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.

Psychopathy, aggression, and the processing of emotional stimuli in non‐referred girls and boys

“…Also, the use of a normative sample consisting of children of college students could limit the generalizability of the findings. Second, although the dot-probe paradigm has been shown to assess attentional biases in anxious individuals who are highly reactive to emotional stimuli (Mogg & Bradley, 1999;Vasey et al, 1995Vasey et al, , 1996, it has only been used in one study to investigate the relation between emotional processing and aggressive behavior (Schippell et al, 2003). Further, the dotprobe task is not a direct index of emotional responsiveness, since a number of cognitive, affective, and motoric processes are operating between the child's perception of the pictorial stimuli and his or her motoric response concerning the location of the dot (Vasey et al, 1996).…”

“…It has primarily been used to assess the relation between anxiety and attentional orienting responses in adults (Mogg & Bradley, 1999) and children (Vasey, Daleidon, Williams, & Brown, 1995;Vasey, El-Hag, & Daleidon, 1996). However, it has also been used to investigate the relation between emotional processing and child aggressive behavior (see, e.g., Schippell, Vasey, Cravens-Brown, & Bretveld, 2003). This is the first study to use the dot-probe task to investigate the relationship between emotional processing and psychopathic traits.…”

Testing the developmental distinctiveness of male proactive and reactive aggression with a nested longitudinal experimental intervention

“…For example, several studies have shown that RA but not PA is related to hostile attribution biases in response to ambiguous provocation situations [Dodge and Coie, 1987;Dodge et al, 1997;Hubbard et al, 2001;Nas et al, 2005;Orobio de Castro et al, 2002], negative affect [Fite et al, 2009], attention for rejection, ridicule, and failure cues [Schippel et al, 2003], problem-solving deficits in difficult social situations [Brown and Kolko, 1999;Dodge, 1991;Price and Dodge, 1989], and impairment in executive functions [Ellis et al, 2009].…”

Interactive Links Between Theory of Mind, Peer Victimization, and Reactive and Proactive Aggression

“…Although studies usually report a high correlation between reactive and proactive aggression (mean r=0.68; Card and Little 2006), factor analyses and meta-analyses provide clear evidence for the validity of the distinction between the two functions of aggression (Card and Little 2006;Crick and Dodge 1996;McAuliffe et al 2007;Poulin and Boivin 2000;Vitaro et al 1998). As will be discussed in more detail below, evidence also suggests that these two functions of aggressive behavior are differentially related to social cognitive skills, particularly with respect to the decoding of social stimuli (Crick and Dodge 1996;Dodge et al 1997;Dodge and Coie 1987;Hubbard et al 2001;Schippel et al 2003). The present study examines a specific and as yet unstudied aspect of decoding-related social cognitive skills, namely theory of mind, in relation to proactive and reactive aggression.…”