Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchChild Psychopathic Traits Moderate Relationships Between Parental Affect and Child 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
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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.