ity is inversely related to overt anger incidents.” It seems that the more popular children are better at coping with anger inducing situations. The concept of emotional display rules is similar to emotion regulation. Emotional display rules are the rules that are followed so as to keep the peace and balance in a social setting. Certain emotions are not appropriate for some situations. It is difficult to quantitatively assess how well a child uses emotional display rules, but it follows logically that a child who is well liked by his peers will be able to properly display or mask his emotions in a given situation. Since sympathy requires one to be “other-oriented,” meaning understanding the distress of others from their point of view, it would require some emotional control. Both teachers and peers describe popular children as more cooperative and helpful than the average child, and rejected children as less helpful. However, there was no direct evidence for concluding that social status can be predicted from sympathetic responding.Mood states of a child can also be a factor in whether that child is a desirable playmate or not. Children who routinely display positive moods are better liked by their peers. Moody children tend to be disliked by their peers. However, it is difficult to determine cause and effect of this. From this article, a child’s social status and popularity has great correlation to the emotional functionality of that child. We do not always know, as with many other psychological studies, what the cause is and what the effect is. This seems to be the case with the mood states of the children. However, in all the other cases, the cause seems to be the emotional functionality of the child and the effect is popularity. So should we teach our children to be more emotionally stable and functional? Should we make our children conform to society’s standards to be “popular?...
