6.2 Personality (and the Emerging Self)

As they get older, how do children’s perceptions about themselves change and how do these changes affect self-esteem? What makes children (and adults) act in caring or hurtful ways?

Observing the Self

Developmentalist Susan Harter (1999) has explored the first questions in her research program examining how children view themselves. To make sense of her findings, Harter draws on Piaget’s distinction between preoperational and concrete operational thinking—a difference I will be highlighting throughout this chapter. So let’s take another look at the mental leap that Piaget believes takes place when children reach age 7 or 8.

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Children in the concrete operational stage:

To examine how these changes affect self-awarenessthe way children reflect on who they are as people—Harter asks boys and girls of different ages to describe themselves. Here are examples illustrating the responses she finds:

I am 3 years old and I live in a big house. . . . I have blue eyes and a kitty that is orange. . . . I love my dog Skipper. . . . I’m always happy. I have brown hair. . . . I’m really strong.

I’m in fourth grade, and I’m pretty popular. . . .That’s because I’m nice to people . . . , although if I get into a bad mood I sometimes say something that can be a little mean. At school I’m feeling pretty smart in . . . Language Arts and Social Studies. . . . But I’m feeling pretty dumb in Math and Science. . . .

(adapted from Harter, 1999, pp. 37, 48)

Notice that the 3-year-old talks about herself in terms of external facts. The fourth grader’s descriptions are internal and psychological, anchored in her feelings, abilities, and inner traits. The 3-year-old describes herself in unrealistic, positive ways as “always happy.” The fourth grader lists her deficiencies and strengths in many areas of life. Moreover, while the younger child talks about herself as if she were living in a bubble, the older child focuses on how she measures up compared to her classmates. So Harter believes that when they reach concrete operations, children realistically evaluate their abilities and decide whether they like or dislike the person they see. Self-esteem—the tendency to feel good or bad about ourselves—first becomes a major issue during elementary school.

Actually, studies around the world show that self-esteem tends to decline during early elementary school (Frey & Ruble, 1985, 1990; Harter & Pike, 1984; Super & Harkness, 2003). A mother may sadly notice this change when her 8-year-old daughter starts to make comments such as, “I am not pretty” or “I can’t do math.” (“What happened to that self-confident child who used to feel she was the most beautiful, intelligent kid in the world?”) Caring teachers struggle with the same comparisons, the fact that their fourth graders are exquisitely sensitive to who is popular, which classmates are getting A’s, and who needs special academic help.

Harter’s research beautifully dovetails with Erik Erikson’s early and middle childhood developmental tasks. Erikson, as you can see in Table 6.1, labeled the preschool psychosocial challenge as initiative versus guilt. Children’s mission at this age, he believed, is to courageously test their abilities in the wider world. From risking racing your tricycle in the street to scaling the school monkey bars, our challenge in early childhood is taking the initiative to confront life.

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In middle childhood (from age 6 to 12) our task shifts to industry versus inferiority the need to manage our emotions and work for what we want to achieve (industry). Now we know that we are not just wonderful, and are vulnerable to low self-esteem—or inferiority—having the painful sense that we don’t measure up. In other words, the price of leaving the preoperational bubble, or early-childhood Garden of Eden, is becoming realistically aware of our abilities and the demands of living in the “real world.”

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Exuberantly taking off on your tricycle versus listening to the teacher and making sure you have finished your homework before raising your hand in class captures the essential difference between Erikson’s initiative and industry tasks. It also shows why early childhood is a magical Garden of Eden interlude, before we enter the real world (aka concrete operations) and face the need to “work.”
Maria Sweeney/Getty Images

Still, all is not lost because this new, realistic understanding produces another change. Notice how the fourth grader on page 171 compares her abilities in different areas such as personality and school. As they get older, this means children’s self-esteem doesn’t hinge on one quality. Even if they are not doing well in one area, they can take comfort in the places where they really shine.

