Attributional Biases in Aggressive Children and Their Mothers

To investigate if mothers and their aggressive children share the tendency to infer hostile motives from others\u27 behavior in ambiguous social situations, 100 pairs of mothers and their clinic-referred or comparison children (50 boys and 50 girls) were asked to interpret hypothetical situations involving both overtly and relationally provocative scenarios. Results replicated previous findings of studies on social information processing of aggressive children and extended the findings to mothers of aggressive children. Findings were generally consistent with the hypothesis that mothers of aggressive children tend to view others\u27 ambiguous actions as hostile, increasing the probability of responding with aggression and, in effect, modeling a hostile attributional bias for their children. Examinations of mothers\u27 and their children\u27s attributional and behavioral intentions suggested that mothers\u27 and daughters\u27 attributions and behavioral intentions were significantly correlated, whereas mothers\u27 and sons\u27 were not. Gender effects with regard to provocation type are also discussed