Aggression and Antisocial Behavior in Youth

This chapter reviews the literatures on the normative development of antisocial behavior and how individual differences in antisocial behavior develop across the life span. The literature can be integrated with a model that includes biological (genetic, neural, and temperament) and socialization (parenting, peer, academic, and neighborhood) factors in antisocial development. These factors operate as main effects that cumulate, interaction effects that moderate each other, and developmental processes that mediate each other and transact across time. Social information processing factors (e.g., selective attention, hostile attributional bias, incompetent social problem-solving skills, and response evaluation biases) have been found to mediate these effects. Interventions that address these factors have proven partially successful in preventing antisocial development and may be targets for future efforts. Keywords: biological factors; individual differences; intervention; normative development; social information processing; socialization factors