According to Harter, children draw on five areas to determine their self-esteem: scholastic competence (academic talents); behavioral conduct (obedience or being “good”); athletic skills (performance at sports); peer likeability (popularity); and physical appearance (looks). To diagnose how a child feels in each domain, Harter devised the kinds of questions in Figure 6.1.

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Figure 6.1: How do children view themselves?: Harter has devised this questionnaire format to measure children’s feelings of competence in her five different areas of life. The item in the top panel is derived from Harter’s scale designed for young children; the questions in the bottom panel are from a similar scale for elementary school children.
Data from: Harter, 1999, pp. 121–122.

As you might expect, children who view themselves as “not so good” in several domains often report low self-esteem. However, to really understand a given child’s self-esteem, it is important to know that person’s priorities—the value that a boy or girl attaches to doing well in a particular area of life.

To understand this point, take a minute to rate yourself in your people skills, politeness or good manners, your intellectual abilities, looks, and your physical abilities. If you label yourself “not so good” in an area you don’t care about (for me, it would be physical skills), it won’t make a dent in your self-esteem. If you care deeply about some area where you feel deficient, you would get pretty depressed.

This discounting process (“It doesn’t matter if I’m not a scholar; I have great relationship skills”) is vital. It lets us gain self-esteem from the areas in which we shine. The problem is that some children take this discounting to an extreme—minimizing their problems in essential areas of life.

Two Kinds of Self-Esteem Distortions

Normally, we base our self-esteem on the signals from the outside world: “Am I succeeding or not doing so well?” However, when children with externalizing problems are failing—for instance, being rejected or performing poorly at school—they may deny reality (Chung-Hall & Chen, 2010) and blame others to preserve their unrealistically high self-worth (Miller & Daniel, 2007). Perhaps you know an adult whose anger gets him into regular trouble at home and at work, but who copes by taking the position, “I’m wonderful. It’s their fault.” Because this person seems impervious to his flaws and has such difficulty regulating his emotions, he cannot change his behavior and so ensures that he continues to fail.

Children with internalizing tendencies have the opposite problem. Their hypersensitivity to environmental cues (recall Chapter 4) may cause them to read failure into benign events. (“My teacher hates me because she looked at me the wrong way.”) They are at risk of developing learned helplessness (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978), the feeling that they are powerless to affect their fate. They give up at the starting gate, assuming, “I know I’m going to fail, so why should I try?”

So, children and adults with externalizing and internalizing tendencies face a similar danger—but for different reasons. When people minimize their real-world difficulties or assume they are incompetent, they cut off the chance of working to change their behavior and so ensure that they will fail.

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Table 6.2 summarizes these self-esteem problems and their real-world consequences. Then, Table 6.3 offers a checklist, based on Harter’s five dimensions, for evaluating yourself. Are there areas where you gloss over your deficiencies? Do you have pockets of learned helplessness that prevent you from living a full life?

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INTERVENTIONS: Promoting Realistic Self-Esteem

This discussion shows why school programs focused just on raising self-esteem—those devoted to instilling the message, “You are a terrific kid”—are missing the boat (Baumeister and others, 2003; Swann, Chang-Schneider, & McClarty, 2007). Drawing on Erikson’s theory, true self-esteem is derived from “industry”—working for our goals. Therefore, when children are having difficulties in a vital life domain, it’s important to (1) enhance self-efficacy, or the feeling, “I can succeed if I work” (Miller & Daniel, 2007) and (2) promote realistic perceptions about the self. As a caring adult, how might you carry out this two-pronged approach?

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By praising her 3-year-old for being such a hard worker, this mom is socializing her child to tackle challenging tasks in third grade.
auremar/Shutterstock, Inc.

ENHANCING SELF-EFFICACY. As developmentalist Carol Dweck has demonstrated, one key to enhancing academic self-efficacy is to praise children for effort (“You are trying so hard!”), rather than to make comments about basic ability (“You are incredibly smart!”). In her studies, elementary schoolers who were praised for being “very intelligent,” after successfully completing problems, later had lower self-efficacy. They were afraid to tackle other challenging tasks (“I’d better not try this or everyone might learn I’m really dumb!”) (Molden & Dweck, 2006; Mueller & Dweck, 1998).

