Kenneth Dodge

This article describes the Durham Family Initiative (DFI), an innovative effort to bring together child welfare and juvenile justice systems to reach DFI's goal of reducing the child abuse rate in Durham, North Carolina, by 50% within the next 10 years. DFI will follow principles of a preventive system of care (PSoC), which focuses on nurturing the healthy parent-child relationship. A community collaborative of government agency directors has signed a memorandum of agreement to implement the PSoC principles. The researchers will use multiple methods to evaluate DFI's efficacy.

A contrived play group procedure was utilized to examine the behavioral and social-cognitive correlates of reactive aggression, proactive aggression, and victimization via peers. Eleven play groups, each of which consisted of six familiar African-American 8-year-old boys, met for 45-min sessions on five consecutive days. Social-cognitive interviews were conducted following the second and fourth sessions. Play group interactions were videotaped and examined by trained observers. High rates of proactive aggression were associated with positive outcome expectancies for aggression/assertion, frequent displays of assertive social behavior, and low rates of submissive behavior. Reactive aggression was associated with hostile attributional tendencies and frequent victimization by peers. Victimization was associated with submissive behavior, hostile attributional bias, reactive aggression, and negative outcome expectations for aggression/assertion. These results demonstrate that there is a ...

Previous studies have identified the MMPI-based Cook and Medley hostility scale (Ho) as a predictor of health outcomes. To achieve a better understanding of the construct measured by this scale, Ho items were classified on an a priori basis. Six subsets were identified: Cynicism, Hostile Attributions, Hostile Affect, Aggressive Responding, Social Avoidance, and Other. Study 1 examined the correlations of these subsets with scales of the NEO Personality Inventory in two samples of undergraduates. Good convergent and discriminant validity were demonstrated, but there was some evidence that items in the Social Avoidance and Other categories reflect constructs other than hostility. Study 2 examined the ability of the Ho scale and the item subsets to predict the 1985 survival of 118 lawyers who had completed the MMPI in 1956 and 1957. As in previous studies, those with high scores had poorer survival (chi 2 = 6.37, p = 0.012). Unlike previous studies, the relation between Ho scores and survival was linear. Cynicism, Hostile Affect, and Aggressive Responding subsets were related to survival, whereas the other subsets were not. The sum of the three predictive subsets, with a chi 2 of 9.45 (p = 0.002), was a better predictor than the full Ho scale, suggesting that it may be possible to refine the scale and achieve an even more effective measure of those aspects of hostility that are deleterious to health.

We conducted a developmental analysis of genetic moderation of the effect of the Fast Track intervention on adult externalizing psychopathology. The Fast Track intervention enrolled 891 children at high risk to develop externalizing behavior problems when they were in kindergarten. Half of the enrolled children were randomly assigned to receive 10 years of treatment, with a range of services and resources provided to the children and their families, and the other half to usual care (controls). We previously showed that the effect of the Fast Track intervention on participants' risk of externalizing psychopathology at age 25 years was moderated by a variant in the glucocorticoid receptor gene. Children who carried copies of the A allele of the single nucleotide polymorphism rs10482672 had the highest risk of externalizing psychopathology if they were in the control arm of the trial and the lowest risk of externalizing psychopathology if they were in the treatment arm. In this stu...

Debate continues regarding the magnitude and importance ofparenting effects on the development of children's externalizing behavior problems, in spite of the evidence that environments (as well as genes) contribute to individual differences in these behaviors. Research has ...

... Kirby Deater-Deckard Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre Institute of Psychiatry, London ... Several of our peers (eg, Elias; Jackson; Goodman; Stoolmiller et al.) note that, by focusing on harsh paren-tal discipline, we have ignored other potentially ...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of an audio computer-assisted self-interviewing Web-based software application called the Social Information Processing Application (SIP-AP) that was designed to assess social information processing skills in boys in 3rd through 5th grades. This study included a racially and ethnically diverse sample of 244 boys ages 8 through 12 (M = 9.4) from public elementary schools in 3 states. The SIP-AP includes 8 videotaped vignettes, filmed from the first-person perspective, that depict common misunderstandings among boys. Each vignette shows a negative outcome for the victim and ambiguous intent on the part of the perpetrator. Boys responded to 16 Web-based questions representing the 5 social information processing mechanisms, after viewing each vignette. Parents and teachers completed measures assessing boys' antisocial behavior. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that a model positing the original 5 cognitive mechanisms fit the data well when the items representing prosocial cognitions were included on their own factor, creating a 6th factor. The internal consistencies for each of the 16 individual cognitions as well as for the 6 cognitive mechanism scales were excellent. Boys with elevated scores on 5 of the 6 cognitive mechanisms exhibited more antisocial behavior than boys whose scores were not elevated. These findings highlight the need for further research on the measurement of prosocial cognitions or cognitive strengths in boys in addition to assessing cognitive deficits. Findings suggest that the SIP-AP is a reliable and valid tool for use in future research of social information processing skills in boys.

