The applicant requests five years of funding through the Mentored Career Development Award (K23) for training in psychophysiological methods to examine the effects of physical abuse and domestic violence on children. The candidate's ultimate goal is to integrate this training with her previous experience in observational approaches. The candidate will also gain experience in the ethical and methodological issues involved in conducting research with samples of abused and neglected children. Training includes coursework and close mentoring with experts in research on child abuse, domestic violence, psychophysiology, aggression,, measurement design, and multi-variate data analysis. The primary goal of the research plan is to test competing models for the role of autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity in the link between family violence and two different types of adolescent aggression: proactive aggression, which is unemotional and instrumental, and reactive aggression, which is emotional and defensive. The trauma of family violence may sensitize children, causing increased ANS activity to subsequent conflict and thereby increased reactive aggression. Alternatively, prolonged exposure to family violence may cause suppressed ANS activity and thus increased proactive aggression. Still another possibility is that family violence does not affect ANS activity, but that ANS response moderates the effect of family violence on adolescent aggression. Data collection will be part of a larger R01 grant examining the effects of abuse and neglect on adolescent development. The sample will include 210 abused adolescents identified by the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services and 210 comparison children. ANS arousal and reactivity to conflict stimuli will measured, and information regarding aggression and family violence histories will be obtained. The first year of the award will be devoted to developing stimuli for the psychophysiological assessments and to refining measures of proactive and reactive aggression. The subsequent years will be devoted to conducting the substantive research project.
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