Callous-Unemotional Traits and Social Information Processing as Predictors of Reactive and Proactive Aggression

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.