Some Consequences of Early Harsh Discipline: Child Aggression and a Maladaptive Social Information Processing Style

Weiss, Bahr; Dodge, Kenneth A.; Bates, John E.; Pettit, Gregory S.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1992.tb01697.x

Cited by 285 publications

(198 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

179

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…In a study of older, clinic-referred children, Gomez, Gomez, DeMello, and Tallent (2001) found that child-reported maternal controlling behaviors correlated with children's HAI. With kindergarten-age participants, Weiss, Dodge, Bates, and Pettit (1992) found a significant relationship between a retrospective maternal self-report of harsh discipline and HAI for 1 of 2 cohorts studied; ARP showed a small but consistent relationship with maternal harsh discipline for both cohorts. In Dodge et al (1995), ARP-but not HAI-fit a partial mediation model from maternal retrospective self-reports of harsh discipline to externalizing outcomes.…”

Section: Parenting and Social Information Processingmentioning

confidence: 78%

Young children's social information processing: Family antecedents and behavioral correlates.

Runions¹,

Keating²

2007

Developmental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Little research has examined whether social information processing (SIP) measures from early childhood predict externalizing problems beyond the shared association with familial risk markers. In the present study, family antecedents and first-grade externalizing behaviors were studied in relation to preschool and 1st-grade SIP using data from the U.S. National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care (N ϭ 1,364). A subgroup of low-risk children reported only benign attributions in preschool and had few externalizing problems in 1st grade according to both teacher and mother reports. After controlling for gender and cognitive functioning, the authors found that maternal education and authoritarian attitudes were key predictors of this "Pollyanna preschooler" status and of SIP in 1st grade. However, small effect sizes for SIP variables underscore the need for new approaches to measurement and for further research on moderators of the link between SIP and children's behavior.Keywords: social information processing, behavior problems, psychosocial development, parentingBeginning with Dodge (1980), a substantial body of research has demonstrated that children with behavior problems often show distinctly maladaptive social information processing (SIP). But answers to the central question of whether SIP plays a causal role in children's behavioral development remain elusive. Unraveling the etiology of aggression-related SIP is important as interventions to address behavior problems in young children increasingly target these processes. But most studies have not adopted a longitudinal design, and when they have, they have not incorporated the range of risk markers that are implicated in the etiology of behavior problems. These past limitations make it difficult to assess whether SIP patterns are more than incidental to the development of behavior problems. Furthermore, little is known about the stability of SIP variables over early childhood or about how individual differences in SIP arise in early childhood. In the present study, we examined whether early SIP measures predict later externalizing tendencies after accounting for antecedent risk markers, and we tested hypotheses about the role of these risk markers in predicting individual differences in children's SIP.

show abstract

Section: Parenting and Social Information Processingmentioning

confidence: 78%

Young children's social information processing: Family antecedents and behavioral correlates.

Runions¹,

Keating²

2007

Developmental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Children completed additional face-to-face interviews when they were in grades 1, 2, 3, 8, and 11; children's interviews from grades 1 and 2 are not considered in this report to simplify the presentation of results. Interrater agreement on all open-ended SIP questions described below was good (kappa greater than .80 in all instances in kindergarten and grade 3, see Weiss et al, 1992;r(96) = .86, .74, . 80 for steps 1-3, respectively, in grade 8; step 4 in grade 8 and all steps in grade 11 were assessed with close-ended questions).…”

Section: Procedures and Measuresmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…There is precedent for this approach in work that examines all SIP steps jointly as indicators of an overall, maladaptive processing style (Weiss, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1992). However, to our knowledge, the current study represents the first person-centered, rather than variable-centered, attempt of this kind.…”

Section: Nih-pa Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

A 12-Year Prospective Study of Patterns of Social Information Processing Problems and Externalizing Behaviors

