The Relation Between Executive Function, Parenting And Chinese Children's Proactive And Reactive Aggression

According to the Developmental Systems Theories, both environmental factors (e.g. Parenting Styles) and dispositional factors (e.g. Executive Function) can significantly affect children's behavior (e.g. Aggression).A large body of researches from diverse fields suggested that impaired Executive Function (EF) may play an important role in the etiology of Aggressive Behavior (AB). Furthermore, there were evidence for the association between different components of EF and different subtypes of AB, such as poor hot EF (e.g. empathy) with proactive AB and poor cool EF (e.g. emotional dysfunction, impulsivity) with reactive AB, much of the evidence were scattered.However, the hazardous dispositional factors can only provide a probability for maladaptive behavior, but can't determine the occurrence or consequence of the given behavior, because children's behavior was also influenced by the environmental factors. According to extant literatures, authoritarian parenting was associated with both subtypes of aggression, whereas indulgent parenting was more associated with proactive than reactive AB. However, there were still scant of researches that jointly examine the effects of both EF and parenting on proactive and reactive AB.Applying cross-sectional design, the present study used a sample of 843 children (M age=12.66 years, 388 girls) and their parents who were recruited from one junior high school in Heze City, Shandong Province. The data included cool and hot EF scores of children, parenting style scores and scores of children's proactive and reactive AB. The main conclusions had been demonstrated in following parts:1. There was significant gender discrepancy between cool and hot EF, and between proactive and reactive AB. Both hot and cool EF scores of girls were higher than boys. And both the scores of proactive and reactive AB of boys were higher than girls'.2. The results showed that children's hot EF was more associated with proactive AB than cool EF, whereas cool EF was more associated with reactive AB than hot EF. Significant additive and interactive effects were also found between hot and cool EF, which means well hot EF can buffer the maladaptive effect of poor cool EF, and ill hot EF can exacerbate the effect of poor cool EF, and vice versa.3. Children got significantly less AB scores under positive parenting (e.g. authoritative parenting) than negative parenting (e.g. indulgent parenting). The effects of three negative parenting had no significant difference on reactive AB,but had significant different effects on proactive AB.4. There were significant interaction between EF and parenting. Positive parenting such as authoritative can lower the maladaptive effect of ill hot or cool EF, whereas negative parenting can exacerbate the effect of ill hot and cool EF. And the interaction between hot and cool EF was conditional, which means, it would only occur under negative parenting.