New research
Child Psychopathic Traits Moderate Relationships Between Parental Affect and Child Aggression

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2011.06.013Get rights and content

Objective

Previous studies show that children with psychopathic traits may be less responsive to parenting. Although harsh/inconsistent parenting is associated with increased problem behaviors in children low on psychopathic traits, children high on psychopathic traits show consistently high levels of problem behavior regardless of negative parenting. Moderating effects of child psychopathic traits on positive dimensions of parenting have not been explored.

Method

We applied multi-level regression models to test for interactions between child psychopathic traits and both positive and negative parental affect on individual differences in both reactive and proactive aggression, in a community-based sample of 1,158 children aged 9 through 10 years of age.

Results

There were significant associations between child psychopathic traits and positive and negative parental affect with both forms of aggression. Child psychopathic traits also moderated effects of positive and negative parental affect. Children low on psychopathic traits showed decreasing reactive aggression as positive parental affect increased, and increasing levels of reactive aggression as negative parental affect increased, but children high on psychopathic traits showed more stable levels of reactive aggression regardless of levels of parental affect. Proactive aggression was more strongly associated with negative parental affect among children with higher levels of psychopathic traits.

Conclusions

In a community sample of preadolescent children, child psychopathic traits were shown to moderate the effects of parental affect on aggression. Reactive aggression in children high on psychopathic traits appears less responsive to variations in either positive or negative parenting. In contrast, child psychopathic traits may exacerbate the effects of high levels of negative parental effect on proactive aggression.

Section snippets

Relationships Between Psychopathy, Parenting, and Antisocial Behavior

Evidence from a small number of previous studies suggests that psychopathic traits may make children less amenable to shaping influences such as parental discipline and socialization, facilitating antisocial behavior. The first study of this kind13 was conducted in a sample of 136 clinic-referred and 30 community-based children aged 6 to 13 years of age, using parent and teacher ratings on the Callous-Unemotional (CU) traits subscale of the Antisocial Screening Process Device14 to measure child

Reactive Versus Proactive Aggression

To date, most of the small number of studies investigating interactions between child psychopathic traits and parenting have focused on general antisocial behavior (e.g., CD, ODD, delinquency). Only one study has specifically examined the moderating effects of child psychopathic traits on aggressive behavior.15 Previous work has distinguished reactive and proactive aggression on the basis of both function and motivation.25, 26, 27, 28 Although reactive aggression represents hostile or angry

The Present Study

There is emerging evidence that children high on psychopathic traits may be less responsive to the effects of parenting. However, prior studies have focused exclusively on negative aspects of parenting, and have most often combined both affective and behavioral measures of negative parenting into a single index. The present study specifically investigates whether psychopathic traits moderate associations between affectional dimensions of parenting and childhood aggression in a large, diverse,

Participants

The current sample consisted of 1,210 twin children, 9 through 10 years of age, from 605 families participating in the first wave of the USC Twin Study.39 Families with twin children of eligible age were sent letters describing the study. Approximately 70% of the 860 families eligible for recruitment participated in the study. The sample is representative of the ethnic and socio-economic diversity of the greater Los Angeles area.39

Procedure

Children and their caregivers participated in a 6- to 8-hour

Results

Missing data were processed with listwise deletion, resulting in a value of N = 1,158 (95.7% of sample). Means and Pearson correlations among main study variables are presented in Table 1, separately by gender. To facilitate comparison with other samples, raw means and standard deviations (SD) are given. ANOVA adjusting for the correlated data revealed significant gender difference in four of five measures. Boys had higher scores on CPS (F1,1156 = 29.44, p < .001), reactive aggression (F1,1156

Discussion

The present study examined whether psychopathic traits in children moderate the typically robust relationships between positive and negative parenting with child reactive and proactive aggression. Independently, both childhood psychopathic traits and negative parental affect were positively correlated with aggression, whereas positive parental affect inversely correlated with aggression. However, as expected we found that level of child psychopathic traits significantly moderated the

References (66)

  • R.D. Hare

    Psychopathy and sensitivity to adrenaline

    J Abnorm Psychol

    (1972)
  • D.A.T. Siddle et al.

