Social cognitions, distress, and leadership self-efficacy: Associations with aggression for high-risk minority youth

Abstract

Urban ethnic minority youth are often exposed to high levels of aggression and violence. As such, many aggression intervention programs that have been designed with suburban nonethnic minority youth have been used or slightly adapted in order to try and meet the needs of high-risk urban youth. The current study contributes to the literature base by examining how well a range of social–cognitive, emotional distress and victimization, and prosocial factors are related to youth aggression in a sample of urban youth. This study utilized data gathered from 109 9- to 15-year-old youth (36.7% male; 84.4% African American) and their parents or caregivers. A series of hierarchical multiple regressions were fit predicting youth aggression from social–cognitive variables, victimization and distress, and prosocial variables, controlling for youth gender and age. Each set of variables explained a significant and unique amount of the variance in youth aggressive behavior. The full model including all predictors accounted for 41% of the variance in aggression. Models suggest that youth with stronger beliefs supportive of violence, youth who experience more overt victimization, and youth who experience greater distress in overtly aggressive situations are likely to be more aggressive. In contrast, youth with higher self-esteem and youth who endorse greater leadership efficacy are likely to be less aggressive. Contrary to hypotheses, hostile attributional bias and knowledge of social information processing, experience of relational victimization, distress in relationally aggressive situations, and community engagement were not associated with aggression. Our study is one of the first to address these important questions for low-income, predominately ethnic minority urban youth, and it has clear implications for adapting aggression prevention programs to be culturally sensitive for urban African American youth.

Friend to friend: A randomized trial for urban African American relationally aggressive girls.

“…It is likely that our participants hold strong beliefs about the need to defend themselves using physical aggression (see Leff et al, 2014) , which are reinforced by peers and adults in their lives as a means of protecting them against the violence that occurs daily in many urban neighborhoods. A recent study suggests that urban children’s general beliefs about violence (e.g., I would be a coward if I did not respond to a conflict with aggression) may be more strongly related to levels of aggression than traditional social cognitive variables such as knowledge of social problem-solving steps and hostile attributional biases (Leff, Baker, et al, 2014). In the future, F2F could be expanded to explore general beliefs about aggression, as well as monitoring the potential impact of the program on this construct.…”

Sex differences in DNA methylation of the cord blood are related to sex-bias psychiatric diseases

“…In addition, there is a clear temporal specificity and sexually dichotomous influence of the effects of prenatal stress 26 27 28 . Males seem to be more vulnerable to develop schizophrenic, autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in response to perinatal stress, all these were associated with intra uterus growth restriction (IUGR) 29 30 .…”

Fight Navigator: Exploring the Feasibility of a Retaliatory Violence Prevention Program to Help Youth Manage the Code of the Street

“…Many researchers have noted that violence prevention programs with minimal consideration of cultural context (e.g., Allison, Edmonds, Wilson, Pope and Farrell, 2011;Barrett & Kallivayalil, 2015) or tailoring to individual youth's specific needs (e.g., Blake & Hamrin, 2007) often fail to yield behavioral change. Moreover, others have attempted to identify beliefs and perceptions that make youth more or less likely to engage in violent behavior (Bettencourt & Farrell, 2013;Leff et al, 2014;Stoddard, Zimmerman, & Bauermeister, 2012). The conceptualization and development of these interventions often neglect to include the voice of the youth themselves.…”