This article proposes and tests a formal cognitive model for the go/no-go discrimination task. In this task, the performer chooses whether to respond to stimuli and receives rewards for responding to certain stimuli and punishments for responding to others. Three cognitive models were evaluated on the basis of data from a longitudinal study involving 400 adolescents. The results show that a cue-dependent model presupposing that participants can differentiate between cues was the most accurate and parsimonious. This model has 3 parameters denoting the relative impact of rewards and punishments on evaluations, the rate that contingent payoffs are learned, and the consistency between learning and responding. Commission errors were associated with increased attention to rewards; omission errors were associated with increased attention to punishments. Both error types were associated with low choice consistency. The parameters were also shown to have external validity: Attention to rewards was associated with externalizing behavior problems on the Achenbach scale, and choice consistency was associated with low Welsh anxiety. The present model can thus potentially improve the sensitivity of the task to differences between clinical populations.

OBJECTIVE: To test the hypothesis that societal rates of corporal punishment of children predict societal levels of violence, using "culture" as the unit of analysis. DESIGN: Data were retrieved from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of anthropological records, which includes 186 cultural groups, to represent the world's 200 provinces based on diversity of language, economy, political organization, descent, and historical time. Independent coders rated the frequency and harshness of corporal punishment of children, inculcation of aggression in children, warfare, interpersonal violence among adults, and demographic, socioeconomic, and parenting covariates. RESULTS: More frequent use of corporal punishment was related to higher rates of inculcation of aggression in children, warfare, and interpersonal violence. These relations held for inculcation of aggression in children and warfare after controlling for demographic, socioeconomic, and parenting confounds. CONCLUSION: More frequent use of corporal punishment is related to higher prevalence of violence and endorsement of violence at a societal level. The findings are consistent with theories that adult violence becomes more prevalent in contexts in which corporal punishment is frequent, that the use of corporal punishment increases the probability that children will engage in violent behaviors during adulthood, and that violence in one social domain tends to influence behavior in other domains. If corporal punishment leads to higher levels of societal violence, then reducing parents' use of corporal punishment should lead to reductions in societal violence manifested in other ways.

... This is perplexing behavior on the part of the 2-year-old children, who presumably understand the ... give their children unsolicited social referential information, children do not show 20 18 16 14 ... Older children (above 30 months of age) whose parents have a high rate of providing ...

This study tests the efficacy of the Fast Track Program in preventing antisocial behavior and psychiatric disorders among groups varying in initial risk. Schools within four sites (Durham, NC; Nashville, TN; Seattle, WA; and rural central Pennsylvania) were selected as high-risk institutions based on neighborhood crime and poverty levels. After screening 9,594 kindergarteners in these schools, 891 highest risk and moderate-risk children (69% male and 51% African American) were randomly assigned by matched sets of schools to intervention or control conditions. The 10-year intervention (begun in 1991 with three yearly cohorts) included parent behavior-management training, child social-cognitive skills training, reading tutoring, home visiting, mentoring, and a universal classroom curriculum. Outcomes included criterion counts and psychiatric diagnoses after grades 3, 6, and 9 for conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, any externalizing disorder, and self-reported antisocial behavior. Grade 9 outcomes were assessed between 2000 and 2003, depending upon cohort. Significant interaction effects between intervention and initial risk level were found at each age but most strongly after grade 9. Assignment to intervention had a significant positive effect in lowering criterion count scores and diagnoses for conduct disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and any externalizing disorder, and lowering antisocial behavior scores, but only among those at highest risk initially. Prevention of serious antisocial behavior can be efficacious across sex, ethnicity, and urban/rural residence, but screening is essential.

We examined social-information-processing mechanisms (e.g., hostile attributional biases and intention-cue detection deficits) in chronic reactive and proactive aggressive behavior in children's peer groups. In Study 1, a teacher-rating instrument was developed to assess these behaviors in elementary school children (N = 259). Reactive and proactive scales were found to be internally consistent, and factor analyses partially supported convergent and discriminant validities. In Study 2, behavioral correlates of these forms of aggression were examined through assessments by peers (N = 339). Both types of aggression related to social rejection, but only proactively aggressive boys were also viewed as leaders and as having a sense of humor. In Study 3, we hypothesized that reactive aggression (but not proactive aggression) would occur as a function of hostile attributional biases and intention-cue detection deficits. Four groups of socially rejected boys (reactive aggressive, proactive aggressive, reactive-proactive aggressive, and nonaggressive) and a group of average boys were presented with a series of hypothetical videorecorded vignettes depicting provocations by peers and were asked to interpret the intentions of the provocateur (N = 117). Only the two reactive-aggressive groups displayed biases and deficits in interpretations. In Study 4, attributional biases and deficits were found to be positively correlated with the rate of reactive aggression (but not proactive aggression) displayed in free play with peers (N = 127). These studies supported the hypothesis that attributional biases and deficits are related to reactive aggression but not to proactive aggression.

