Callous-Unemotional Traits and Social Information Processing as Predictors of Reactive and Proactive Aggression
Date
2018-05
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
No research to date has examined the relative contribution of social
information processing (SIP) and callous-unemotional (CU) traits to the prediction of
reactive and proactive aggression, and that is the goal of the current study. Participants
included 150 racially/ethnically diverse adolescents (mean age = 13.53 years) and
their parents. Adolescents completed questionnaires reporting their reactive and
proactive aggression as well as a task to assess social information processing
(including hostile attributional bias, dominance, and positive expectations for
aggression), while parents reported on their child’s callous-unemotional traits
(including three subscales assessing callous, uncaring, and unemotional). When the
subscales of SIP and CU traits were entered as simultaneous predictors of reactive
aggression, significant positive effects emerged for dominance and positive
expectations for aggression and a marginal negative effect emerged for callousunemotional.
When the same analysis was conducted to predict proactive aggression, a
marginal positive effect emerged for dominance, a marginal negative effect emerged
for callous-callous, and a significant positive effect emerged for callous-uncaring.
Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed.
Description
Keywords
Psychology, predictors of aggression, callous-unemotional traits, social information processing