Abstract

This study is aimed at investigating the impulsive or aggressive children's cognitive characteristics on the basis of the Social Information Processing Model(Dodge, 1987) by 2(level of impulsivity) ×2(level of aggressiveness) factorial design. For the preliminary subject screening, 384 children in the fifth or sixth grade were rated by the peers for aggressiveness, and then 150 children classified as aggressive or non-aggressive children were tested by MFFT for impulsivity measures. Ninty-five children(66 males and 29 females) were selected as final subjects for experiment. There was no difference in causal attributions and the interpretations of the peer's intent between aggressive and non-aggressive children, and between impulsive and non-impulsive children. However, comparing with that of the non-aggressive children, the behavioral responses of the aggressive children were more predictable form those two traits. While there were no differences in both aggressive and non-aggressive alternatives between impulsive and non-impulsive children, the aggressive children tended to have more aggressive alternatives and had less non-aggressive alternatives than the non--aggressive children. And, the aggressive children selected more aggressive behaviors as response than non-aggressive children and the impulsive children did so than nonimpulsive children. There was also an interaction between impulsivity and aggressiveness in behavioral response. That is, aggressive/impulsive children selected more aggressive responses than children assigned to the three other conditions, and there were no differences among three conditions.