Social information processing of aggressive and non-aggressive children in small group home

Abstract

Objectives: This study examined the social-cognitive processes between aggressive and non-aggressive children living in 9 small group homes.

Methods: Housemothers’ rating of aggression, peer nomination of aggression, and the reactive- and proactive- aggression scale scores of the children were used to classify the aggressive and non-aggressive group. Eight aggressive and eight non-aggressive children, aged 9 to11, were presented with one of the six videotapes, each consisting of 13 scenarios with stimulus about peer provocation situations. To assess the variables in the five steps of social information processing, an interviewer asked the participant to imagine being in the situation and to act out what he or she would do or say in response.

Results: A distinct pattern of interpreting, responding, and enacting to peer’s provocation was found to distinguish between aggressive and non-aggressive children in small group homes. Consistent with the hypothesis, aggressive children were found to make more attribution bias or hostile attribute to benign intention and to show less skills to enact a chosen response. Also, aggressive children were found to be more likely to interpret the ambiguous situation as hostile, generate more responses, endorse less passive responses, and favor to choose less competent responses. However, contrary to the hypothesis, no statistical significant difference was found between the two groups in endorsing aggressive and competent response.

Discussion: Since attribution or interpretation to benign ambiguous social stimuli plays a role in the essential social cognitive mechanism that determines aggressive and non-aggressive behavior, an attributional intervention may be effective in decreasing childhood aggressive behavior in small group homes. Moreover, intervention programs that are designed to enhance enactment skills may also reduce childhood aggression, as the findings showed that aggressive behaviors were deficient in enactment skills.