Early childhood aggressive behaviour: Negative interactions with paternal antisocial behaviour and maternal postpartum depressive symptoms across two international cohorts. | LitMetric
Academic Unit of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom; PEDAL Centre, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Published: October 2018
AI Article Synopsis
Article Abstract
Background: Early childhood aggressive behaviour is a predictor of future violence. Therefore, identifying risk factors for children's aggressive behaviour is important in understanding underlying mechanisms. Maternal postpartum depression is a known risk factor. However, little research has focused on the influence of paternal behaviour on early childhood aggression and its interaction with maternal postpartum depression.
Methods: This study was performed in two cohorts: the Fathers Project, in the United Kingdom (n = 143) and the Generation R Study, in The Netherlands (n = 549). In both cohorts, we related paternal antisocial personality (ASP) traits and maternal postpartum depressive (PPD) symptoms to childhood aggressive behaviour at age two (Fathers Project) and age three (Generation R Study). We additionally tested whether the presence of paternal ASP traits increased the association between maternal PPD-symptoms and early childhood aggression.
Results: The association between paternal ASP traits and early childhood aggressive behaviour, corrected for maternal PPD-symptoms, was similar in magnitude between the cohorts (Fathers Project: standardized β = 0.12, p = 0.146; Generation R: β = 0.14, p = 0.001), although the association was not statistically significant in the Fathers Project. Strikingly, and in contrast to our expectations, there was evidence of a negative interaction between paternal ASP traits and maternal PPD-symptoms on childhood aggressive behaviour (Fathers Project: β = -0.20, p = 0.020; Generation R: β = -0.09, p = 0.043) in both studies. This meant that with higher levels of paternal ASP traits the association between maternal PPD-symptoms and childhood aggressive behaviour was less and vice versa.
Conclusions: Our findings stress the importance of including both maternal and paternal psychopathology in future studies and interventions focusing on early childhood aggressive behaviour.
The Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest recognize persons who have advanced psychology as a science and/or profession by a single extraordinary achievement or a lifetime of outstanding contributions in the public interest. Anjhula Mya Singh Bais is the chair of the International Board of Amnesty International, the first psychologist in this role. Dr.
Objectives: Autistic children frequently exhibit irritability, which can manifest as aggression, self-injurious behaviour, and severe tantrums, leading to significant impairments. Two atypical antipsychotics have been licensed by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of irritability in autistic children, although a significant percentage of these children do not respond to this treatment. This study aimed to determine the frequency of drug refractory irritability (DRI) and identify the risk factors in a large clinical sample of autistic children.
Street fight videos on the internet may provide information about little known aspects of human physical aggression, but their reliability is unclear. Analyses of 100 dyadic fight videos addressing ethological, game theoretic and sex-differentiated questions derived from research on other animals found that prefight verbalizations or gestural signals of nonaggressive or aggressive intent loosely predicted who would strike first and who would win. The head is the preferred strike target.
Exposure to stressors has been shown to dysregulate motivated behaviors in a bidirectional manner over time. The relationship between stress and motivation is relevant to psychological disorders, including depression, binge eating, and substance abuse; however, this relationship is not well characterized, especially in females, despite their increased risk of these disorders. Social defeat stress is a common model to study stress-induced motivation changes, however, historically this model excluded females due to lack of female-to-female aggression and unreliable male-to-female aggression.
