Poster #58 - Children Derive Aggression and Prosociality from Parents in Distinct Ways

• In Event: Poster Session 10

Abstract

Reducing aggression and increasing prosociality can improve the well-being of individuals and society. Therefore, understanding how these social behaviors develop is crucial for developing children. Accumulated literature has revealed that parental behaviors and family relationships influence children’s aggression and prosociality. However, most of the studies only investigated aggression or prosociality separately and lacked a distinction between the effects of parental behaviors and family relationships. In the current study, we examined the effects of these two family contexts on children’s development of both aggression and prosociality simultaneously.

Thirty-two participants were recruited for the current study, with 16 parent-child dyads, in which children aged 8-16y (M = 11.81) and parents aged 33-53y (M = 43.00). Participants were asked to play two games, competitive role-playing game and victim rescue game. The competitive role-playing game is a competitive reaction time game for three people. It captures participants’ different reactive and proactive aggression tendencies by averaging the punishment levels (i.e., noise intensity level, range: 1-8) respectively chosen for the highly invasive opponent and less invasive opponent by the participants in win trials. The victim rescue game is a parallel design with the competitive role-playing game. It measures participants’ reactive and proactive prosocial tendencies by calculating the mean points (1-8) that participants are willing to sacrifice to rescue two separate victims, one of which says “thank you” to the participants while the other one does not. The sacrificed points would be turned into real donations to anti-bullying associations. Participants were also required to finish surveys on family conflict, family identity, and parent and peer attachment, for quantifying the quality of family relationships.

The results showed that the child group has higher reactive aggression (M[children] = 6.48, M[parents] = 5.10, d = .77, p = .04) and lower prosociality in general (M[children] = 5.23, M[parents] = 6.60, d = -.77, p = .04) than the parent group. For prosocial behavior in children, we found that the parents’ prosocial tendencies can increase children’s prosociality through the mediation of positive family relationships (indirect effect: B = .22, p < .001), but there was no direct effect of parental tendencies on children’s behavior (B = -.03, p = .90). For aggressive behavior in children, interestingly, higher parents’ aggressive tendencies directly lead their children to be more aggressive (B = .39, p = .02) regardless of their relationship quality (indirect effect: B < .01, p = .93).

These distinct paths of how aggression and prosociality development are influenced could be explained by the natural differences between aggressive and prosocial behaviors. Aggressive behaviors are usually instinctual and overt in order to protect oneself or gain from others and thus, parental aggression affects more directly, while prosociality is an implicit trait that intends to benefit others and thus the family interactions and perceived values in a family are relatively important. Further studies could focus on identifying protective factors from family contexts to interrupt the effect of parental aggressive tendencies on children’s aggression.

Authors

• Ya-Yun Chen, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  Presenting Author

• Sammy Hong, Virginia Tech

• Tae-Ho Lee, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University