Poster #121 - Children’s Emotion Recognition Capacities Association With Proactive and Reactive Aggression: A One-Year Longitudinal Study

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Poor emotion recognition is linked to aggression in children (Dawel et al., 2012; Schultz, Izard, & Bear, 2004). Whether emotion recognition skills are differentially associated with subtypes of aggression, such as proactive and reactive aggression, has largely been unexplored. These subtypes of aggression are thought be distinct in their emotional processes. Proactive aggression is characterized as “cold-blooded” and is associated with fearlessness and callous-unemotional traits, whereas reactive aggression is described as “hot-blooded” and is linked to increased intensity of emotions such as anger and fear (Kempes et al., 2005). The hypothesis was that children displaying proactive aggression would have reduced abilities to perceive the presence of emotions in others, while those showing reactive aggression may sense the presence of emotions, but would be more likely to misidentify them. Two waves of data were collected from an ethnically diverse sample of Canadian 4- and 8-year-olds (N = 300; Mage = 6.53, SD = 2.02, 50% female) over a period of 1-year. Children were asked to identify angry, happy, fearful, sad, and neutral facial expressions that varied in level of intensity (see Gao & Maurer, 2009). The number of facial expressions identified as showing no emotion reflected children’s emotion sensitivity scores. Whereas emotion misidentification indicated the degree to which children identified facial expressions as the incorrect emotion. Caregivers rated children’s overt proactive and reactive aggression using the Little et al. (2003) measure (αs = .88 for both reactive and proactive scales). Descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1. We found that children who were less sensitive to sad, angry, and fearful emotions were more proactively aggressive. Further, children who were more sensitive to facial expressions of anger had higher reports of overt reactive aggression. When controlling for Time 1 proactive aggression, we found that lower sadness sensitivity scores at Time 1 was associated with higher proactive aggression at Time 2 (see Table 2). Emotion misidentification was not significantly associated with reports of reactive or proactive aggression subtypes at initial visit or at the one year follow-up. These findings further support the distinction between reactive and proactive forms of aggression in children, such that proactively aggressive children may be less sensitive to the presence of negatively valenced emotions, while reactively aggressive children may have increased sensitivity to specifically anger.

Authors

• Erinn Acland, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Marc Jambon, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tina Malti, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author