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Nikki R. Crick (February 6,1958 - October 28, 2012) was a psychologist and professor of child development and family studies known internationally for her research on relational aggression. She published a large number of influential research articles and chapters and received a prestigious awards for her contributions as a scientist, including the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology and the Boyd McCandless Award from the American Psychological Association.

Biography
Crick received her B.A./B.S. degree in psychology and a Masters degree in human development and family studies at Purdue University. She went to graduate school at Vanderbilt University where she obtained her Ph.D in clinical psychology in 1992. Crick participated in research to promote positive youth development. She helped begin one of the first intervention programs for relationally aggressive youth.

Research
Nikki Crick's work on peer victimization has had a huge impact on society as a whole. Peer victimization is the experience among children of being a target of the aggressive behavior of other children, who are not siblings and not necessarily age-mates. Nikki Crick observed that forms of peer maltreatment that were common in boys' peer groups tended to occur much less frequently in girls' peer groups, and concluded that girls were more often relationally victimized, whereas boys were more overtly victimized. Crick published a number of influential articles on peer victimization including "An observational study of delivered and received aggression, gender, and social-psychological adjustment in preschool: "This White Crayon Doesn't Work ...".

Crick's work on childhood aggression demonstrated that, as a group, boys are more physically aggressive than girls. Her study hypothesized that this finding reflects a lack of research on forms of aggression that are relevant to girls rather than an actual gender difference in levels of overall aggressiveness.The form of aggression hypothesized to be typical of girls, relational aggression, was assessed with a peer nomination instrument in third- through sixth-grade children. Results provided evidence for the validity and distinctiveness of the construct of relational aggression, defined as acts intended to harm others through deliberate manipulation of their social standing and relationships. In addition to finding that girls tended to be more relationally aggressive than boys, she found evidence that relationally aggressive children were at risk for serious adjustment difficulties.

Crick's innovative research on relational aggression examined behaviors involving social exclusion or spreading malicious rumors. The research showed that girls are more likely to engage in relational forms of aggression than the physical forms of aggression that had previously captured the majority of empirical attention. Crick's research documented the harmful consequence of relation aggression for victims and perpetrators, which forced aggression researchers to expand their studies of aggressions to include a wider range of aggressive behaviors. At heart, she was an astute methodologist who took risks to develop reliable and reasonable measures. Her combination of theoretical and methodological intensity essentially changed the way that people study aggression today.

Representative Publications

 * Cicchetti, D., & Crick, N. R. (Eds.). (2009). Precursors of and diverse path- ways to personality disorder in children and adolescents: Part 1 [Special Issue]. Development and Psychopathology, 21, 683–1030.
 * Crick, N. R., Casas, J. F., & Ku, H.-C. (1999). Relational and physical forms of peer victimization in preschool. Developmental Psychology, 35, 376–385.
 * Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1996). Social information‐processing mechanisms in reactive and proactive aggression. Child Development, 67(3), 993-1002.
 * Gower A. L., Lingras K. A., Mathieson L. C., Kawabata Y., Crick N. R. (2015). The Role of Preschool Relational and Physical Aggression in the Transition to Kindergarten: Links with Social-Psychological Adjustment. Early Education and Development. 25: 619-640. PMID 26146468  DOI: 10.1080/10409289.2014.844058
 * Schäfer M, Werner N. E., Crick N. R. (2002). A comparison of two approaches to the study of negative peer treatment: General victimization and bully/victim problems among German schoolchildren British Journal of Developmental Psychology. 20: 281-306. DOI: 10.1348/026151002166451