The relation between emotional state, social cognition, and aggression in boys

Previous research has found that social cognition in aggressive children differs qualitatively from that of non-aggressive children. A large body of empirical literature has found that aggressive children are more likely to ascribe malicious intent to another child in social interactions when a negative outcome occurs, even when the intent of the other child was not hostile. However, the role of emotion in social cognition is one area that has yet to be explored rigorously in relation to childhood aggression. The goal of the present study was to examine the relation between emotion and social cognition in boyhood aggression. Eighty ten-year-old boys viewed two sets of videotaped social interactions. In each interaction, a negative outcome for a target child was depicted as the result of another child's actions. The second child's intent was presented as being either hostile, ambiguous, or accidental. After viewing each interaction, participants answered questions pertaining to cue encoding, attribution accuracy, schema usage, and behavioral response to the situation. The behavioral responses generated by the participants were coded for aggressive content. Before viewing each interaction set, the participants engaged in a mood induction procedure. Two mood states, "happy" and "angry," were administered separately to each subject. Manipulation checks were used to assess the successfulness of the mood induction procedures. Results indicated that the mood induction procedure was successful for approximately 64% of the participants. Encoding of social cues was significantly related to correct attribution of the second child's intent in the vignettes for both mood states. For participants who were successful in the mood induction procedures, ratings of mood state during the angry mood induction procedure predicted hostile attribution bias to ambiguous social scenarios. The interaction between feelings of anger and participants' aggression level significantly predicted aggressive responding in specific types of social scenarios as well as accurate cue encoding. More aggressive participants were affected by feelings of anger to a greater extent than less aggressive participants in relation to increased aggressive responding and accurate cue encoding. Results suggest the need for multicomponent intervention programs to provide more emphasis on anger control training.