Finding the positive in a hostile world: Relationships between aspects of social information processing, prosocial behaviour, and aggressive behaviour, in children with ADHD and disruptive behaviour.

摘要

Three studies were conducted to investigate relationships between unique social information processing (SIP) abilities, aggressive behaviour, prosocial behaviour, and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In study one a questionnaire containing twenty vignettes comprising a variety of social situations was developed and validated through expert panel review and adult classification. Five categories of social vignette were developed and validated containing situations where peer intention and situation outcome were clearly positive, clearly negative, ambiguous, or mixed (i.e., ambiguous peer intention with negative or positive situational outcome). In study two and three, vignettes were read to 68 children; 21 of which had ADHD and aggression, 18 had ADHD-only, and 29 children were controls. Vignettes were followed by a series of questions assessing the cue encoding, interpretation, and response generation steps of Crick and Dodges, 1994 SIP model. Child responses were coded for positive, negative, or neutral cue detection, peer intention attribution, situational outcome attribution, and response generation. Responses were compared between groups and used to predict specific forms of aggression (i.e., reactive and proactive) and prosocial behaviour (i.e., adult and peer preferred). Results of study two and three showed that groups of children differed in most SIP abilities with children in the ADHD groups typically demonstrating biased processing. Control children tended to detect more positive and neutral cues, attribute less negative and positive intent, focus more on situational outcome, and generate more positive responses compared to either ADHD group. Differences between the ADHD-only and ADHD-aggression groups were mixed, suggesting similarity in information processing in some areas and differences in others. Behaviourally, children with ADHD-aggression demonstrated the least adult and peer preferred prosocial behaviour, followed by the ADHD-only and control groups. Additionally, children that focussed on the intention of peers in the vignettes had associated higher levels of reactive and proactive aggression, and less adult and peer preferred prosocial behaviour. Conversely, an outcome focus was associated with less aggression and more prosocial behaviour. Results of the series of studies support a growing body of research emphasising the relationship between SIP with both the aggression and prosocial spectrums of behaviour. Results also support the need for clear delineation of SIP and behaviour connections that are situation specific.