| Aggression is a type of social behavior of relatively high prevalence among children. It is an aspect of children's personality and social development. Aggression is closely associated with the formation of children's personality and morality, and normally considered as an important index of individuals' socialization. The development of children's aggressive behavior is one of the most important research areas in developmental psychology. This dissertation is consist of two studies. Study one focused on the multi-method assessment of children's aggressive behavior between 3 to 4 years old. and study two explored the relationship of children's aggressive behavior to their theory-of-mind.Effective and accurate assessment of children's aggressive behavior determines directly level and quality of the research in the area. Therefore, the study and evaluation of methods for assessing children's aggressive behavior constitutes one of the most fundamental tasks for the research in this area. The main methods of measuring children's aggressive behavior include questionnaire, scale, observation, nomination, interview and so on. Most previous studies used solar method to measure children's aggressive behaviors, and often led to low validity of the result, and at times lead to difficulties in testifying the results from one another. In the first study, a panel of measures including natural observation, mother assessment, teacher assessment and peer nomination were employed in a sample of 177 3-4 years old children from three urban kindergartens. The validity and reliabilities of each method was evaluated for each measure. The main findings of study one were as follows:1. Natural observation, mother assessment, teacher assess and peer nomination each had comparatively high reliability. 2. Each of the four measures also had comparatively high criterion validity. 3. The theoretical multiple-method model using four measures was very well fitted to data, which proved to be a more accurate and effective measuring tool of aggression.The cognitive mechanism of children's aggressive behavior is a deep-seated issue for research. Dodge proposed the social information processing model to interpret the cognitive process under children's aggressive behavior. However, theconducting of certain type of aggressive behavior such as indirect aggression does require comparatively high cognitive ability to understand and manipulate others' mind on the part of the aggressor, which can't be explained by Dodge's cognitive deficiency hypothesis. We believe that the cognitive process under children's aggressive behavior may be relates to the types of aggressive behavior. The cognitive ability of those children categorized as indirect-aggression group may be different from that of the physical-aggressive children. So the cognitive feature of aggressive children must be examined according to the specific types of aggressive behavior. We would rather call this viewpoint type-specific hypothesis of cognitive mechanism of aggressive behavior.Theory-of-mind refers a naive cognition that individuals understand others' mental state and that of their own as well as the relationship of others' behavior to their mind. In the second study, the 'unexpected transfer' and 'deceptive appearance' test tasks were employed in a sample of 93 children selected from the first study, in an effort to explore the cognitive mechanism of children's aggressive behavior in terms of the ability of theory-of-mind. The results showed that, overall, no significant difference in the ability of theory-of-mind existed between aggressive and non-aggressive children. Indirect-aggressive children had a higher level of ability of theory-of-mind than those physical-aggressive children and non-aggressive children, but the latter two groups did not differ significantly. All the three groups of children had similar abilities of understanding their own mind.This study developed a multi-method model for measuring children's aggressive behavior and evaluated its reliabilities a... |
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