This study evaluated individual-group similarity and dissimilarity hypotheses generally stipulating that the behavioral correlates of status are moderated by the peer group context in which they are displayed. Thirty play groups of 5 or 6 unacquainted same-age boys participated in five 45-min sessions. Five behaviors described group and individual characteristics: reactive aggression, proactive aggression, solitary play, rough-and-tumble play, and positive interactive behavior. Individual social preference scores were computed following a variant of the J. D. Coie and K. A. Dodge (1983) procedure. The behavioral correlates of emerging peer status were examined as a function of the group's behavioral norms. Evidence of a dissimilarity effect was found for solitary play and reactive aggression whereas positive interactive behavior followed a rule of similarity.

We examined young adolescents' endorsement of parental use of corporal punishment to elucidate processes underlying the intergenerational transmission of discipline strategies. The community sample was ethnically and socioeconomically diverse. Mothers completed interviews and questionnaires when the target children were entering kindergarten (n = 566) and in 6th and 8th grades. Adolescents completed questionnaires when they were in 8th grade (n = 425). Adolescents' attitudes about corporal punishment varied widely. Those adolescents who had been spanked by their own mothers were more approving of this discipline method, regardless of the overall frequency, timing, or chronicity of physical discipline they had received. However, there was no correlation among adolescents for whom physical maltreatment in early or middle childhood was suspected.

Parents' use of physical discipline has generated controversy related to concerns that its use is associated with adjustment problems such as aggression and delinquency in children. However, recent evidence suggests that there are ethnic differences in associations between physical discipline and children's adjustment. This study examined race as a moderator of the link between physical discipline and adolescent externalizing behavior problems, extending previous research beyond childhood into adolescence and considering physical discipline at multiple points in time. A representative community sample of 585 children was followed from pre-kindergarten (age 5) through grade 11 (age 16). Mothers reported on their use of physical discipline in the child's first five years of life and again during grades 6 (age 11) and 8 (age 13). Mothers and adolescents reported on a variety of externalizing behaviors in grade 11 including aggression, violence, and trouble at school and with the police. A series of hierarchical linear regressions controlling for parents' marital status, socioeconomic status, and child temperament revealed significant interactions between physical discipline during the child's first five years of life and race in the prediction of 3 of the 7 adolescent externalizing outcomes assessed and significant interactions between physical discipline during grades 6 and 8 and race in the prediction of all 7 adolescent externalizing outcomes. Regression slopes showed that the experience of physical discipline at each time point was related to higher levels of subsequent externalizing behaviors for European American adolescents but lower levels of externalizing behaviors for African American adolescents. There are race differences in long-term effects of physical discipline on externalizing behaviors problems. Different ecological niches may affect the manner in which parents use physical discipline, the meaning that children attach to the experience of physical discipline, and its effects on the adjustment of children and adolescents.

The authors tested the hypothesis that early physical abuse is associated with later externalizing behavior outcomes and that this relation is mediated by the intervening development of biased social information-processing patterns. They assessed 584 randomly selected boys and girls from European American and African American backgrounds for the lifetime experience of physical abuse through clinical interviews with mothers prior to the child's matriculation in kindergarten. Early abuse increased the risk of teacher-rated externalizing outcomes in Grades 3 and 4 by fourfold, and this effect could not be accounted for by confounded ecological or child factors. Abuse was associated with later processing patterns (encoding errors, hostile attributional biases, accessing of aggressive responses, and positive evaluations of aggression), which, in turn, predicted later externalizing outcomes.

The authors proposed that reactively aggressive and proactively aggressive types of antisocial youth would differ in developmental histories, concurrent adjustment, and social information-processing patterns. In Study 1, 585 boys and girls classified into groups called reactive aggressive, proactive aggressive, pervasively aggressive (combined type), and nonaggressive revealed distinct profiles. Only the reactive aggressive groups demonstrated histories of physical abuse and early onset of problems, adjustment problems in peer relations, and inadequate encoding and problem-solving processing patterns. Only the proactive aggressive groups demonstrated a processing pattern of anticipating positive outcomes for aggressing. In Study 2, 50 psychiatrically impaired chronically violent boys classified as reactively violent or proactively violent demonstrated differences in age of onset of problem behavior, adjustment problems, and processing problems.