachers and other adults (Coyne et al. 2012).
It has been reported widely that while men tend to express physical, overt, and direct aggression, women tend to express relational and indirect aggression more often [4,5,6,7].
Mean girl behavior is often relational aggression, or alternative aggression, an indirect but harmful form of social bullying. Unlike physical harm, those who engage in relationship aggression want to make a person look bad to others, to bring them down or take away what the other person has.
Cute aggression is typically not a cause for concern. The type of aggression that is usually experienced during cute aggression is not one that often causes people to actually act out their feelings of aggression. Instead, it's a type of trick of the brain to temper feelings that feel overwhelming or excessive.
Cute aggression can also be considered a part of our “social biting” which we may have learnt from our ancestors. According to a research conducted psychological scientists of Yale University, the desire to pseudo-bite or squeeze anything we find excruciatingly cute is actually a neurochemical reaction.
For children, anger issues often accompany other mental health conditions, including ADHD, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Tourette's syndrome. Genetics and other biological factors are thought to play a role in anger/aggression. Environment is a contributor as well.
While physical aggression and victimization refers to physical attacks (e.g., hitting, pushing, or kicking) or verbal threats (Crick et al., 1999), relational aggression and victimization involves harm through the manipulation of (or damage to) peer relationships and social status through the spreading of rumors and ...
According to Griffin, children subjected to relational aggression can experience a number of negative effects, including low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, a decline in academic performance and even thoughts of suicide.
Relational aggression in romantic relationship refers to behaviors intended to hurt or harm one's romantic partner through the damage or manipulation of relationships, including direct and indirect aggression, as well as proactive and reactive aggression.
Relationship behavior is the degree to which a leader engages in two-way communication with an employee performing a specific task to include listening, facilitating and providing support.
Make her feel bad about bullying and try to shut her up so that she can't bother you. In other words, say something that she can't answer. Nevertheless, make sure it's not something that she can later make a comeback from. Showing her assertive energy can also help, in some cases; it doesn't need to be confrontational.