Copyright Malvin Porter, Jr. 2010 - acumen - The University of ...

aggressive behavioral patterns are highly salient predictors for other risk factors in children's
development such as peer rejection, delinquency, criminality, mental illness, underachievement,
and dropping out of school. Aggression with peers may likely to put children on a negative
developmental course for future social difficulties in adolescence and adulthood. This has
implications for preventive interventions that expose maladaptive social competencies and
provide prosocial strategies for solving peer conflict and dealing with social stress. Preventive
education and counseling may also provide critical reflective strategies for enhancing prosocial
values and beliefs about peer relationships.
Child Variables
Intellectual Ability
Previous research finds that children’s social behavior is related to their intellectual
ability. Dodge (1986) argued that children’s social information processing skills are determined
at least in part by intelligence and that those skills are determined in part by intelligence.
Specifically, children of lower intelligence are more likely to be physically aggressive with peers
than children of higher intelligence. More recent research found that adaptive emotion-regulation
strategies, aggressive-response generation, and problem-solving response generation were all
related to adolescents’ intelligence; however, hostile attribution of intent was not related to
intelligence (Nas et al., 2005).
Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that children’s Action and Justification Choices will
co-vary with their intellectual ability. However, this study found that neither CBVS Action
Choices nor CBVS Justification Choices varied with teacher-reports of children’s intellectual
ability. The vast majority of children in this study were classified by teachers as Average in
intellectual ability. Very few children were classified as Above Average/High in intellectual
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