Lifespan A: Antisocial behaviour in Childhood, WEEK 10 Flashcards
1
Q
Antisocial behaviour
A
- ASB are normative in development but differ from each other so some are more harmful than others (arguing isn’t as harmful as physically fighting someone) + are more/less frequent (e.g. fight once or fight often for a long time)
- ASB include excessive verbal and physical aggression, lying, stealing, disobedience, rule breaking and violence.
- Suggests ASB in on a continuum (from not much ASB to high amounts of ASB)
- ASB can be overt (explicit) or covert (secretive), can be reactive (impulsive) or proactive (premeditated) and can be relational (relation to other people like arguing) or physical like destroying property
- Conduct problems is a preclinical manifestation > only becomes clinically important when it affects people around them + ed > child only gets classified w/ conduct problems if engage in harmful beh which affects different contexts in their lives
2
Q
Conduct disorder
A
- Angry, irritable mood, argumentative and defiant behaviour, vindictiveness for at least 6 months
- Persistent pattern of behaviour in which basic rights of others or major age-appropriate norms or rules are violated over at least 6 months.
- Aggression to people or animals (e.g., bullying, fighting, threatening, using weapons, cruelty).
- Destruction of property (e.g., vandalism, fire)
- Deceitfulness or theft
- Serious rule violations (e.g., running away, truancy)
3
Q
Callous-Unemotional Traits
A
- 2 sub-types of conduct problems w/ children w/ conduct problems vary in callous + unemotional traits
- Callous + unemotional traits include lack of guilt or remorse, a lack of concern for others, shallow emotions and a lack of concern for performance
- There are people w/ conduct problems w/ no callousness + unemotional traits > these are reactive, explosive + emotional people
- Other type have a calm demeanour + don’t appear emotional > callousness + unemotional traits
- CU is characterised by instrumental aggression > aggression designed to satisfy the need of the child
- CU is characterised by premeditated way of thinking + not reactive > can be found as young as 3yrs + has stability so can continue into adulthood > has a genetic component
4
Q
Epidemiology of Conduct Disorder
A
- Not all ASB is problematic + research looking at trajectories of aggression show normative increase in ABS in young children
- CD occurs in 5-8% of pop > more common in boys
- 50% of parents report ABS in 12mo + rises to 70% when they are 2-3
- Typically levels of ABS decrease + trail off around 4yrs > but subgroup of children whose ABS continues
- Onset of ABS means it may have different cause:
1. Early onset life course persistent > child shows extreme conduct problems early on + are more likely to persist over time
2. Adolescent onset > only happens in adolescence + trails off after
5
Q
Social information processing
A
- Dodge argues people w/ high ASB + conduct problems think differently about social world
1. Knowledge Structures: Hostile world view, Defensive goals, Aggressive repertoire > this underlying schema means you will encode info differently about the world > leads to inaccurate processing + inappropriate reactions to situations > scheme are affected by biological + EV factors
2. Encoding of cues from environment: incomplete + hypervigilant
3. Representation of Encoded cues: have difficulty understanding intentions of others + likely to assume -ve intent + struggle taking others perspectives
4. Response Selection and Evaluation: Poor judgment of outcomes > due to above problems, likely to respond poorly
5. This manifests as aggression or ASB
6
Q
Social information processing: encoding differences
A
- Evidence supports that children w/ conduct disorders perceive things differently
- Viding et Al compared 3 groups of children (high cu, low cu + TD) while they were doing a task in FMRI > task was to sit in FMRI scanner + were shown faces + asked if it was male or female > the faces shown had fearful or neutral exp
- Results show amygdala activated differently in ppt when they saw the faces > when shown fearful faces, people w/ conduct problems + high callous + unemotional traits showed under activation of amygdala > under-active response to fear
- Those w/ low CU traits showed over active response to fear > may see fearful face as threatening
7
Q
Social information processing: Representation difference
A
- Not much evidence that there is a difference in understanding others beliefs + thoughts (ToM)
- If you show emotional faces + ask them to label it, they get confused between sad + fearful faces > people w/ conduct problems likely to think they had malicious intentions when typical people would see it as an accident > perceive hostility when there isn’t any
8
Q
Executive Dysfunction
A
- ASB in children may be due to executive dysfunction
- Resemblance between conduct disorder and antisocial symptoms of patients with frontal lobe injuries > not as severe
- ED can be characterised as difficulty inhibiting emotions + controlling behaviour, impaired ability to anticipate consequences + difficulty generating alternative responses
- Frontal lobe dysfunction may lead to ED
- Problem w/ this theory is that it isn’t specific to ASB > children w/ autism have ED so why do they not all have ASB?
