Cognitive, personality, and demographic factors: A moderated mediation of chronic violence exposure and violent offending in justice-involved youth.

Abstract

Objective: Guided by continuous traumatic stress theory (Eagle & Kaminer, 2013) and trauma coping theory (Ford et al., 2006), the present study examined hostility and callous-unemotional traits as mediators between chronic community violence exposure in adolescence and violent offending in early adulthood. Method: Baseline surveys and data over 5 years (8 follow-up time points) were analyzed from 1,354 justiceinvolved adolescents (86% male) Ages 14-19 (M = 16.04, SD = 1.14) in the Pathways to Desistance Project. Results: Results demonstrated that callous-unemotional traits, but not hostility, mediated the association between violence exposure and aggressive offending such that increased chronic violence exposure predicted increases in callous-unemotional traits, and subsequent increased aggressive offending. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that the association between chronic violence (both witnessed and victimization) and callous-unemotional traits was stronger for males and females who were younger at the time of their first offense. When gender was examined as a moderator, the callous-unemotional traits mediation model was significant for males, but not for females. However, the interaction effects between gender and chronic violence exposure were not significant at the more stringent p < .01 level. Conclusions: Findings call attention to the need to reduce youth exposure to violence via community-based crime prevention. For youth who are already justice-involved, trauma-informed personality assessments and interventions that build emotion regulation and healthy interpersonal interactions may help reduce recidivism rates. These community and therapeutic interventions may decrease future aggressive offending as youth age into early adulthood.

Internal and External Crime Hot Spots: From Neural to Micro-Geographical Networks

“…This disruption, in turn, can interfere with the typical development of cortical areas (Stiles 2017; Vasung et al 2019) associated with the cognitive control system. The same principles can be applied to factors linked to attributes of crime hot spots, such as exposure to chronic community violence exposure and criminal acts on the streets, as well as physical factors that are known to contribute to persistent stressors (McEwen 2017; Sargent et al 2022), which, in turn, has the potential to disrupt the natural processes of neuron proliferation and differentiation, giving rise to neural circuits that underlie emotional and cognitive functions associated with antisocial behaviours, such as aggressiveness and externalizing disorders (Chong et al 2022; Palumbo et al 2018; Saxbe et al 2018; Tremblay, Vitaro, and Côté 2018).…”

Exposure to violence predicts callous‐unemotional traits and aggression in adolescence in the context of persistent ethnic‐political conflict and violence

“…For example, results from the Crossroads Study—a longitudinal study of a diverse sample of male first‐time juvenile offenders from California, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana—indicated that CU traits mediated the relation between exposure to violence and overt aggression (Wall Myers et al, 2018). In the Pathways to Desistance study—a longitudinal study of adjudicated youth from Pennsylvania and Arizona—CU mediated the association between witnessing violence and later aggressive offending (Sargent et al, 2022), and psychopathy—a broader construct that incorporates CU as well as impulsivity/irresponsibility and grandiosity/manipulativeness—mediated the association from earlier violence exposure to later violent offending for males (Baskin‐Sommers & Baskin, 2016). It should be noted that another set of analyses from a subset of these data found that exposure to violence mediated the association between CU and aggression for males, rather than CU mediating the association between exposure and aggression (Walters, 2018).…”