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You might think that praising kids for effort would only be effective when children have reached concrete operations and developed fixed ideas about the self (“I am basically dumb”). But when researchers videotaped mothers’ interactions with their 2-year-olds, and tracked these toddlers into elementary school, guess what? Parents who years earlier made more statements that praised effort (“You worked so hard on that drawing,” versus, “You are a great artist!”) had 8-year-olds who (1) preferred tackling challenging tasks, (2) attributed academic success to hard work, and (3) believed that a person’s intelligence and personality can be changed (Gunderson and others, 2013). Therefore, instilling the efficacious message, “working is what matters,” should be a parental socialization goal starting from age one!

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What qualities made hundreds of New York City firefighters run into the burning Twin Towers on September 11, knowing that they might be facing death? This is the kind of question that developmentalists who study prosocial behavior want to answer.
© Neville Elder/Sygma/Corbis

ENCOURAGING ACCURATE PERCEPTIONS. Still, if a child—for instance, Jimmy in the beginning chapter vignette—has internalizing tendencies, efficacy-enhancing interventions may not be enough. These children often see themselves as failing when they are not. Therefore, adults must continually provide accurate feedback: “The class doesn’t hate you. Notice that Matt and Josiah wanted you in the game last week.” And, if an elementary schooler with externalizing tendencies discounts his failures at the price of preserving an inflated sense of self-esteem, gently point out reality, too: Using the example of Mark, you might say, “The kids don’t like you when you barge in and take over those games” (Thomaes, Stegge, & Olthof, 2007).

There is a way of softening this painful “You are not doing so well” message that is the price of realistically seeing the self. Harter (1999, 2006) finds that feeling loved by their attachment figures provides a cushion when children understand they are having trouble in an important area of life. So, returning to the beginning of this section, school programs (and adults) that stress the message “I care about you,” plus foster self-efficacy (“You can succeed if you work hard”), are the key to promoting true self-esteem (Miller & Daniel, 2007).

Doing Good: Prosocial Behavior

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the nation was riveted by the heroism of the firefighters who ran into the World Trade Center buildings, risking almost certain death. We marveled at the “ordinary people” working in the Twin Towers, whose response to this emergency was to help others get out first.

Prosocial behavior is the term developmentalists use to describe such amazing acts of self-sacrifice, as well as the minor acts of helping, comforting, and sharing that we perform during daily life. Do we need to be taught to open a door when we see someone struggling with a package, to hug a distressed friend, or to reach out to include a shy kid who wants to play in our elementary school group?

The answer is no. Each prosocial activity naturally appears early in life (Hepach, Vaish, & Tomasello, 2013; Thompson & Newton, 2013). Toddlers will help a researcher retrieve an out-of-reach object; or comfort that person when she bangs her finger and says “Ouch!” (Dunfield & Kuhlmeir, 2013.) Eighteen-month-olds even perform sharing acts that go beyond the adult norm, giving some of their own stickers to an experimenter when that person has acted selfishly in a previous trial (Sebastián-Enesco, Hernández-Lloreda, & Colmenares, 2013).

This impetus to help, comfort, and share, which blossoms during toddlerhood, appears in cultures around the world (House and others, 2013). Moreover, doing good makes young children feel good. Toddlers look happier after giving a treat to another person than when they get that treat for themselves. They seem especially joyous when engaging in costly giving—giving up something they wanted to get (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012). So, the principle that it feels better to give than receive doesn’t need to be vigorously instilled in us at our mosque, temple, or church. It seems baked into the human genome from birth (Hepach and others, 2013)!

