A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children's social adjustment.

Abstract

Research on the relation between social information processing and social adjustment in childhood is reviewed and interpreted within the framework of a reformulated model of human performance and social exchange. This reformulation proves to assimilate almost all previous studies and is a useful heuristic device for organizing the field. The review suggests that overwhelming evidence supports the empirical relation between characteristic processing styles and children's social adjustment, with some aspects of processing (e.g., hostile attributional biases, intention cue detection accuracy, response access patterns, and evaluation of response outcomes) likely to be causal of behaviors that lead to social status and other aspects (e.g., perceived self-competence) likely to be responsive to peer status.

Negative Affect in Victimized Children: The Roles of Social Withdrawal, Peer Rejection, and Attitudes Toward Bullying

“…Future studies should continue to examine specific hypotheses generated from social information processing theory (Crick & Dodge, 1994) to help further explain the mediating influence of cognitive structures in the pathway from victimization to the experience of negative affect. In addition, one might expect that victimization reduces interpersonal sensitivity and that this deficit mediates the progress from victimization to victimizing (Fonagy, Target, Steele, & Steele, 1997).…”

“…Social information processing theory provides one reason to expect this link. From this perspective, children form their interpersonal-and self-schemata based on their social interactions, and these knowledge structures influence multiple aspects of social information processing, such as one's interpretation of and response to interpersonal events (Crick & Dodge, 1994;Dodge, 1993). For example, if a child experiences repeated victimization by peers and subsequently forms an interpersonal schema that aggression is an acceptable form of behavior inflicted on individuals who in some way deserve punishment, he/she would be expected to respond to such interpersonal events with self-derogating messages, thereby contributing to the development of negative affect.…”

“…Further, the connection between victimization and negative affect was expected to be partially mediated by the attitude that aggression is a legitimate and warranted form of social behavior. On the basis of research on self-blaming attributions (Graham & Juvonen, 1998) and social information processing theory (Crick & Dodge, 1994;Dodge, 1993), this schema regarding aggression was proposed to develop as a result of repeated victimization and to account in part for the victimization-negative affect connection by leading victimized children to conclude they must have done something wrong or have undesirable characteristics to be chosen as frequent targets of peer aggression. It is this particular attitude concerning aggression (in conjunction with their own experiences with maltreatment by peers) that should then predict whether or not a child reports elevated negative affect.…”

How School can Teach Civic Engagement Besides Civic Education: The Role of Democratic School Climate

“…Applying assumptions of the Social Information Processing model (SIP; e.g., Crick and Dodge 1994) to the potential effects of unfairness (Arsenio and Gold 2006), some authors argue that when adolescents are highly exposed to social contexts with a lack of fairness and reciprocity they tend to develop the belief that life primarily revolves around dominance (Arsenio and Gold 2006;Nation et al 2008). More specifically, being exposed to unfairness and inequalities in different social contexts may encourage the tendency to value instrumental goals more highly than relational goals.…”

Exposure to violent video games and aggression in German adolescents: a longitudinal analysis

“…Information processing on the basis of aggressive scripts can lead to the development of a ''hostile attributional style'', i.e., the habitual tendency to interpret ambiguous situations in terms of hostility and aggression, as suggested in the Social Information Processing Model by Crick and Dodge [1994]. As Dill et al [1997, p 275] graphically put it, people characterized by a hostile attributional style ''tend to view the world through blood-red tinted glasses''.…”