Abstract
Child externalising symptoms are associated with a bias towards attributing hostile intent to others. We examined the role of parental attributions in the development of this hostile attribution bias in children. The parents of 134 children aged 5–7 years responded to hypothetical social scenarios examining a) their general tendency to attribute hostile intent to the ambiguous behaviour of others, and b) hostile attributions made specifically to their child. Children's own attributions of hostile intent and levels of externalising symptomatology were assessed. The results indicated that child externalising symptoms were positively associated with both a generalised tendency towards the attribution of hostile intent and child-specific hostile attributions in parents. Child externalising symptoms were themselves associated with hostile attributions made by the child. However, no direct associations were observed between parental and child attributions of hostile intent. Thus, although the results suggest a role for parental social information processing biases in the development of child externalising symptoms, a direct transmission of such biases from parent to child was not supported.
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Notes
Ratings of hostile attributions and aggressive responding were carried out on the open-ended responses following the general procedures established by Dodge and colleagues (Crick & Dodge, 1996; Dodge et al., 1997), and the detailed protocol for examining parental responses described by MacBrayer et al. (2003). We thank Elizabeth MacBrayer for her assistance with applying the coding scheme.
Percentiles were based on parental SDQs for our screened sample of 502 children. However, the distribution of our scores corresponded with the established properties of the SDQ for children in the study age range (see http://www.sdqinfo.com). With a score of 10+ (the cut-off used for boys) either the conduct or the hyperactivity would score will fall in the ‘abnormal’ range on the SDQ. With a score of 8+ (girls) either the conduct or the hyperactivity score will fall in the ‘borderline’ range.
We also conducted exploratory analyses based on a median split by age; we did not find any evidence of a different pattern of results for younger versus older participants in our sample, although we had limited power to test for such effects (results not presented).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Monica Beacroft, Caroline Dunning, Priscillia Gracias-Tsang, and Rosemary Scarborough for their contribution to developing the current study and their work collecting data.
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Halligan, S.L., Cooper, P.J., Healy, S.J. et al. The Attribution of Hostile Intent in Mothers, Fathers and Their Children. J Abnorm Child Psychol 35, 594–604 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-007-9115-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-007-9115-6