Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2008
The purpose of this work was to investigate the way in which boys, ages 6, 8, and 10 years, who are behaviorally disturbed, understand motives behind human behavior, compared to normally functioning peers. Four tasks were administered that differed in surface features but that shared an underlying conceptual structure. A structural analysis of response protocols was undertaken to assess the level of cognitive complexity of their productions. Age-appropriate performance required varying degrees of intentional understanding (i.e., the reciprocal causal relations between action and mental states such as feelings and desires). The results of this analysis supported our predictions that behaviorally disturbed children use developmentally naive reasoning in the domain of conflict resolution, compared with their normal peers. Additionally, a thematic analysis of the content of responses was performed. The results of this analysis showed that the two groups' reasoning also differed qualitatively, in that the aggressive boys showed greater evidence of socially maladaptive thought, whereas the comparison group's performance was largely adaptive. We propose that early-formed primitive defense mechanisms may interfere with the aggressive group's construction of prosocial mental models of the social world. The results suggest that this line of research, which integrates developmental and psychoanalytic theory, has the potential to offer insight into the mechanisms underlying behavioral aggression.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.