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The fact that toddlers naturally take joy in giving suggests that giving is built into being human.
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Individual and Gender Variations

However, as you saw in the vignette at the beginning of the chapter, children differ in the strength of this impulse to help, comfort, and spontaneously share. Developmentalists visited preschool classrooms and looked specifically at spontaneous sharing, the coming-from-the-heart giving that is different from being ordered: “Share!” When they tested these children in elementary school, during adolescence, and in emerging adulthood, the 3-year-olds who shared most readily were more prosocial at every age (Eisenberg and others, 1999; Eisenberg and others, 2014). So, if your 4-year-old niece seems unusually generous (especially at cost to herself), she may grow up to be an unusually prosocial adult.

What about your 4-year-old nephew? Are females generally more prosocial than males? As one Dutch study confirmed, women report more prosocial attitudes on questionnaires. However, when researchers used the EEG to tap into one facet of caring, being sensitive to other people’s feelings, they found fewer variations by sex. Scenes depicting strong human emotions equally activated both male and female brains. But the women showed comparatively more arousal when viewing images of anguished people—which suggests that females may indeed be more attuned to others distress (Groen and others, 2013). The problem is that being sensitive to people’s emotional pain may not result in acting in a prosocial way.

Decoding Prosocial Behavior in a Deeper Way

Empathy is the term developmentalists use for directly feeling another person’s emotion. You get anxious when you hear your boss berating a co-worker. You were overcome by horror as you saw a video of the Twin Towers go down.

Sympathy is the more muted feeling that we experience for another human being. You feel terrible for your co-worker, but don’t feel her intense distress. Your heart went out to the people who were trapped in the Twin Towers that day. Rather than empathy, developmentalists argue, sympathy is related to behaving in a prosocial way (Eisenberg, 1992, 2003; Trommsdorff, Friedlmeier, & Mayer, 2007).

The reason is that experiencing another person’s distress can provoke a variety of reactions, from becoming immobilized with fear to behaving in a far-from-caring way. We can vividly see this when, out of empathic embarrassment, we burst out laughing after a waiter spills a restaurant tray, or become paralyzed by terror as we see a highway crash. So to be prosocial, children need to mute their empathic feelings into a sympathetic response (Eisenberg, 1992; Liew, Friedlmeier, & Mayer, 2011).

Acting prosocial, especially after preschool, also requires superior information processing skills. You need to decide when to be generous, which explains why 2-year-olds share with everyone, but, around age 4 or 5, children become selective, sharing mainly with people who are kind to them (Paulus & Moore, 2014). You must draw on your blossoming, concrete operational talents to assess the situation and decide if you can offer aid. Preoperational children will automatically give you their blankee when you are upset, because they are egocentric and assume that everything that comforts them will comfort you. However, just as I would not run into a flaming building because I’m not a firefighter, the reasons elementary school children report for not acting prosocial are that they don’t have the skills to help (Denham, 1998; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998).

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Who tends to help a stranded stranger on the highway, carry your heavy load of packages, or be there to offer aid when you move? With that in mind, can we conclude that males are generally less prosocial than the other sex?
CandyBox Images/Shutterstock, Inc.

Returning to gender differences, this suggests we take a more nuanced approach to the idea that females are more (or less) prosocial than males. Yes, women qualify as more prosocial if we measure comforting someone in emotional pain. Men, however, may be more prosocial in their own competence realm—changing a motorist’s tire; helping a stranger lift a heavy object; opening doors for people; paying for dinner; or taking prosocial charge of a group during the fast-paced physical elementary school situation in the opening chapter vignette. After all, that’s what being a gentleman—or gentleman-in-training—is traditionally all about!

Finally, people are more apt to reach out prosocially when they are happy—explaining why, when we are immersed in our own problems, we are less likely to help a friend, and why children who are fearful (those prone to internalizing disorders), as well as those who are relatively nonempathic (children with externalizing problems), tend to be less prosocial than their peers (Liew and others, 2011; Saarni, 1999).

To summarize, the impulse to share, to help, and to comfort is built into our species. But to predict who acts on that impulse, we need to ask specific questions: “Does this child have good executive functions?” “Does he have the concrete skills to help?” “Is she a confident, upbeat human being?”

