Social Information-Processing Bases of Aggressive Behavior in Children

The ways that basic theories and findings in cognitive and social psychology (including attribution, decision-making, and information-processing theories) have been applied to the study of aggressive behavior problems in children are described. Following an overview of each of these theories, a social information-processing model of children's aggressive behavior is outlined. According to this model, a child's behavioral response to a problematic social stimulus is a function of five: steps of processing: encoding of social cues, interpretation of social cues, response search, response evaluation, and enactment. Skillful processing at each step is hypothesized to lead to competent performance within a situation, whereas biased or deficient processing is hypothesized to lead to deviant social behavior Empirical studies are described in which children's patterns of processing have been found to predict individual differences in their aggressive behavior The implications of this body of work for empirically based interventions aimed at reducing children's aggressive behavior are discussed.