Emotional State and its Relation to Social Cognition and Aggression in Elementary School Age Boys

Lorrie Nielson Gehlbach¹ and Lisabeth Fisher DiLalla

Southern Illinois University School of Medicine

Paper presented to the Society for Research in Child Development, April, 2003, Tampa, FL.

The role of emotion in social cognition is one area yet to be explored rigorously in relation to childhood aggression. Previous research has shown that aggressive children are more likely to ascribe malicious intent to another child in social interactions when a negative outcome occurs, even when the intent of the other child was ambiguous. The present study examined how emotion interacts with this relation between social cognition and aggression. Eighty ten-year-old boys participated. Parents completed behavioral ratings of participants’ aggression level. Participants viewed two sets of videotaped social interactions created by Dodge, et al. (1995). In each interaction, a negative outcome for a target child was depicted as resulting from another child's actions. The second child's intent either was hostile, ambiguous, or accidental. After each interaction, participants answered questions pertaining to attribution accuracy, encoding accuracy, and behavioral responding. Participant’s responses were coded for aggressive content. Before viewing each interaction set, participants engaged in either a “happy” or “angry” mood induction procedure. Manipulation checks were used to assess the successfulness of the induction procedures. A within subjects design was utilized to examine the role of emotion.

For boys who responded to mood induction procedures, hierarchical regression analyses revealed a significant interaction in which parent rated aggression level and intensity of anger significantly predicted aggressive behavioral responses for hostile vignettes (adjusted R² = .41; see Figure 1). Specifically, participants higher in aggression were affected by feelings of anger to a greater extent than less aggressive participants.

Regression analyses also revealed a significant interaction between intensity of anger and aggression for the prediction of accurate cue encoding (adjusted R² = .15; see Figure 2). Again, more aggressive participants were affected by emotion to a greater degree, with encoding accuracy increasing with feelings of anger.

This higher susceptibility of aggressive children to react to feelings of anger suggests the need for multicomponent intervention programs designed to reduce aggression to provide more emphasis on anger control training. The finding that for aggressive boys, increased feelings of anger are associated with increased cue encoding accuracy and increased aggressive responding presents an interesting contradiction. This implies that although aggressive boys encode more accurately during feelings of anger, they do not utilize the increased knowledge of social cues to refrain from aggressive responding. Thus, there appears to be a disconnect between aggressive boys’ social knowledge and social functioning. The existence of separation between aggressive children’s social knowledge and behavior does have precedence. For example, although cognitive social skills training programs with aggressive children have demonstrated improved knowledge of problem solving skills, this improvement in social knowledge was not typically associated with behavioral changes. Thus, it may be that feelings of threat or anger lead to hypervigilance in aggressive children, which in turns leads to an increase in accurate social cue encoding, but at the same time leads to increased aggressive responding.

References

Dodge, K.A., Pettit, G.S., Bates, J.E. & Valente, E. (1995). Social information processing patterns partially mediate the effect of early physical abuse on later conduct problems. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 104, 632-643.

¹ Now at University of Massachusetts Medical School.