Now that we’ve targeted the qualities involved in being prosocial, what can adults do to encourage these behaviors in a child?

INTERVENTIONS: Socializing Prosocial Children

As some of you might imagine, offering concrete reinforcements, such as giving prizes for sharing, is counterproductive. External reinforcers undercut the happiness that flows from spontaneously performing costly prosocial acts. In one fascinating study, children who had earlier been given the chance to make a difficult prosocial decision—sharing desirable stickers with an experimenter—were more likely to be generous later on. So, the first step in promoting generosity is to give children space to spontaneously give (Chernyak & Kushnir, 2013).

Providing a caring socialization climate is important. Model prosocial behavior, making sure your toddler sees you regularly help people in need (Williamson, Donohue, & Tully, 2013). Behave in a caring, cooperative way with your spouse (Scrimgeour and others, 2013). Encourage a young child to talk about her emotions, and respond to her distress in a sympathetic way (Taylor and others, 2013). Be attuned to the caring things that your child does and attribute them to her personality—for instance, saying, “You really are a caring person for doing that,” instead of “That was a nice thing you did” (Eisenberg, 2003). So, by complimenting your niece for being a kind person, you may be getting her to define herself as caring and helping to socialize her to be a prosocial adult (see Kochanska and others, 2010).

Most studies of prosocial behavior focus on a socialization technique called induction (Hoffman, 1994, 2001). Caregivers who use induction point out the ethical issues when a child has performed a hurtful act. Now, imagine that classic situation when your 8-year-old daughter has invited everyone in class but Sara to her birthday party. Instead of punishing your child—or giving that other classic response, “Kids will be kids”—here’s what you should say: “It’s hurtful to leave Sara out. Think of how terrible she must feel!”

Induction has several virtues: It offers children concrete feedback about exactly what they did wrong and moves them off of focusing on their own punishment (“Now, I’m really going to get it!”) to the other child’s distress (“Oh, gosh, she must feel hurt”). Induction also allows for reparations, the chance to make amends. Induction works because it stimulates the emotion called guilt.

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Shame Versus Guilt and Prosocial Acts

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When parents use shame to discipline, a child’s impulse is to get furious. But by pointing out how disappointed a parent is in a “good girl,” a parent can produce guilt—and so ultimately have a more prosocial child.
© Take 2 Productions/Brand X/Corbis

Think back to an event during childhood when you felt terrible about yourself. Perhaps it was the day you were caught cheating and sent to the principal. What you may remember was feeling so ashamed. Developmentalists, however, distinguish between feeling ashamed and experiencing guilt. Shame is the primitive feeling we have when we are personally humiliated. Guilt is the more sophisticated emotion we experience when we have violated a personal moral standard or hurt another human being.

I believe that Erikson may have been alluding to this maturity difference when he labeled “shame” as the emotion we experience as toddlers, and reserved “guilt” for the feeling that arises during preschool, when our drive to master the world causes other people distress (see Table 6.1 on page 171). While shame and guilt are both “self-conscious” relationship-oriented emotions, they have opposing effects. Shame causes us to withdraw from people, to slink away, and crawl into a hole (Thomaes and others, 2007). We feel furious at being humiliated and want to strike back. Guilt connects us to people. We feel terrible about what we have done and try to make amends. So, shame diminishes us. Guilt—in moderation (see Soenens & Vansteenkiste, 2010)—can cause us to act prosocially and emotionally enlarge (Olthof, 2012).

This suggests that socialization techniques involving shame are especially poisonous. If, when you arrived at the principal’s office, he shamed you (“In the next school assembly, I’ll announce what a terrible person you are!”), you might change your behavior, but at an emotional price. You would feel humiliated. You might decide you hated school. But if the principal induced guilt (“I feel disappointed because you’re such a good kid”), you could act to enhance self-efficacy (“Dr. Jones, what can I do to make it up?”). You might end up feeling better about yourself and more connected to school. Has feeling guilty and apologizing ever made you feel closer to someone you love?