- Meta analysis on different between TD and CD kids on EF measures show consistent difference
9
Q
Genes & Environment
A
- Longitudinal study on people w/ ASB on 17,000 twins > looked at ASB overtime + compared MZ twins to DZ twins to see how strongly associated they were in terms of their ASB
- 43%-50% of variance in ASB is explained by genes > stable genetic affect (doesn’t change)
- In children, the common EV effect is just as strong as genetic effect but impact of family EV reduced in adolescence + adulthood while non shared EV impact increases + explains half of variance in ASB
10
Q
Role of parenting in ASB
A
- Schemas (knowledge structures) are shaped by early experiences that nurture hostile attributions:
1. Harsh control (i.e., physical or verbal punishment) 2.Psychological control (i.e., attempts to manipulate child through guilt, shame and conditional love) - Exposure to harsh parenting might cause children to develop these schema which give a hostile world view + see world as threatening + hostile place
- Harsh parenting (r= .21) + psychological control (r= .22) is associated w/ conduct problems but these are weak to modest correlations
11
Q
Adoption studies: passive gene-environment correlation
A
- It is assumed harsh parenting is an EV factor but it is possible that if child + parent are biologically related, it could be due to shared genetic factors
- Harsh parenting may be a form of conduct problems > perhaps the same genes that cause harsh parenting cause ASB > passive gene-environment correlation > not a environmental impact but a genetic transmission of ASB between generations
12
Q
Evidence for passive gene-environment correlation
A
- Can test if this is EV or genetic by comparing adopted + non-adopted samples
- If there is an association between harsh parenting + conduct problems in the related + unrelated sample > suggests an EV effect as adopted sample aren’t biologically related
- But if there is only an association between harsh parenting + CD in related samples > this suggests a passive rGE > due to genes
13
Q
Adoption studies: evocative gene-environment
A
- Harsh parenting doesn’t necessarily cause conduct problems in children > conduct problems in children may evoke harsh parenting > child-driven effect > Child can elicit behaviour in their parents
- Child may have an underlying genetic propensity towards aggression or ASB > this underlying genetic factor causes harsh parenting in parent
14
Q
Evidence for evocative gene-environment
A
- Looked at adopted children + adoptive parents > shared EV > shared EV
- But also found biological parent who didn’t know adoptive parents + only spent a few weeks/months w/ child at beginning of life
- Interviewed biological parent + assessed them > found if biological parent had history of mental health problems or ASB > their child was more likely to have it
- Equally, adoptive parents were more likely to be harsh if biological parent had history (having never met them)
- Shows an association between biological parent MH + ASB + adoptive parent’s harshness > there is an evocative rGE
15
Q
Nature and Nurture in conduct problems
A
- Nature + nurture work together to cause conduct problems in a coercive cycle of parenting
- Child is born w/ genetic risk towards ASB but negative interactions w/ parent evoke ASB causing conduct problem or reinforces it
- Got families w/ children diagnosed w/ conduct problems > didn’t treat conduct problem but trained parent’s response to be less harsh
- When harsh parenting reduced so did the level of conduct problems
- Even if there is a genetic propensity, modification of EV reduced conduct problems
