Suppressed Attention to Rejection, Ridicule, and Failure Cues: A Unique Correlate of Reactive but Not Proactive Aggression in Youth

Abstract

Tested the hypothesis that reactive aggression (RA) but not proactive aggression (PA) should be associated with heightened attention to rejection, ridicule, and failure cues. In addition to a reaction time measure of selective attention, participants also completed a vignette-based interview regarding their interpretation of ambiguous social situations, and children, parents, and teachers completed questionnaire measures of child aggression and related variables. Consistent with predictions, RA but not PA was related to biased attention for rejection, ridicule, and failure cues. However, contrary to expectation, heightened RA scores were associated with suppressed rather than enhanced attention to such cues. Despite the unexpected direction of this attentional bias, as predicted it was significantly related to the well-established tendency of aggressive children to interpret ambiguous social situations as threatening, which was also uniquely related to RA. Further, the correlation between suppressed attention and RA was fully mediated by interpretation bias.

Visual Attention to Dynamic Scenes of Ambiguous Provocation and Children’s Aggressive Behavior

“…The patterns of attention found in this study, therefore, should also be specific toreactive aggression. Indeed, suppressed attention in the Schippell et al (2003) study and encoding errors in the Dodge et al (1997) study were associated with reactive, but not proactive aggression. Thus, future studies on biases in attention should take into account these subtypes of aggression.…”

“…The findings from these studies suggest a third possible pattern of attention biases among aggressive children – inattention to hostile cues and heightened attention to non-hostile cues . Using a probe detection task, Schippell et al (2003) found that among early-to-mid-adolescents, reactive aggression and a bias to interpret ambiguous situations as hostile are associated with suppressed attention to socially threatening words. Wilkowski, Robinson, Gordon, and Troop-Gordon (2007) used eye tracking to assess the attention of 45 undergraduate males as they viewed line drawings depicting scenes of ambiguously aggressive acts.…”

Executive Functions in Children: Associations with Aggressive Behavior and Appraisal Processing

“…Research on social information processing has found that reactive aggressive behavior is frequently fueled by hostile attributional biases and is related to significant reductions in the number and quality of effective solutions generated in response to conflicts in ambiguous provocation situations (Hubbard, Dodge, Cillessen, Coie, & Schwartz, 2001). Reactive aggressive behavior has also been found to be associated with deficits in the development of an appropriate attentional focus on interpersonal interactions (Schippell, Vasey, Cravens-Brown, & Bretveld, 2003). Further, difficulty in the employment of effective problem-solving skills during complex and contradictory social situations has been associated with reactive aggressive behavior (Dodge, Lochman, Harnish, Bates, & Pettit, 1997).…”

In the Eye of the Beholder: Eye-tracking Assessment of Social Information Processing in Aggressive Behavior

“…Fourth, encoding has been studied indirectly by using reaction time measures to indicate attention allocation (van Goozen et al 2002; Gouze 1987; Schippell et al 2003). In one task, children watched puppet shows depicting either hostile or non-hostile events.…”

“…In a groundbreaking study, Schippell et al (2003), operationalized encoding as attention allocation in a probe detection task. Aim of the task was to provide an indication of attention allocation on the basis of stimuli competing for attention, just as social cues would compete for attention during a social interaction.…”