The primary goal of the proposed set of studies is to examine how children's response decision patterns (i.e., response evaluation and selection), especially within moral and esteem dimensions, relate to the development of chronic aggressive behavior, early social maladjustment, emotional states, and physiological reactivity. Response decision patterns have to do with how youths tend to evaluate and select from alternative ways in which to respond to a social cue. A model of response evaluation and selection is proposed herin and is operationalized according to social information-processing, a theoretical framework of social competence and the order of cognitive processes which may function in response to situation-specific, social stimuli (developed by the sponsor: Dodge, 1986, 1993; Crick & Dodge, 1994). This research program has been designed to examine the interrelations of (a) moral reasoning and dimensions of response evaluation, (b) interpersonal adjustment (maladaptive peer relations), (c) affective influences, and (d) physiological arousal, and how these operaitons relate to the early development of (e) aggressive and deviant behaviors. The current proposal, involving a progression of three studies, will include these main analyses. (1) the role of response evaluation in aggressive and deviant behavioral tendencies, (2) the potential mediation of response evaluation styles in the progression from early social maladjustment to later conduct problems, and (3) the degree to which response evaluation factors into aggressive behaviors which are based partially on anger and physiological arousal.
| Fontaine, Reid Griffith; Yang, Chongming; Burks, Virginia Salzer et al. (2009) Loneliness as a partial mediator of the relation between low social preference in childhood and anxious/depressed symptoms in adolescence. Dev Psychopathol 21:479-91 |
| Fontaine, Reid Griffith; Burks, Virginia Salzer; Dodge, Kenneth A (2002) Response decision processes and externalizing behavior problems in adolescents. Dev Psychopathol 14:107-22 |
