CROSS GENERATIONAL INFLUENCES ON DEV OF AGGRESSION

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The proposed research is aimed at elaborating our understanding of how environmental/contextual and individual/ personal factors combined with cognitive processes to influence the transmission of aggressive and antisocial behavior across generations as well as over the life span. By collecting psychosocial data on the children of 856 subjects whom we have studied previously at ages 8 (1960), 19 (1971), and 30 (1982), and by collecting new data on the subjects, we will be able to address several critical issues for understanding the development of human aggressive behavior and its transmission across generations. We will be able to examine the stability or change in aggressive behavior across three generations or in few cases even four generations. Moreover, we will be able to examine continuity across parent-child pars in which the child subjects vary from 4 years old to about 24 years. Of special interest will be the degree to which childhood aggression in one generation is predictive of childhood aggression in the next, and the degree to which different trajectories in the development of aggressive or prosocial behavior in one generation affect the occurrence of aggressive, prosocial, or other behaviors in the next. Within one generation we will be able to evaluate the trajectory of aggressive behavior over a 40-year span from middle childhood at age 8 to middle-age at age 48. This study will enable us to derive a better understanding of the processes underlying continuity and change in aggressive and antisocial behavior within the life-span and across generations. We expect to find substantial continuity of aggression over time and across generations. However, the more important questions are why such continuity occurs, what mediates what, what moderates it, and what can deflect a trajectory of developing aggressive behavior. We will examine the extent to which the degree of continuity of aggressive behavior over time and across generations as a product of the continuity of environmental/contextual factors (e.g., parent childrearing practices, socioeconomic context, television viewing environment) or of personal/individualized factors (e.g., intellectual achievement, social competence, aggression-related cognitions). We will identify those contextual and individual variables that place individuals at greater or lesser risk for later aggressive behavior and those that promote or inhibit the cycle of aggressive behavior across generations. Finally, we will evaluate the role of cognitive, information-processing factors as mediators in a social- learning process that teachers children life-long aggressive habits and promotes transmission across generations.