A Bi-Dimensional Taxonomy of Social Responsivity in Middle Childhood: Prosociality and Reactive Aggression Predict Externalizing Behavior Over Time

Abstract

Developing social skills is essential to succeed in social relations. Two important social constructs in middle childhood, prosocial behavior and reactive aggression, are often regarded as separate behaviors with opposing developmental outcomes. However, there is increasing evidence for the co-occurrence of prosociality and aggression, as both might indicate responsivity to the social environment. Here, we tested whether a bi-dimensional taxonomy of prosociality and reactive aggression could predict internalizing and externalizing problems over time. We re-analyzed data of two well-validated experimental tasks for prosociality (the Prosocial Cyberball Game) and reactive aggression (the Social Network Aggression Task) in a developmental population sample (n = 496, 7–9 years old). Results revealed no associations between prosociality and reactive aggression, confirming the independence of those constructs. Interestingly, although prosociality and reactive aggression independently did not predict problem behavior, the interaction of both was negatively predictive of changes in externalizing problems over time. Specifically, only children who scored low on both prosociality and reactive aggression showed an increase in externalizing problems 1 year later, whereas levels of externalizing problems did not change for children who scored high on both types of behavior. Thus, our results suggest that at an individual level, reactive aggression in middle childhood might not always be maladaptive when combined with prosocial behavior, thereby confirming the importance of studying social competence across multiple dimensions.

Development of social feedback processing and responses in childhood: an fMRI test-replication design in two age cohorts

“…Second, since participants were instructed to always send a noise blast, it is difficult to discover whether some children would rather have refrained from aggression or would have acted prosocially when receiving positive feedback. Children who show both self-protective as well as prosocial behaviors were previously found to show decreased externalizing behaviors over time ( Dobbelaar et al. , 2021 ).…”

Longitudinal associations between prosocial behavior and behavioral problems across childhood: A robust random-intercept cross-lagged panel model.

“…Furthermore, children may use a combination of prosocial and aggressive strategies to gain social status (Hartl et al, 2020;Hawley, 2003). These children might be especially responsive to their environment, thereby showing both prosocial and RELATIONS BETWEEN PROSOCIAL AND PROBLEM BEHAVIORS 13 self-protective aggressive behaviors, based on the social context (Crone et al, 2020;Dobbelaar et al, 2020). This effect was not observed in early childhood and these developmental differences might arise from developmental differences in social relations and peer status.…”

A neurocognitive model of early onset persistent and desistant antisocial behavior in early adulthood

“…To experimentally examine retaliation, the SNAT paradigm allows individuals to blast a loud noise to their peer(s) following feedback. Prior research showed that individuals give the loudest noise blasts following negative feedback, less following neutral feedback and least following positive feedback (Achterberg et al, 2016(Achterberg et al, , 2017(Achterberg et al, , 2018(Achterberg et al, , 2020Dobbelaar et al, 2021Dobbelaar et al, , 2022Van de Groep et al, 2021;van de Groep et al, 2022a). In our prior research in which we studied how young adults with childhood-onset persistent antisocial behavior, childhood-onset desistant antisocial behavior and typically developing young adults regulated their aggressive behavior following social feedback (van de Groep et al, 2022a), we observed that young adults with a persistent developmental trajectory of antisocial behavior showed similar levels of noise blast aggression as the other two groups following negative feedback.…”