The Relationship Between Adverse Peer Relationships And Proactive And Reactive Aggression

Aggression refers to behaviors intentionally harm others by children and adolescents.According to behaviors’ intentions,aggression can be classified into proactive and reactive aggression.Proactive aggression and reactive aggression are related,but there are differences between them.Adverse peer relations may be the risk factor for aggressive behavior as previous research indicated.However,effects of these risk factors perhaps vary on the bases of personal features,such as differences in temperament and gender.For instance,when children and adolescents with high effortful control or fear were confronted with adverse peer relationships,they may show lower aggression.Compared with girls,boys who were victimized were likely to feel pressure to reestablish dominance in group.In the past,researchers mainly focused on the relationship between higher-order characteristics of temperament and externalization,and seldom examined the specific dimensions of temperament.In addition,the impact of environmental factors on aggression mainly focus on parenting,and pay less attention to peer contexts,particularly peer rejection and victimization.Although some studies examined temperament and peer environments at the same time,they only examined externalization including aggression,or classified aggression according to its forms(e.g.physical and relational aggression).Few studies examined differences in aggressive motivation(e.g.proactive and reactive aggression).Therefore,exploring and revealing the specific dimensions of temperament(such as effortful control,fear and frustration),negative peer relationship(such as peer rejection,peer victimization)and gender and interaction on proactive and reactive aggression has become one of the research subjects in this field.In this study,1513 junior high school students(14.20 ± 0.34 years old,735 boys,48.57%)were selected as samples,and investigated the moderating effects of temperament reactive and regulatory characteristics(frustration,fear and effortful control)and gender on the relationship between negative peer relationships(peer rejection,peer aggression)and proactive and reactive aggression.Results suggest that(1)Effortful control and fear negatively predicted proactive and reactive aggression,and frustration has nonsignificant predictive effects on two types of aggression.(2)Peer rejection positively predicted proactive and reactive aggression,the predictive effect of peer victimization on two subtypes were nonsignificant.(3)Compared with boys with high effortful control,among boys with low effortful control,the positive association between peer rejection and proactive aggression was stronger.(4)For boys with low effortful control,peer victimization significant negatively predicts proactive aggression.For boys with high effortful control,peer victimization significant positively predicted proactive aggression.(5)Compared with girls with high fear,among girls with low fear,the positive association between peer rejection and reactive aggression was stronger.(6)The moderate effects of frustration and gender on the relationship between peer victimization and reactive aggression were nonsignificant.(7)Effortful control has nonsignificant moderating effect on the relationship between frustration,fear and two types of aggression.The results of this study indicated that adolescents’ effortful control,fear and peer rejection have unique effects on proactive and reactive aggression,and there are differences between these interactions and two types of aggression.After being rejected by peers,boys with low effortful control were prone to proactive aggression and girls with low fear were prone to reactive aggression.After being victimized by peers,boys with low effortful control were less prone to proactive aggression,while boys with high effortful control were more prone to proactive aggression.These results suggest that when planning and implementing prevention and interventionactivities,we should pay attention to the differences of negative peer relationships and gender differences.