Children's aggressive and prosocial behaviours: exploring age, sex-related differences, and the role ofsocial cognitive functioning

Abstract

Children’s social behaviours have significant implications to their

adjustments. Aggressive children display emotional, behavioural, and social

problems. On the other hand, prosocial children are better adjusted (for review,

see Card, Stucky, Sawalani, & Little, 2008). Adopting the social cognitive

approach, the present study aimed to investigate the relationships between

several social-cognitive capacities related to empathy (i.e., perspective-taking,

affect sharing, and emotion regulation) and social behaviours (physical

aggression, relational aggression, and prosocial behaviours) in children. The

results showed that perspective-taking was the most predictive factor of both

prosocial and aggressive behaviours, whereas the capacity to share emotions

and to modulate emotion was found to have little predictive value to both

positive and negative social behaviours. In addition, the present study also

investigated the sex-related and age differences of aggressive behaviours in

children. Consistent with the findings of previous studies, this study found that

boys enacted more physical aggression than girls. However, sex-related

difference in relational aggression was not found. Besides, older children were

found to use more relational aggression but the trend of decreasing physical

aggression across development was not evident. Clinical implications of the

present findings were discussed.