A new study challenges the idea that antisocial behavior is relatively unchangeable during the teenage years. The study, published in the March/April 2008 issue of the journal Child Development, found that decision making and behavior among adolescents are related across time, and that efforts to help may be more effective if they address how adolescents make decisions about acting aggressively.
Conducted by researchers at Duke University, Indiana University, and Auburn University, the study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The researchers studied 522 teenage boys and girls who lived in three different places in the United States from 7th through 12th grades. The teenagers and their parents completed questionnaires about the youths’ aggressive and delinquent behaviors—such as fighting, lying, bullying, and stealing—in grades 7, 9-10, and 12.
When they were in grades 8 and 11, the adolescents were asked to imagine themselves as characters in hypothetical video scenarios that presented provocative situations, such as being challenged about picking up an abandoned backpack. At the end of each situation, the teenagers answered questions about responding aggressively to a person in each scenario who had acted provocatively and caused harm (in the case of the backpack, one of the scenarios shows someone aggressively challenging the person who found the backpack).
The findings suggest that teenagers’ antisocial conduct and judgments about aggressive behaviors influenced each other at early, middle, and late adolescence. These are among the first findings to support the idea that social decision making and behavior continue to influence each other in a reciprocal fashion over time.
“Our results are particularly notable because antisocial behavior has been demonstrated repeatedly in behavioral science studies to be highly stable (and presumably unchangeable) during adolescence,” according to Reid Griffith Fontaine, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona (where he moved from Duke) and the study’s lead author.
“The powerful relation between decision making and behavior in adolescence that was observed in this study suggests that interventions with antisocial adolescents may focus on changing adolescents’ thinking and decision making about aggressive behavior in order to alter their antisocial styles of acting out. Furthermore, interventions may emphasize that adolescents consider non-aggressive ways of responding to provocative situations before deciding how to behave.”
Source: Society for Research in Child Development
Related stories:
Study cites media violence as 'critical risk factor' for aggression
You are what you watch, when it comes to violence in the media and its influence on violent behavior in young people, and a new paper, lead-authored by Rutgers University, Newark, researcher Paul Boxer, provides new evidence that violent media does indeed impact adolescent behavior.
'Cascading effect' of childhood experiences may explain serious teen violence
Adverse experiences early in life can lead to minor childhood behavior problems, which can grow into serious acts of teen violence, according to new research. This "cascading effect" of repeated negative incidents and behaviors is the focus of an article in the November/December edition of the journal
Child Development.
Couples with children with ADHD at risk of higher divorce rates, shorter marriages
Parents of a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are nearly twice as likely to divorce by the time the child is 8 years old than parents of children without ADHD, the first study to look at this issue in depth has shown.
Study reveals specific gene in adolescent men with delinquent peers
Birds of a feather flock together, according to the old adage, and adolescent males who possess a certain type of variation in a specific gene are more likely to flock to delinquent peers, according to a landmark study led by Florida State University criminologist Kevin M. Beaver.
Serious school failure turns out to be a real bummer for girls, but not boys
(PhysOrg.com) -- Adolescent girls who had a serious school failure by the 12th grade -- being expelled, suspended or dropping out -- were significantly more likely to have suffered a serious bout of depression at the age of 21 than girls who did not have these problems.
Majority of teens discuss risky behaviors on MySpace, studies conclude
In a pair of related studies released by Seattle Children's Research Institute and published in the January 2009 issue of
Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, researchers found that 54 percent of adolescents frequently discuss high-risk activities including sexual behavior, substance abuse or violence using MySpace, the popular social networking Web site (SNS). The studies, Adolescent Display of Health Risk Behaviors on MySpace, and Reducing At-Risk Adolescents' Display of Risk Behavior on a Social Networking Web Site, were led by research fellow Megan A. Moreno, MD, MPH, MSEd, and Dimitri Christakis, MD, MPH, of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Research Institute, and the University of Washington.
Brain circuit abnormalities may underlie bulimia nervosa in women
Women with bulimia nervosa appear to respond more impulsively during psychological testing than those without eating disorders, and brain scans show differences in areas responsible for regulating behavior, according to a report in the January issue of
Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the
JAMA/Archives journals.
MySpace is research place for busybody 'Dr. Meg'
(AP) -- Many teenagers cleaned up their MySpace profiles, deleting mentions of sex and booze and boosting privacy settings, if they got a single cautionary e-mail from a busybody named "Dr. Meg." The e-mail was sent by Dr. Megan Moreno, lead researcher of a study of lower-income kids that she says shows how parents and other adults can encourage safer Internet use.