The relationship of intent attributions, goals and outcome expectancies to relationally aggressive behavior in pre-adolescent girls

Research on aggression in females suggests that girls tend to display aggression in a different manner than boys. Relational aggression (RA) is defined as: a behavior that is motivated with the intention to significantly manipulate or cause damage to another person's relationships or feeling of inclusion by the peer group. Recent studies have indicated that girls are more likely than boys to display relational aggression.;Dodge's social information-processing (SIP) theory explains the etiology and maintenance of aggressive behavior by focusing on the ways in which children process and respond to social information. While Dodge's model has been empirically validated with overt aggression, it has not yet been applied appropriately to RA. This study investigated how the SIP model relates to reports of participants' own RA behavior. It was predicted that the level of the participants' peer-reported proactive and reactive RA would differentially correlate with biases in participants' self-reported intent attributions, social goals, and outcome expectancies in relational provocation situations.;A total of 134 fourth- through sixth-grade girls participated in the study. Participants nominated peers who displayed prosocial behaviors, overt aggression and reactive and proactive relational aggression. Girls were presented with six hypothetical vignettes that depicted relational slights occurring against the participant. Likert-type rating scales following each vignette assessed intent attributions; five potential response alternatives; five social goals; six outcome expectancies of an RA response; and five potential emotional reactions to the vignettes.;Two themes emerged in the findings. First, peer nominations of girls' RA were not related to their self-reported cognitions and emotions in response to relational provocations. These findings also held for nominations of overtly aggressive behavior and contradict previous studies linking aggression and faulty cognitive processing, including a few studies on relational aggression. Second, self-reported cognitive and emotional processing mechanisms were related to self-reported ratings of RA behavioral intentions in ways that would be expected based on SIP theory. Girls who reported that they would likely respond to hypothetical vignettes in an RA manner also tended to: (a) attribute hostile intent to provocateurs; (b) select social goals that valued revenge and exclusive friendships with peers; (c) expect that RA would result in achieving revenge for the slight and an exclusive friendship with a peer; and (d) report angry, jealous and sad CQ feelings in response to vignettes.;Taken together, findings provide mixed support for applying the SIP model to RA in pre-adolescent girls. Theoretical, empirical, and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.