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Resting Heart Rate, Vagal Tone, and Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Chinese Children

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Abstract

Abundant research conducted in Western contexts has shown that biological risk factors such as low resting heart rate (HR) might be related to childhood aggression. However, it was unclear (1) how resting HR, as well as other markers of cardiac functions such as resting vagal tone, may be related to subtypes of aggression such as reactive and proactive aggression, and (2) whether the HR-aggression relation can be replicated in non-Western contexts. Therefore, this study examined the concurrent and prospective relations between resting HR, vagal tone, and Chinese children’s reactive and proactive aggression. Participants were 183 children (M age = 7.64 years, 91 girls) recruited from an elementary school in Zhenjiang, PRC. Children’s resting HR and vagal tone were assessed in the second grade (T1). Teachers rated children’s reactive and proactive aggression in the second (T1) and fourth grade (T2). Results showed that lower resting HR at T1 was associated with higher reactive and proactive aggression at T1 and T2, and higher vagal tone was associated with lower HR, which in turn was related to higher reactive and proactive aggression at T1 and T2. Lower vagal tone was directly related to higher reactive but not proactive aggression at T1 and T2, whereas lower HR was related to higher reactive aggression at T2 for children with low or moderate vagal tone but was not for children with high vagal tone. These psychophysiological findings from a non-Western context add additional support for both similarities and differences between reactive and proactive aggression in childhood.

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Notes

  1. As pointed out by Ortiz and Raine (2004), any measures of HR in a “resting” state may reflect some degree of responsivity to a mild stressor (e.g., expectation of a medical checkup). In the current study, the research assistants represented “strangers” to the children. Therefore, strictly speaking, HR in response to a mild stressor, rather than “resting HR” were assessed in the current study.

  2. We attempted to test mediating and moderating models with both T1 and T2 aggression data. However, the inclusion of T1 and T2 aggression data would result in negative degrees of freedom due to high number of parameters. Therefore, we tested the models separately for T1 and T2 aggression data.

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Acknowledgment

We wish to thank the children and teachers who participated in the study

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA

    Yiyuan Xu & Alexander Krieg

  2. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Adrian Raine

  3. Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang, China

    Lidong Yu

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  1. Yiyuan Xu
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Correspondence to Yiyuan Xu.

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Xu, Y., Raine, A., Yu, L. et al. Resting Heart Rate, Vagal Tone, and Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Chinese Children. J Abnorm Child Psychol 42, 501–514 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-013-9792-2

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