Conduct Problems Flashcards
- Infancy vs Preschool vs Elementary vs Adolescence aggression
- Influences on aggression between early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence
- Children who behave aggressively early vs late (esp physical aggression)
Infancy:
- Pushing, shoving
- Some diffs in irritability
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Preschool:
- Proactive/Instrumental (reactive aggression/to get status) + relational aggression appear
- Verbal aggression increases
- Boys more physically aggressive
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Elementary:
- Reactive/Hostile aggression occurs
- Proactive and physical aggression declines
- Boys use more physical and relational aggression
- Girls use more relational aggression
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Adolescence:
- Aggressive children group with aggressive peers
- Violent behav higher for boys bcuz of hormonal changes (high reactive aggression)
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Early: Poor parental discipline and monitoring
Middle: Rejection by peers, academic failure
Adolescence: Commitment to deviant peer group
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Early: Tend to stay aggressive in adolescence and adulthood (Mainly boys)
Late: Begin in adolescence; tends to not continue into adulthood (Equal gender ratio)
Bio origins of aggressive behav:
- Infants w/ irritable, irregular, difficult temperament in 1st year of life
- Children who’re noncompliant, overactive, ill-tempered at age 3
- Children who lack self-control
- Fearful toddlers
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- Serotonin and Testosterone
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- Behavioural activation system (BAS) and behavioural inhibition system (BIS) activation
- Neural systems involved (3)
- More hostile at age 3
- Externalizing behavs (physical aggression) at age 9
- Likely to become aggressive at an early age and remain so
- More likely to display aggression thru age 8
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Serotonin: Deficits linked to high lvls of severe aggression in adults (involved in attention and emotions)
Testosterone: Testosterone leads to irritability, leading to aggressive behav (may also be other way around)
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BAS: Overactive
BIS: Underactive; important for inhibiting behav in response to punishment - Subcortical neural systems: Involved in aggression
- Prefrontal cortex: Decision-making, socioemotional info processing circuits
- Frontoparietal regions: Emotions, impulsive motivational urges
Conduct problems:
- Referred boys/girls vs nonreferred boys/girls
- Disobeys at hone
- Fights
- Hangs around kids who get in trouble
- High rates of disobeying at home
- Fights higher for referred boys since referred girls focus on relational aggression more
- Referred girls start a bit later at 11-13
- Childhood onset vs adolescent onset conduct disorder
- Conduct disorder -> Antisocial personality disorder (APD)
- Prevalence of ODD vs CD
Childhood:
- More boys
- More aggressive symptoms
- Account for lots of illegal activity
- Persist in antisocial behav
Adolescent:
- Equal boys and girls
- Less likely to commit violent offences or persist in antisocial behav
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40% of children w/ CD develop APD later (pervasive pattern of disregard for/violation of rights of others and multiple illegal activities)
- Signs of lack of conscience can occur at 3-5 years old
- Callous and unemotional (CU) interpersonal style at risk
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ODD: More prevalent during childhood
- ODD and CD equal in teens
- But ODD has higher lifetime prevalence rates
Associated characteristics of conduct problems:
- Anxiety
- ADHD
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Are ODD and CD separate?
- Inhibits aggressive factors
- Longitudinal research indicates that ADHD is causally related to emergence of conduct problems
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Yes - CD doesn’t always have past of ODD; Children w/ ODD do not always progress to more severe CD
Life-course-persistent (LCP) path vs Adolescent-limited (AL) path
LCP:
- Antisocial behav begins early, recovery in adulthood rare
- Assoc w/ family history of externalizing disorders + neuropsychological deficits heightening vulnerability to antisocial elements
AL:
- Begins in puberty, recovers in young adulthood
- Less extreme antisocial behav, less likely to drop out of school
- Tends to have stronger family ties; delinquent activity mainly from peers and temporary situations
Factors in parenting style that contribute to conduct problems (3)
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Coercive parent-child interactions
Hostile parenting behav (5 cons of positive punishment)
Parents’ cognitions and mental health
- No secure attachment within 1st year
- Hostile parenting (critical, controlling, negative; physical punishment; abusive parenting)
- Permissive parenting and low monitoring (esp in CD since it allows more opportunities to do disruptive behav)
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Caregivers unknowingly reinforce child’s oppositional/defiant actions (operant conditioning; negative reinforcement) - Child learns how to control their parents
— - Positive punishment models hostile behav
- Does not teach children new prosocial behavs
- To be effective positive punishment must be used consistently
- If punished often, children learn bow to avoid punishments thru negative reinforcement
- Can lead to verbal and physical abuse
— - Parents attribute misbehaviour to internal/stable factors + are prone to anger/resentment
- Parents feel powerless over their children
Social-information processing theory
- Impairments (2)
- Steps (5) + biases w/ aggression
- Cognitive deficiencies + distortions
- Deficits in facial expression recognition and eye contact
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1) Encode cues (attend selectively to aggressive cues)
2) Interpret cues (hostile attribution bias: ambiguous social behav interpreted as hostile)
3) Review possible behav responses (generate fewer and lower quality responses)
4) Choose response (less likely to consider consequences and expect more success from aggressiveness)
5) Translate response into action (less competent at enacting nonaggression responses)
Gene-environment interactions (conduct problems):
- Monoamine oxidase A (MAOA)
Severe maltreatment + low MAOA activity -> CD in adulthood
- Low MAOA + no maltreatment reduced CD in adulthood, violent offences, disposition towards violence, and APD symptoms
- Shows supportive enviro can reduce bio vulnerability
