There are also conceptual reasons to expect children with externalizing symptoms to be relatively prone to sadness and related emotions. Externalizing children are likely to be rejected by peers, which would be expected to engender sadness and loneliness (Asher, Parkhurst, Hymel, & Williams, 1990). Moreover, they are likely to have difficulties at school (Rubin et al., 2006) and to enact inappropriate behaviors that preclude reaching their goals, which would be expected to elicit sadness (Saarni, Campos, Camras, & Witherington, 2006). For example, Capaldi (1991, 1992) argued that noxious externalizing problems tend to lead to pervasive failures (e.g., in regard to school and peer and familial relationships), which increase children’s vulnerability to negative emotionality (depression in that study). Conversely, children who are prone to sadness may display incompetent social behavior, including externalizing behaviors, because they do not have the skills or motivation to behave in more socially skilled ways. Likely due to such multiple factors, sadness has been positively related to externalizing problems (Eisenberg, Sadovsky, et al., 2005; Lemery et al., 2002; Zeman et al., 2002), although often primarily within context
