| The Social Information Processing Model proposed by Dodge and his colleagues has been one of the most influencing theories in the area of the cognitive approach on human aggression and its development since the 80th of the 20th century. The model interpreted the mechanism of human aggressive behavior in terms of processing of information underlying the overt behavior. According to this model, aggressive children display a distinctive cognitive style characterized by inefficiency in each step of the information processing, from the encoding of the environmental clues to the enactment of the selected responses. While it provided a usefulframework for the explanation of the differential cognitive processes and distinctive features related to aggression, the model was based on phenomenological evidences. Because the brain is the substantial base of cognition, the cognitive biases displayed by the aggressive children in processing social information should be related to brain functions and functioning features. In other word, the distinctive cognitive style of social information processing of aggressive children should have their neurological bases.With the upsurge of the research interest in cognitive neuroscience and the function of human brain, an increasing number of studies have emerged since the 1970s, in an effort to explore the biological, and especially the neuropsychological bases of human aggression. However, research into this area up to date seems to be still in a preliminary stage, in the sense that the existing findings concerning the neurological mechanism of aggression are full of disagreements. At the same time, most of these findings are from studies on animal or aggressive patients, and could not be appropriately applied to the explanation of the aggressive behaviors among common population.ERP (event-related potential) measure of human brain was developed in 1950s. ERPs are voltage fluctuations that are associated in time with some physical or mental occurrence. The temporal resolution of ERP measure is on the order of milliseconds. So with ERP, researchers can accurately measure the processes taking place in human brain during mental activities. And multiple-channel recordings also allow us to estimate the intracerebral locations of theseprocesses.The aim of this study is to explore the growth and function of the aggressive children's brain, and their cognitive neurological characteristics by ERP measures.The subjects in the aggressive group were selected via dual screening. On the first step, 48 students of grade 4, 5 and 6 from two primary schools in the city of Jinan were rated as aggressive via "Peer Nomination Inventory" (Eron, 1971. Translated by Zhang Qian & Guo Nianfeng, 1997). Then from these candidates 18 children were defined as highly aggressive via the teachers and peer assessment using DSM-IV. Among them only 9, all boys, got the agreement for participating the experiment from the authority of the school and the parents, and they finally constituted the experiment group. The same number of boys, who were rated good students by their teachers from same schools, were sampled as control group. The children in the both groups were matched in age, gender, and classes. All the children of the experimental and control groups had normal eyesight and audition. None of them had any disease, nor had taken any substances recently.Three experimental tasks were employed. They were: 1. Auditory P300 using Oddball pattern to explore the P300 component; 2 STROOP Test to explore STROOP Effect and the ERPs evoked by STROOP Test; 3 Provoking Scenario Task. The equipment used was 32 channel EEG/ERP recording and analysis system manufactured by NeuroScan Company.The main findings of this study were:1 There were statistically significant group differences in the latency of P2 component in front part of brain evoked by STROOR test. No statistically significant difference was found in the latencies of P300 and other ERP components evoked by STROOP test, nor in the amplitudes of all... |
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