Lansford

Malone

Dodge

et al. 2006

J Abnorm Child Psychol

Self Cite

137

102

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study investigated how discrete social information processing (SIP) steps may combine with one another to create distinct groups of youth who are characterized by particular patterns of SIP. SIP assessments were conducted on a community sample of 576 children in kindergarten, with follow-up assessments in grades 3, 8, and 11. At each age, four profiles were created, representing youth with no SIP problems, with early step SIP problems (encoding or making hostile attributions), with later step SIP problems (selecting instrumental goals, generating aggressive responses, or evaluating aggression positively), and with pervasive SIP problems. Although patterns of SIP problems were related to concurrent externalizing during elementary school, the consistency between cognition and future externalizing behavior was not as strong in elementary school as it was between grades 8 and 11. In some cases, youth characterized by the co-occurrence of problems in early and later SIP steps had higher externalizing scores than did youth characterized by problems in just one or the other. KeywordsSocial information processing; Externalizing behaviors; Aggression Social information processing (SIP) theory (e.g., Crick & Dodge, 1994) describes a set of cognitive-emotional mechanisms that have been found to account, in part, for the link between a host of risk factors and the subsequent development of aggression. According to this theory, the way that children interpret a particular event influences how they will respond to that Correspondence to: Jennifer E. Lansford, lansford@duke.edu. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript situation. Within the field of developmental psychopathology, social information processing theory has been the major theoretical framework for addressing the question of which proximal factors give rise to aggression in particular situations.Dodge and his colleagues (e.g., Crick & Dodge, 1994; Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990;Dodge & Schwartz, 1997) have proposed several steps in a model of social information processing: encoding, making attributions, selecting a goal, generating responses, evaluating responses, and enacting responses. First, encoding is the process of taking in information from the environment. Second, making attributions involves deciding what motivates the behavior of other people; on the basis of information children encode from a particular situation, they could decide that others acted with benign, hostile, or ambiguous intent. Third, selecting a goal involves choosing the most desired outcome in a given situation. Fourth, generating responses is the process of thinking of behavioral reactions to a given situation. Fifth, evaluating responses occurs when children assess whether a response is a good one to use in a particular situation and whether that response will be associated with desired outcomes. Finally, enacting responses is the manner in which a child actually behaves. The following specific deficits in each of these six...

show abstract

“…The relationship of parenting to child externalizing behavior has been documented both in clinical and nonreferred samples (Belsky, Hsieh, & Crnic, 1998). Lack of parental involvement or poor acceptance or responsiveness, lack of supervision or poor parental monitoring, harsh and inconsistent punishment, and insufficient rewarding of positive behavior have been identified as predictors of externalizing behavior (DeaterDeckard & Dodge, 1997;Forehand, Miller, Dutra, & Chance, 1997;Haapasalo & Tremblay, 1994;Loeber & Dishion, 1983;Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1986;Patterson & StouthamerLoeber, 1984;Rothbaum & Weisz, 1994;Ruchkin et al, 1999;Stormshak, Bierman, McMahon, Lengua, & Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 2000;Wakschlag & Hans, 1999;Weiss, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1992). Parenting has also been associated with child internalizing behavior, such as anxiety (Gruner, Muris, & Merckelbach, 1999;Siqueland, Kendall, & Steinberg, 1996) and depression (Muris, Schmidt, Lambrichs, & Meesters, 2001;Richter, 1994).…”

Section: Parental Behavior and Child Problem Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Child Personality and Parental Behavior as Moderators of Problem Behavior: Variable- and Person-Centered Approaches.

Leeuwen¹,

Mervielde²,

Braet³

et al. 2004

Developmental Psychology

129

142

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Parenting ϫ Child Personality interactions in predicting child externalizing and internalizing behavior were investigated in a variable-centered study and a person-centered study. The variable-centered study used data from a 3-year longitudinal study of 600 children 7 to 15 years old at Time 1 and 512 children 10 to 18 years old at Time 2. Parents rated child personality (five factor model), negative control, positive parenting, and child problem behavior, whereas children rated parental behavior. Hierarchical moderated regression analyses showed significant Parenting ϫ Child Personality (benevolence and conscientiousness) interactions, principally for externalizing behavior. The interactions were largely replicable across informants and across time. The person-centered study, which classified participants into 3 types, showed that negative parental control was more related to externalizing behavior for undercontrollers than for resilients. Negative parental control enhanced internalizing behavior for overcontrollers.

show abstract

Some Consequences of Early Harsh Discipline: Child Aggression and a Maladaptive Social Information Processing Style

Cited by 285 publications

References 22 publications

Young children's social information processing: Family antecedents and behavioral correlates.

Young children's social information processing: Family antecedents and behavioral correlates.

A 12-Year Prospective Study of Patterns of Social Information Processing Problems and Externalizing Behaviors

Child Personality and Parental Behavior as Moderators of Problem Behavior: Variable- and Person-Centered Approaches.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About