The Differences Of Attention To Emotional Facial Expressions Between Reactive And Proactive Aggressive Children

Aggressive behavior is divided into two dimensions of the reactive aggression and the proactive aggression,which have different characteristics.The significant characteristic of reactive aggressive children is the "hostility attribution bias" to social cues especially in vague situations,while the proactive aggressive children have no such attribution bias.However,proactive aggressive children tend to have the "callous-unemotional trait",which shows that they are unable to empathize others.Previous studies have rarely discussed the reasons for these two phenomena.This study believes that the possible reason for this difference is that the early patterns of children's aggression in social information processing may be different.Based on the debate between attention-first model and interpretation-first model,this study designed three experiments to explore the attentional characteristics of reactive and proactive aggressive children in emotional faces processing.The participants of this study are all aged from 9 to 12 in a primary school of Tianjin.They were divided into four types of aggression by reactive-proactive aggression scale.The four types are normal children,reactive aggression children(RA),proactive aggression children(PA)and mixed aggression children(RAPA).We adopted emotional Stroop paradigm in experiment one to measure the attentional differences between the four-type children in emotional faces processing and the reactive time(RT)to picture's color as the observed variable.And the experiment two adopted eye movement technology to confirm the results of experiment one.Then,based on the results of experiment one and two,we designed a facial expressions recognition task in experiment three to measure the different performance in four types especially between the reactive and proactive aggression children.According to the results of three experiments in our study,we found that compared with PA group,RA group are more easily disturbed by emotional faces,but less able to recognize facial expressions;as for PA group,they are less likely to be disturbed by emotional faces,and more easy to recognize the facial expressions.