The Highlights of "Is Being Popular a Risky Proposition", with Dr. Lara Mayeux

DISCLAIMER: What follows is my interpretation of Dr. Lara Mayeux's research. This blog post is not written by Dr. Mayeux, nor is it peer reviewed, but rather is my synopsis as a layman of the topics discussed at the July 7 Science Cafe gathering.



Tonight, Dr. Lara Mayeux gave an overview of the findings in the psychological research on popularity. Her specific focus was on the perceptions of teens of the popular kids, and whether popular teens are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, which I'll talk more about below. First, to paraphrase Dr. Mayeux, popularity is best defined as the ability to influence one's peers. This differentiates popularity from other measures of social status, such as likability. In fact, these two measures of status tend to diverge from one another as people move into adolescence, meaning that the popular people are often not the most well-liked.


Dr. Mayeux's research methodology includes a combination of peer reporting, teacher reporting and self reporting. Peer reporting involves students identifying peers that they identify with labels like "popular", "aggressive", "people I hang out with", and others. Students are identified with unique tags, so that the researchers can statistically determine whether students being labeled as "popular" are associated to other labels. Teacher reporting is more traditional, using a Likert scale (1 to 5 or 1 to 7) to gauge how much a teacher agrees that a student fits different labels, like "popular". Dr. Mayeux was careful to point out that she never defines popularity, but rather looks at how the students define popularity through the associations present in the data.


From this experimental setup, Dr. Mayeux pointed to a number of associations:

• Overt and Relational Aggression and Bullying. Popular students are more likely to commit acts of physical and verbal (overt) and more subtle relational aggression towards peers. This association is extremely robust, and is supported by every study published on peer relations. Boys are more likely to use overt methods, while girls are more likely to use relational aggression, meaning that they attack peers through their common relationships using destructive gossip and influence.
  
• Low likability. The correlation between likability and popularity is actually negative for high school age girls.
  
• Poorer academic performance (post middle school).
  
• Substance use. Especially alcohol use, increases with onset of popularity. There is almost no evidence that substance use leads to increased popularity.
  
• Early, high-risk sexual behavior. This is emerging from more recent studies, particularly among high school age girls.
  

The audience was perplexed by the (lack of) association between popularity and likability, coupled with the strong association between aggression and popularity. Why would we admire people that treat us badly? Dr. Mayeux discussed the theory that popular kids tend to possess "peer valued characteristics", including being attractive, wealthy, athletic, or a sense of humor, which allow peers to look past their bad behavior. She noted that these results are robust in western nations, but that in China, academic achievement is more closely aligned with popularity.
Lest we think that all popular kids are bad seeds, Dr. Mayeux pointed out some of the positive traits correlated with popularity:

• Good leadership skills.
  
• Social skills.
  
• Confidence.
  
• Athletic ability.
  
• Increased "defending behaviors". Some popular kids use their status to assist others who are being bullied or attacked.
  

Hopefully this post gives a sense of the fascinating work being done on popularity. There were some counterintuitive results, and these comprised most of the vigorous discussion between Dr. Mayeux and the audience.

You can contact Dr. Lara Mayeux at her website Mayeux Research .

The Psychology of Popularity, featuring Dr. Lara Mayeux

Whether you were one of the "cool kids" or not, you won't want to miss the upcoming Science Cafe. On July 7, Dr. Lara Mayeux will be presenting a body of her work related to teenagers and popularity. Her talk, titled "Popularity in the Peer System: Is Being Popular a Risky Proposition?", will address the effects on different age groups of being popular, including the struggle to maintain popularity. Dr. Mayeux's findings are a fascinating commentary on how human beings treat each other, and are chronicled in several scholarly papers. She co-edited a recent volume entitled Popularity in the Peer System for Guilford Press on this issue, and is an expert in social development in childhood and adolescence. Her research focuses on peer relationships, peer status (popularity, likeability, and rejection), physical and relational aggression, and gender differences and similarities in how kids and teens use aggressive behaviors. The evening promises to be packed with valuable insights for parents and teachers, and for anyone curious about human behavior in general.

Learnin' about Convective Clouds!

On Thursday at 7pm at the Norman Public Library, we're going to gather to hear Dr. Michael Jensen of Brookhaven National Lab talk about the Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E). This experiment is employing the largest network of meteorological instruments in history for the study of convective clouds, which are the progenitors of severe thunderstorms. The researchers hope to better understand the processes that lead to these types of clouds, so that we can better forecast severe weather in the future.

I personally went to the Department of Energy's Southern Great Plains facility near Lamont, Oklahoma, and the array of instruments is impressive. In addition to multiple radars with different capabilities, there are many different types of sensors for estimating the amount of moisture throughout the atmosphere above the site (important for cloud formation), several different lidars (like a radar, but with pulses of light), and a pair of airplanes that fly into cloud structures to measure what the cloud looks like directly.

Hopefully you will all come out to learn more about clouds, which is a favorite topic of mine, and to support Science Cafe. Don't forget we'll we having Gray Owl Coffee, and snacks provided by the Friends of the Norman Public Library!

