2/3/2010 1 WHITE PAPER Cognitive-Behavioral Foundations of Aggression and Violence Nancy Guerra, University of California at Riverside [email protected] A variety of individual characteristics have been identified that increase risk for childhood aggression and youth violence. Some of these individual factors (such as perinatal trauma) begin in utero, whereas others (such as difficult temperament, fearlessness, impulsivity, low verbal ability, and lack of control) begin at birth or shortly after. Over time, distinct dimensions of personality including low agreeableness and low conscientiousness also crystallize and increase the likelihood of aggression. In other words, a host of individual predispositions, whether written on a child‟s biological birth certificate or emerging early in the course of development, render certain children more prone to aggression than others from a very early age. Without intervention, children who develop aggressive behavioral patterns early in life are also more likely to graduate to more serious violence in adolescence and continue such behavior chronically. For this reason, elevated aggression and its precursors in early childhood are among the best factors for selecting individuals or subgroups for focused prevention and intervention programs. However, selecting children based on early aggression does not provide specific guidance for the content and scope of the intervention itself. Indeed, many individual risk factors linked to temperament, personality, and neuropsychological functioning are difficult to change, although how these unfold in a given context can dictate their course. For this reason, it is important to identify individual characteristics associated with aggression and violence that can be targeted specifically by prevention and intervention programs. It is also the case that children actively navigate and interpret their social worlds. How they come to understand both their own behavior and the behavior of others has important2/3/2010 2 implications for action. Over time, children learn specific patterns of cognition that make aggression more or less likely. Beginning in the 1960s, there has been an increasing recognition of the cognitive underpinnings of aggression. Most social-cognitive models of childhood aggression draw heavily from cognitive information-processing theory, emphasizing both discrete social information-processing-skills as well as specific types of social knowledge stored in memory (the „data base” that individuals develop over time). In short, the cognitive system is seen as processing inputs of social stimuli (what happened and what does this mean?), considering desired outcomes (what do I want?), searching memory for relevant information (what are my options?), generating outputs accordingly (what should I do?), evaluating options accordingly (what are the consequences?), and deciding on the best option (I‟ll do this). Furthermore, because the child‟s cognitive system develops over time, it is amenable to early preventive efforts while cognitions are most malleable as well as later efforts to modify maladaptive patterns of thought. Indeed, cognitive-behavioral prevention, intervention, and treatment programs consistently have been shown to be effective for preventing aggression, violence, and delinquency. This leads us to ask what specific social information-processing skills and/or specific types of social knowledge are the most robust risk factors for childhood aggression and/or youth violence and are the most viable targets for prevention and intervention? According to recent models, a child or young person with a specific set of individual characteristics (biological, social, environmental, etc.) is regularly presented with social cues that require encoding, interpretation, processing, and decision-making, for instance, an unknown peer trips a boy at school. The boy can either respond quite automatically without much conscious processing or2/3/2010 3 carefully consider the peer‟s intent, different response options, and the consequences of different courses of action. The former is considered automatic processing, while the later is considered controlled processing. Because most social situations require relatively quick responding, as children grow up and confront similar situations (such as peer provocation) their responding becomes more automatic—for aggressive children and youth this often becomes more automatically aggressive and violent, leading to aggressive scripts for social interaction. The Data Base: Aggressive Scripts and Moral System of Belief (Normative Beliefs) In everyday life we are confronted with a vast amount of information and options that would simply be exhausting (and impossible) to process time and time again. To simplify things, we develop mental representations that serve as shortcuts for information processing. Schemas refer to general categories that assist in processing, with scripts representing a specific type of event schema for common interactions. Stereotypes are simple examples of schemas that assist in processing. Scripts are more complex as they provide for a series of automatic actions—ordering in a restaurant is perhaps the easiest illustration of an event schema or script. Without really thinking, we sit down, get menus, read the menu, order, eat, and pay the bill. In other words, each time we eat at a restaurant we do not walk through the door and try to figure out what will happen next. How does this apply to childhood aggression and youth violence? Just as we regularly eat at restaurants and learn what to expect, children and youth gain experience with specific types of social interactions as they grow up, be it peer harassment, an angry parent, or rejection by a desired romantic partner. To the extent that these situations occur regularly, they develop scripts for these social interactions that are stored in memory and include prescribed actions. If and2/3/2010 4 when these actions include aggressive and violent responses, they are more likely to be enacted, particularly in dangerous situations requiring automatic processing. An important component of the knowledge base related to scripts that has been studied with aggressive children involves their moral system of belief, specifically normative beliefs about the appropriateness of aggression under different conditions. We hold a set of beliefs (albeit