Controlling reactive aggression through cognitive evaluation of proactive aggression cues

Abstract

The authors investigated how the relationship between the acts of proactive and reactive aggression was moderated by the individual differences in cognitive regulation of emotion. An aggression paradigm, a electrocardiogram recording, a cognitive assessment battery, and a short form IQ test were completed by 109 children, aged 8 to 13 years (Juujärvi, Kaartinen, Laitinen, Vanninen, & Pulkkinen, 2006; Juujärvi, Kooistra, Kaartinen, & Pulkkinen, 2001; Lehto, Juujärvi, Kooistra, & Pulkkinen, 2003). The less the children subdued the intensity of their defence to the attacks in the aggression paradigm, the poorer they performed in the cognitive assessment battery tasks measuring Working memory capacity and in the task assessing crystallised intelligence. The mean cardiovascular reactivity during the aggression paradigm was neither associated with the performances in either the cognitive assessment battery nor the intelligence tasks. Both information processing and knowledge dimensions of cognition contributed to regulation of emotion, but the respective effects of the processes cannot be inferred from the mean cardiovascular reactivity.

Acknowledgments

Data collection was funded by the Academy of Finland (Centre of Excellence programme, grants 40166 and 44858). Preparation of this manuscript was supported by the Finnish Graduate School of Psychology grant to the first author.

Notes

¹The term mean heart rate reactivity refers to the amount of activity during the aggression paradigm after the subtraction of the activity during the baseline.

²Physical acts of proactive aggression provide justification for physical acts of reactive aggression for boys as well as girls (Bettencourt & Miller, 1996), which also explains the absence of sex/gender differences in the relationship between the intensity of offensive and defensive aggression in the current series of studies of studies (Juujärvi et al., 2001, 2006).

³The findings showed that the prediction of the relationship between the intensity of offensive and defensive aggression from the Vocabulary test score depended, in part, on the priority it was given in its entry to the regression equation. One should remember, however, that a single test score often is not as powerful a predictor as a factor score simply because of its lower (and unknown) reliability.