ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Hostile attributional bias and aggressive behavior in global context.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 186 citations in OpenAlex.
- Hostile Intent Attribution and Aggressive Behavior in Children Revisited: A Meta-Analysis.Child development · 2019Pooled it
- The Independent and Combined Roles of Attentional and Interpretative Biases in Antisocial Behavior, Trait Aggression and Aggressive Responses Under Provocation.Aggressive behavior · 2026Article
- Equifinality and multifinality in developmental paths to a hostile mindset: A longitudinal study of mother-child and father-child dyads from toddler to early school age.Development and psychopathology · 2026Article
- School bullying predicts malevolent creativity in middle school students through anger and hostile attribution bias.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Association between free thyroxine and aggression: the chain mediating role of hostile attribution bias and psychological resilience.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Childhood violence exposure and social information processing in young adults: Does relationship with the perpetrator matter?Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Domain-specific associations between social cognition and aggression in schizophrenia spectrum disorders.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Hostile Intent Attribution and Aggression in Japanese Children.Child psychiatry and human development · 2025Article
- The Aggressive Gender Backlash in Intimate Partner Relationships: A Theoretical Framework and Initial Measurement.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Rumination Mediates the Relation of Hostile Attribution to Psychological Maladjustment Among Adolescents from Three Countries.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2025Article
- Exploratory Factor Analysis of the Adversity Appraisal Questionnaire (AAQ).Journal of psychopathology and behavioral assessment · 2025Article
- Hostile Attribution Bias Shapes Neural Synchrony in the Left Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex during Ambiguous Social Narratives.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- The impact of patients' hostile attribution bias on aggression in doctor-patient interactions.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Dark Triad and relational aggression: the mediating role of relative deprivation and hostile attribution bias.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- 'Prosociality' in Daily School Life and Early Adolescents' Peer Aggression: A Multilevel Latent Profile Analysis Approach.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2023Article
- Aggressive and psychopathic traits are linked to the acquisition of stable but imprecise hostile expectations.Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
- Interpretations and revenge goals in response to peer provocations: Comparing adolescents in the United States and Pakistan.International journal of behavioral development · 2022Article
- Capturing mechanisms of change: Weekly covariation in anger regulation, hostile intent attribution, and children's aggression.Aggressive behavior · 2022Article
- Social ascent changes cognition, behaviour and physiology in a highly social cichlid fish.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Adolescents' own and parental expectations for cross-group friendship in the context of societal inequalities.The Journal of social issues · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
18 authors at 13 institutions in 9 countries.
Funding
Abstract
We tested a model that children's tendency to attribute hostile intent to others in response to provocation is a key psychological process that statistically accounts for individual differences in reactive aggressive behavior and that this mechanism contributes to global group differences in children's chronic aggressive behavior problems. Participants were 1,299 children (mean age at year 1 = 8.3 y; 51% girls) from 12 diverse ecological-context groups in nine countries worldwide, followed across 4 y. In year 3, each child was presented with each of 10 hypothetical vignettes depicting an ambiguous provocation toward the child and was asked to attribute the likely intent of the provocateur (coded as benign or hostile) and to predict his or her own behavioral response (coded as nonaggression or reactive aggression). Mothers and children independently rated the child's chronic aggressive behavior problems in years 2, 3, and 4. In every ecological group, in those situations in which a child attributed hostile intent to a peer, that child was more likely to report that he or she would respond with reactive aggression than in situations when that same child attributed benign intent. Across children, hostile attributional bias scores predicted higher mother- and child-rated chronic aggressive behavior problems, even controlling for prior aggression. Ecological group differences in the tendency for children to attribute hostile intent statistically accounted for a significant portion of group differences in chronic aggressive behavior problems. The findings suggest a psychological mechanism for group differences in aggressive behavior and point to potential interventions to reduce aggressive behavior.
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Registered trials
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