Table 6.4 summarizes these section messages and offers an additional tip. And, for readers who are thinking, “I’m prosocial, even though I didn’t grow up in that kind of home,” there is the reality that people can draw on shaming childhood experiences to construct prosocial lives. Perhaps you have a friend who grew up in an abusive family whose mission it is to work with abused children or (like me) have been privileged to meet childhood survivors of Hitler’s holocaust who have devoted their lives to teaching people “never again!” Then you will realize that, while love is the best prosocial socializer, life’s adversities can promote exceptional altruism, too (more about this compelling topic in Chapter 12).

Now that we have analyzed what makes us do good (the angel side of personality), let’s enter the darker side of human nature: aggression.

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Doing Harm: Aggression

Aggression refers to acts designed to cause harm, from shaming to shoving, from gossiping to starting unprovoked wars. It should come as no surprise that physical aggression reaches its life peak at around age 2 1/2 (Dodge, Coie, & Lynam, 2006; van Aken and others, 2008). During this critical age for socialization, children are vigorously being disciplined but don’t have the capacity to inhibit their responses. Imagine being a toddler continually ordered by giants to do impossible things, such as sharing and sitting still. Because being frustrated provokes aggression, it makes perfect sense that hitting and throwing tantrums are normal during “the terrible twos.”

As preschoolers become more skilled at regulating their emotions and can make better sense of adults’ rules, rates of open aggression (yelling or hitting) dramatically decline (Dishion & Tipsord, 2011). As children get older, the reasons for aggression change. Preschool fights center on objects, such as toys. During elementary school, when children have developed a full-fledged sense of self-esteem, aggression becomes personal. We strike out when we are wounded as human beings (Coie & Dodge, 1998). How do researchers categorize aggressive acts?

Types of Aggression

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As he lunges for his friend’s book, the boy on the right may feel powerful (proactive aggression). But his furious buddy is apt to react by bopping him on the head (reactive aggression).
© Picture Partners/Alamy

One way developmentalists classify aggression is by its motive. Proactive aggression refers to hurtful behavior that is initiated to achieve a goal. Johnny kicks Manuel to gain possession of the block pile. Sally spreads a rumor about Moriah to replace her as Sara’s best friend. Reactive aggression occurs in response to being hurt, threatened, or deprived. Manuel, infuriated at Johnny, kicks him back.

Its self-determined nature gives proactive aggression a calculated, “cooler” emotional tone. When we behave aggressively to get something, we plan our behavior. We may feel a sense of self-efficacy as we carry out the act. Reactive aggression involves white-hot, disorganized rage. When you hear that your best friend has betrayed you, or even have a minor frustrating experience such as being caught in traffic, you get furious and blindly lash out (Deater-Deckard and others, 2010).

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Excluding someone from your group is a classic sign of relational aggression— which really gets going in middle childhood. Can you remember being the target of the behavior shown here when you were in fourth or fifth grade?
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This feeling is normal. According to a classic theory called the frustration-aggression hypothesis, when human beings are thwarted, we are biologically primed to retaliate or strike back.

In addition to its motive—proactive or reactive—developmentalists distinguish between different forms of aggression. Hitting and yelling are direct forms of aggression. A more devious type of aggression is relational aggression, acts designed to hurt our relationships. Not inviting Sara to a birthday party, spreading rumors, or tattling on a disliked classmate all qualify as relationally aggressive acts.

Because it targets self-esteem and involves more sophisticated social skills, relational aggression follows a different developmental path than openly aggressive acts. Just as rates of open aggression are declining, during middle childhood, relational aggression rises. In fact, the overabundance of relational aggression during late elementary school and early adolescence (another intensely frustrating time) may explain why we label these ages as the “meanest” times of life.

