Proactive Aggression in Childhood and Early Adolescence

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Youth violence is costly to individuals and society at large, with an annual cost of over $20 billion in the United States alone. One robust precursor of youth violence is childhood proactive aggression, or the use of aggression to obtain desired outcomes (Vitaro et al., 2006). The present symposium integrates three lines of research on proactive aggression in childhood and early adolescence across three countries (Netherlands, US, Canada), aiming to provide starting points for early intervention. The first presentation (Acland & Malti) focuses on emotion recognition difficulties as a potential mechanism underlying proactive aggression in 4- and 8-year-old children (N = 300). Results showed that insensitivity to negative emotions predicted caregiver-reported proactive, but not reactive, aggression. The second presentation (Lansu) examines the quadratic association between popularity and proactive aggression in early adolescents (N = 182) using self-reports, peer-reports, teacher-reports, and structured observations in a cooperative and competitive context. Except for self-report, all findings indicated that proactively aggressive adolescents were more popular, with a quadratic trend suggesting that proactive aggression is particularly defining of highly popular youth in a cooperative context. The third presentation (Van Dijk et al.) uses a person-centered approach to examine whether distinct subtypes of proactively and reactively aggressive children exist. Findings converged across community and clinical samples (total N = 466) to suggest that, in addition to reactive and mixed subtypes, a distinct group of predominantly proactive children exists. Our discussant (Hubbard) will integrate these findings and discusses their implications for early intervention and future research.

Sub Unit

• Developmental Psychopathology

Chair

• Anouk van Dijk, Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)

Discussant

• Julie A Hubbard, University of Delaware

Individual Presentations

• Negative Emotion Recognition and Aggression Subtypes in Early and Middle Childhood - Presenting Author: Erinn Acland, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Tina Malti, University of Toronto

• The Role of Reporter and Context in the Quadratic Associations of Popularity with Proactive Aggression - Presenting Author: Tessa A. M. Lansu, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

• Do Distinct Groups of Reactively and Proactively Aggressive Children Exist? A Confirmatory Latent Profile Approach - Presenting Author: Anouk van Dijk, Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA); Non-Presenting Author: Julie A Hubbard, University of Delaware; Non-Presenting Author: Peter Deschamps, University Medical Center Utrecht; Non-Presenting Author: Wieteke Hiemstra, Utrecht University; Non-Presenting Author: Hanneke Polman, Utrecht University