Cognitions, behaviors, and psychological symptomatology: Relationships and pathways among African American and Latino children

Journal of Negro Education, The, Spring 1997 by Faith L Samples

This study examines racial/ethnic differences in the mean levels of children's internal beliefs, fantasies, and attributions about aggressive behavior; interpersonal negotiation strategies; and psychological symptomatology as well as differences in the relationships among these variables. African American (N=436) and Latino (N=387) second- through sixth-graders comprised the sample. African American children reported more aggressive fantasies; Latinos reported more prosocial fantasies and more normative beliefs about aggression. Ethnicity-by-grade interaction revealed that older Latino children and younger African American children had significantly higher mean levels. Path analysis revealed that hostile attributional biases were inversely related to conduct problems among Latinos such that high attributional ratings were associated with fewer reported conduct problems. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

INTRODUCTION

Most Americans agree that the problem of violence in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. Trends and patterns of violence, particularly among youth under age 18, have placed this issue at the forefront of scientific, public, and policy concern. The implications for preventive interventions for children and youth are especially clear when one realizes that rates of violence among youth less than 18 years of age continued to rise at a time when adult rates were falling (Fox,1996). A multitude of early interventions have been designed to address the problem (see reviews by Tolan & Guerra, 1994; Samples & Aber, in press; Yoshikawa, 1994, 1995), as it has been argued that childhood aggression is the best single predictor of risk for adult aggression (Huesmann, Eron, Lefkowitz, & Walder, 1984; Huesmann, Guerra, Miller, & Zelli, 1992). As these programs and research studies maintain, when developing and implementing preventive interventions, it is important both to identify those populations most at risk and to understand the developmental processes underlying aggression and violent behavior in children's social interactions.

Elliott, Heizinga, and Ageton (1985) note that problems of aggression and violence are particularly salient among racial and ethnic minority youth, who are frequently poor, reside in urban centers, and more likely to be the victims of violent acts. Minorities living in disadvantaged urban communities are often cited as having the highest rates of violence, both as victims and perpetrators (Fox, 1996; Hammond & Yung, 1991; Lin, Bussiere, Matthews, & Wilber, 1994). Studies of children's social behavior have begun to make linkages between their social-cognitive processing patterns and patterns of aggression in their social exchanges, suggesting a direct relationship between the ways in which children process social environmental cues and patterns of aggressive behavior among some children (Dodge, Murphy, & Buchsbaum, 1984; Guerra, Huesmann, & Hanish, in press). Unfortunately, racial/ethnic differences in the examination of the relationship between children's cognitions and later aggression have largely been ignored or underinvestigated. Much of the research in this area has been conducted on White samples and has focused less on racial/ethnic or cultural differences within or across non-White samples than on the link between minority group status and poverty (Hawkins, 1993; Guerra, Huesmann, Tolan, Van Acker, & Eron, 1995; Stark, 1990, 1994). This study directly addresses this gap in knowledge.

How children process social environmental cues is influenced by their evaluation of the extent to which others' behaviors and intentions are fair and justified (Elliott, Heizinga, & Ageton, 1985). Thus, it would seem that the cognitive processing skills that enable children to appropriately detect and interpret social cues would also reduce their tendencies toward aggression. On the other hand, the absence of effective social information processing skills should increase the risk of aggressive behavior among children. For example, aggressive behavior and conduct problems in elementary school children have been shown to be directly and indirectly related to deficits in children's social-cognitive processing skills (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 1992). Evidence of the social information-processing skills that distinguish aggressive from nonaggressive children can also be drawn from the work of Dodge and colleagues. In 1980, Dodge reported findings showing that, in ambiguous situations, aggressive children were more likely to attribute hostile intent to a peer, to anticipate continued aggression, and to mistrust the peer. Findings from a later study by Dodge, Pettit, McClasky, and Brown (1986) support this conclusion. In that study, aggressive children were found to have deficits in their attributional skills such that they were more likely than nonaggressive children to inaccurately interpret the intentions of others as hostile in response to benign or ambiguous provocations. Other studies show an even greater tendency for aggressive children to display hostile attributional biases and deficits in social-cue interpretation under provocative or threatening conditions (Dodge et al., 1984; Dodge & Somberg, 1987).