Most of us assume relational aggression is more common in girls, but, in research, this “obvious” gender difference does not appear. Yes, overt aggression is severely sanctioned in females, so girls make relational aggression their major mode (Ostrov & Godleski, 2010; Smith, Rose, & Schwartz-Mette, 2010). But as spreading rumors and talking trash about your competitors can be vital to dethroning adversaries and climbing the social ranks, one study showed teenage boys were just as relationally aggressive as teenage girls (Mayeux & Cillessen, 2008)!

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Table 6.5 summarizes the different types of aggression and gives examples from childhood and adult life. While scanning the table, notice that we all behave in every aggressive way. Also, being aggressive is not “bad.” As I just implied, it is vital to making our way in the world. Children who are popular don’t abandon being aggressive (Guerra, Williams, & Sadek, 2011; Roseth and others, 2011). Proactive aggression, as you will see later, particularly the relational kind, helps children climb the social ranks (White, Jarrett, & Ollendick, 2013; Rodkin and others, 2013; Waasdorp and others, 2013). Without reactive aggression (fighting back when attacked), our species would never survive. Still, this disorganized, rage-filled aggression definitely doesn’t work. Excessive reactive aggression ensures having troubles in the social world (White and others, 2013).

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Understanding Highly Aggressive Children

You just saw that, as they get older, boys and girls typically get less openly aggressive. However, a percentage of children remain unusually aggressive into elementary school. These children are labeled with externalizing disorders defined by high rates of aggression. They are classified as defiant, antisocial kids.

THE PATHWAY TO PRODUCING PROBLEMATIC AGGRESSION. Longitudinal studies suggest that there may be a poisonous two-step, nature-plus-nurture pathway to being labeled as a highly aggressive child:

STEP 1: The toddler’s exuberant (or difficult) temperament evokes harsh discipline. When toddlers are exuberant (Degnan, Almas, & Fox, 2010), temperamentally fearless (Gao and others, 2010), and have problems regulating their attention (Kim & Deater-Deckard, 2011)—recall that caregivers often react by using power-assertion discipline—they shame, scream, and hit: “Shut up! You are impossible. You’ll get a beating from mom.” Physically punishing a “difficult” toddler is apt to backfire (Boden, Fergusson, & Horwood, 2010; Edwards and others, 2010). Notice, for instance, from scanning the study findings in Figure 6.2, that regularly spanking a difficult 15-month-old magnified that child’s risk of developing externalizing problems at age 4. Therefore, unfortunately, the very toddlers who most need sensitive, loving parenting are primed to get the harshest, most punitive care.

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Figure 6.2: The relationship between mothers’ reports of spanking at 15 months and externalizing behavior at age 4, for temperamentally difficult and easy children, from a longitudinal study: In this research, notice that if a child was temperamentally easy, being regularly spanked during toddlerhood slightly increased the risk of having later externalizing problems. However, this discipline style had a huge negative impact on development for toddlers with difficult temperaments. Bottom line: Power assertion is poisonous for a temperamentally at-risk child.
Data from: Mulvaney & Mebert, 2007.

STEP 2: The child is rejected by teachers and peers in school. Typically, the transition to being defined as an “antisocial child” occurs during early elementary school. As impulsive, by now clearly aggressive, children travel outside the family, they get rejected by their classmates. Being socially excluded is a powerful stress that provokes paranoia and reactive aggression at any age (DeWall and others, 2009; Lansford and others, 2010). Moreover, because aggressive children generally have trouble inhibiting their behavior (Runions & Keating, 2010), during elementary school they may start failing in their academic work (Romano and others, 2010). This amplifies the frustration (“I’m not making it in any area of life!”) and compounds the tendency to lash out (“It’s their fault, not mine!”).

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This boy who has been shunned by other children for his disruptive behavior in elementary school may respond by developing a hostile attributional bias, unrealistically feeling that his classmates are out to do him in.
Nicholas Prior/Stone/Getty Images

A HOSTILE WORLDVIEW. As I just implied, reactive-aggressive children also think differently in social situations. They may have a hostile attributional bias (Crick & Dodge, 1996). They see threat in benign social cues. A boy gets accidentally bumped at the lunch table, and he sees a deliberate provocation. A girl decides that you are her enemy when you look at her the wrong way. So the child’s behavior provokes a more hostile world.

