The Development of Aggressive Behavior in Childhood and Adolescence

Aggressive behavior shows a high stability across the lifespan. Therefore, understanding how aggression develops from childhood to early adulthood is a task of paramount importance, not only from a scientific but also from a societal point of view. The chapter presents an extensive program of research with children, adolescents, and young adults in Germany that identified risk factors of aggressive behavior using longitudinal and multilevel designs. Three main questions will be addressed: (1) What are intrapersonal risk factors for the development and persistence of aggressive behavior from middle childhood to adolescence? This part will discuss the role of deficits in anger regulation, theory of mind, and executive function for the development of aggressive behavior. (2) What factors of the social environment contribute to the development of aggressive behavior? Here, the focus will be on problematic peer relationships and exposure to violent role models in the media. (3) How do individual dispositions and situational risk factors interact to explain developmental trajectories of aggressive behavior? This part will show how features of the social environment define boundary conditions within which individual differences in aggression may be magnified or reduced. The implications of the findings for interventions will be discussed.