Further Evaluation of the Link between Perceived Containment and Proactive and Reactive Functions of Aggression among Detained Youth

ABSTRACT

There is evidence to suggest differential associations between perceived containment (one’s belief about the influence of adult authority on behavior) and proactive and reactive functions of aggression; however, the findings have been inconsistent, and additional consideration of potential moderating variables is needed. The current study further evaluates the link between perceived containment and proactive and reactive functions of aggression and examines the potential moderating effects of callous-unemotional traits and anxiety symptoms in a sample of detained youth. Findings suggest that perceived containment is most robustly associated with reactive aggression and that neither callous-unemotional traits nor anxiety symptoms moderate this link. Findings and their implications are further discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Perceived containment
• proactive aggression
• reactive aggression
• callous-unemotional traits
• anxiety

Disclosure of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflicts to report.

Ethical standards and informed consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation [institutional and national] and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from the legal guardians of all participants and assent was attained from all participants for being included in the study.

Notes

¹ Due to nonnormality of proactive aggression and to account for outliers identified on proactive (n = 3) and reactive (n = 1) aggression, Full Information Maximum Likelihood Robust Estimation (FIMLR) via Mplus software (Muthén & Muthén, 2001) was used to further examine associations. These analyses indicated that results for reactive aggression remained the same for path models and moderation effects. Results for proactive aggression were also the same for path models and moderation effects, with the exception that race was identified as significantly negatively associated with proactive aggression in regression analyses (B = −0.145, p = 0.038).