To summarize, let’s enter the mind of a reactive aggressive child, such as Mark in the opening chapter vignette. As a toddler, your fearless temperament continually got you into trouble with your parents. You have been harshly disciplined for years. In school, you are failing academically and shunned by your classmates. So you never have a chance to interact with other children and improve your social skills. In fact, your hostile attributional bias makes perfect sense. You are living in a “sea of negativity” (Jenson and others, 2004). And yes, the world is out to do you in!

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Finally, as you saw in the Chapter 5 discussion of ADHD, there is a gender difference in the risk of being defined as “an acting-out, antisocial child.” Because they are more “exuberant” and physical when they play, boys are more likely than girls to show the physically aggressive behavior that gets them labeled with an externalizing problem in elementary school (Vazsonyi & Chen, 2010).

How do boys and girls relate when they play? Now, I’ll turn to this question and others as we move to part two of this chapter: relationships.

Tying It All Together

Question 6.2

You interviewed a 4-year-old and a fourth grader for your class project in lifespan development, but mixed up your interview notes. Which statement was made by the 4-year-old?

  1. “My friend Megan is better at math than me.”

  2. “Sometimes I get mad at my friends, but maybe it’s because I’m too stubborn.”

  3. “I have a cat named Kit, and I’m the smartest girl in the world.”

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Question 6.3

Identify which of the following boys has internalizing or externalizing tendencies and then, for one of these children, design an intervention using principles spelled out in this section: Ramon sees himself as wonderful, but he is having serious trouble getting along with his teachers and the other kids; Jared is a great student, but when he gets a B instead of an A, he decides that he’s “dumb” and gets too depressed to work.

Ramon = externalizing tendencies. Jared = internalizing tendencies. Suggested intervention for Ramon: Point out his realistic problems (“You are having trouble in X, Y, Z areas.”), but cushion criticisms with plenty of love. Suggested intervention for Jared: Continually point out reality (“No one can always get A’s. In fact, you are a fabulous student.”). Get Jared to identify his “hopeless and helpless” ways of thinking, and train him to substitute more accurate perceptions.

Question 6.4

Cotonia tells you that children need to be taught to be caring and helpful. Calista disagrees, saying that the impulse to be prosocial is built into human nature. In a sentence or two explain why both statements are correct.

Calista is right that the impulse to be prosocial seems biologically built in, as toddlers get joy from spontaneously performing helpful acts. Cotonia is correct, however, that adults need to nurture this behavior by modeling caring acts, being sensitive to a child’s emotions, defining the child as good, and using induction.

Question 6.5

A teacher wants to intervene with a student who has been teasing a classmate. Identify which statement is guilt-producing, which is shame-producing, and which involves the use of induction. Then, name which response(s) would promote prosocial behavior.

  1. “Think of how bad Johnny must feel.”

  2. “If that’s how you act, you can sit by yourself. You’re not nice enough to be with the other kids.”

  3. “I’m disappointed in you. You are usually such a good kid.”

a = induction; good for promoting prosocial behavior; b = shame; bad strategy; and c = guilt; good for promoting prosocial behavior

Question 6.6

Alyssa wants to replace Brianna as Chloe’s best friend, so she spreads horrible rumors about Brianna. Brianna overhears Alyssa dissing her and starts slapping Alyssa. Of the four types of aggression discussed in this section—direct, proactive, reactive, relational—which two describe Alyssa’s behavior, and which two fit Brianna’s actions?

Alyssa = proactive, relational. Brianna = direct, reactive

Question 6.7

Mario, a fourth grader, feels that everyone is out to get him. Give the name for Mario’s negative worldview.

Mario has a hostile attributional bias.