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Social Trauma

Humiliation, exclusion, and status loss as traumatic events, and who is harmed by them

One in three students experiences bullying at school, yet when a teenager is publicly humiliated, systematically excluded, or stripped of status among peers, we rarely call it trauma. In my studies I have found that accumulated status-loss events predict social anxiety and depression, and that symptom networks following social threats closely resemble those following physical threats. In this line of work I aim to establish social trauma as a distinct clinical target, to map event types (humiliation versus exclusion, single devastating events versus recurrent micro-assaults), and to identify for whom, and in which classroom ecologies, these events escalate. My methods include linguistic analysis of narratives, short-burst ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in classrooms, and sociometric measures. The applied goal is a risk-profiling tool that school counselors can use in real time.