Children’s social behaviours have significant implications to their
adjustments. Aggressive children display emotional, behavioural, and social
problems. On the other hand, prosocial children are better adjusted (for review,
see Card, Stucky, Sawalani, & Little, 2008). Adopting the social cognitive
approach, the present study aimed to investigate the relationships between
several social-cognitive capacities related to empathy (i.e., perspective-taking,
affect sharing, and emotion regulation) and social behaviours (physical
aggression, relational aggression, and prosocial behaviours) in children. The
results showed that perspective-taking was the most predictive factor of both
prosocial and aggressive behaviours, whereas the capacity to share emotions
and to modulate emotion was found to have little predictive value to both
positive and negative social behaviours. In addition, the present study also
investigated the sex-related and age differences of aggressive behaviours in
children. Consistent with the findings of previous studies, this study found that
boys enacted more physical aggression than girls. However, sex-related
difference in relational aggression was not found. Besides, older children were
found to use more relational aggression but the trend of decreasing physical
aggression across development was not evident. Clinical implications of the
present findings were discussed. / published_or_final_version / Clinical Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Psychology
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:HKU/oai:hub.hku.hk:10722/179884 |
Date | January 2010 |
Creators | Lee, Ka-yee, Cavy., 李嘉怡. |
Publisher | The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) |
Source Sets | Hong Kong University Theses |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | PG_Thesis |
Source | http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B47657108 |
Rights | The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works., Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License |
Relation | HKU Theses Online (HKUTO) |
Page generated in 0.0023 seconds