    The psychophysiology of psychopathic behavior

  • L. Fisher et al.

    Cognitive impairment and its relationship to psychopathic tendencies in children with emotional and behavioral difficulties

    J Abnorm Child Psychol

    (1998)
  • B.S. O'Brien et al.

    Reward dominance: associations with anxiety, conduct problems, and psychopathy in children

    J Abnorm Child Psychol

    (1996)
  • E.R. Kimonis et al.

    Psychopathy, aggression, and the processing of emotional stimuli in non-referred girls and boys

    Behav Sci Law

    (2006)
  • H.M. Gretton et al.

    Psychopathy and recidivism in adolescent sex offenders

    Crim Just Behav

    (2011)
  • P.J. Frick et al.

    Callous-unemotional traits in predicting the severity and stability of conduct problems and delinquency

    J Abnorm Child Psychol

    (2005)
  • J.M. Wootton et al.

    Ineffective parenting and childhood conduct problems: the moderating role of callous-unemotional traits

    J Consult Clin Psychol

    (1997)
  • P.J. Frick et al.

    Manual for the Antisocial Process Screening Device

    Toronto, ON, Canada: Multi-Health Systems

    (2001)
  • M. Oxford et al.

    Callous/unemotional traits moderate the relation between ineffective parenting and child externalizing problems: a partial replication and extension

    J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol

    (2003)
  • A.E. Hipwell et al.

    Callous-unemotional behaviors in young girls: shared and unique effects relative to conduct problems

    J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol

    (2007)
  • J.F. Edens et al.

    Psychopathic features moderate the relationship between harsh and inconsistent parental discipline and adolescent antisocial behavior

    J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol

    (2008)
  • A.E. Forth et al.

    Hare Psychopathy Checklist—Youth Version

    Toronto, ON, Canada: Multi-Health Systems

    (2003)
  • G.M. Barnes et al.

    Parental socialization factors and adolescent drinking behaviors

    J Marriage Fam

    (1986)
  • R.D. Conger et al.

    The family context of adolescent vulnerability and resilience to alcohol use and abuse

    Sociol Stud Child

    (1994)
  • J. Jaccard et al.

    Maternal correlates of adolescent sexual and contraceptive behavior

    Fam Plann Perspect

    (1996)
  • M.D. Resnick et al.

    Protecting adolescents from harmFindings from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health

    JAMA

    (1997)
  • L.V. Scaramella et al.

    Parental protective influences and gender-specific increases in adolescent internalizing and externalizing problems

    J Res Adolescence

    (1999)
  • H. Cleckley

    The Mask of Sanity, 5th ed

    St Louis, MO: Mosby

    (1976)
  • K.A. Dodge et al.

    Social-information-processing factors in reactive and proactive aggression in children's peer groups

    J Pers Soc Psychol

    (1987)
  • T.D. Little et al.

    Disentangling the “whys” from the “whats” of aggressive behaviour

    Int J Behav Dev

    (2003)
  • F. Poulin et al.

    Reactive and proactive aggression: evidence of a two-factor model

    Psychol Assess

    (2000)
  • F. Vitaro et al.

    Reactive and proactive aggression differentially predict later conduct problems

    J Child Psychol Psychiatry

    (1998)
  • Cited by (0)

    This study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant R01 MH058354 (L.A.B.), which also provided salary support for Drs. Yeh, Raine, Baker, and Jacobson. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's New Innovator Award DP2 OD003021 (K.C.J.) partially supported Drs. Chen and Jacobson's work on this manuscript.

    Drs. Baker and Jacobson contributed equally to this article as senior authors. Dr. Yeh completed this work while she was a postdoctoral student at the University of Chicago, under the direction of Dr. Jacobson.

    The authors thank the staff and students of the University of Southern California (USC) Twin Study for their assistance in data collection and scoring. We are also grateful to the families in the USC Twin Study for participating in this research.

    Disclosure: Drs. Yeh, Chen, Raine, Baker, and Jacobson report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

    This article is discussed in an editorial by Dr. Benjamin Lahey on page 975.

    View full text