Posters on Therapeutic Approaches to Treating Viral Disease at the Norman Public Library

Dr. Susan Schroeder of OU's Departments of Botany and Microbiology, and Chemistry and Biochemistry, alerted our good friend and librarian Theresa Tittle to a poster display of individual research projects being put on by her students. The posters are aimed at the general public, and are being presented by students headed for health careers. The projects to be presented are related to new therapeutic approaches to treating viral diseases, and will be showcased in the Lowry Room at the Norman Public Library from 1 to 4pm on Thursday, May 12. Come check out the research of these aspiring scientists!

Last Night's Gathering with Dr. Milton

Last night we gathered at the Norman Public Library to hear Dr. Kimball Martin of Physics at OU talk about nuclear power. I was looking forward to a vigorous discussion of the topic, and the attendees did not disappoint. I would estimate about 60 people attended, and there were questions about almost every slide that Dr. Milton presented.

Some of the take away messages of the presentation:

(1) No source of energy is clean, free or without risks. Dr. Milton discussed the various ways we produce energy currently, and costs and limitations of each. He expressed concern over the contributions of fossil fuel use to accelerating warming in the climate, and to the limited supply of petroleum left to us. In addition, he noted that hydroelectric generation has gotten close to capacity for the US, and that newer and larger dams around the world are causing ecological damage and displacing millions of people. Other renewables have unknown effects, and are expensive. With this information in hand, it may be time to consider again whether nuclear power has a role to play in the energy budget.

(2) Fears about safety are based on bad calculations of risk. Dr. Milton said that the safety record of nuclear power plants is quite good, and certainly no worse than generating power by other means. The few failures have been spectacular in nature, which leads us to overestimate risk, since the probabilities of failure are low, but the outcomes have been disastrous. He also said that power generation from coal kills several hundreds per year in mining accidents, and that oil exploration is becoming more dangerous, and pointed to the recent Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as evidence that other methods are quite risky.

(3) There are serious concerns with generation of power using nuclear reactors, other than safety. Nuclear waste must be stored for millions of years to become inert, and in a place that won't change significantly and thus expose the radioactive materials to the environment. Also, nuclear power and nuclear weapons are "entwined technologies", meaning that proliferation of nuclear weapons is a very possible side effect of widespread nuclear power use, since the same basic processes and technologies are used for both. Finally, the only international governance of nuclear power, the IAEA, has very little power for enforcement, and is chronically underfunded.

With these points, Dr. Milton suggested that we need to think deeply as a society about our goals as a society, and that moving forward will require a combined effort of efficiency, conservation, and smarter power production. He stressed that he is not an active proponent of building more nuclear power plants, but rather that our current system is not working and needs to be reconsidered.

Let me know if you're interested in the presentation, and I'll do my best to answer specific questions. Hope to see you at the next one! Details to follow soon!

Nuclear Power with Dr. Kim Milton!

Dr. Kim Milton of the Department of Physics will talk about nuclear power at the upcoming Science Cafe on May 5. Here is Dr. Milton's synopsis of his presentation, titled "Does Nuclear Power Have a Role to Play in the US Energy
Budget?":

It has been plausibly argued both from a consideration of energy needs
and from the need to combat global warming that nuclear power will need
to play an increasing role in our energy sources. However, the recent
events in Japan have brought issues of nuclear safety to renewed
attention. In addition, proliferation is a major concern, and it is
necessary to increase funding, staff, and enforcement of the IAEA.
Disposal of nuclear waste, for indefinitely long periods, and
reprocessing of nuclear wastes, are issues that have yet to be solved.
These issues are extremely difficult and worrisome, and it is possible
for reasonable, responsible people to hold strong views on the issue in
contradiction to each other.

I was inspired to contact Dr. Milton at a suggestion from Jana Smith, and the fact that the issue is reemerging after the events at Fukushima Daichi in Japan following their recent earthquakes and tsunamis. This one will have lots of discussion, since people tend to pretty polarized on this issue. I'm sure that we will all learn a lot, and I hope to find out what makes the generation of power this way different than traditional fossil fuels, in terms of costs, waste production, and so forth. Don't miss it!

Don Wyckoff's Presentation about Oklahoma's Past Climate

We gathered last Thursday to hear Dr. Don Wyckoff, the Curator of Archaeology at Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, talk about reconstructing past climates using all sorts of different types of "proxies", which are different types of preserved materials that indirectly tell scientists what environmental conditions in a particular region must have been like. As an example, Dr. Wyckoff talked about different types of pollen that are preserved for thousands of years, and existence of a pollen for a particular tree might indicate that there was a range of temperatures and precipitation in that location when the pollen was created. He showed several pollen records that describe the natural variability of the climate over the most recent 10000 to 35000 years. He also discussed the finding of "buried soils", which are different types of soil lying in layers below the uppermost layer. These also serve as indicators of the climate at a particular time, with darker carbon rich soils indicating periods of significant plant growth and favorable conditions.

Based on his findings, Dr. Wyckoff expressed a concern for people living in Oklahoma in the future, since the past points to long periods of drought, with short periods in between of relatively moist conditions. He placed a strong emphasis on the need for wiser use of water and resources, since the state's past implies a future where these will be in limited supply.