Emotionality

• Luckily, they lack coordination and strength, making their attacks less dangerous than those of adults.
• Overtly hostile behaviour tends to diminish with age — except for a minority of children who are at risk of later criminality.
• This makes childhood a critical time for steering those most in need of support away from difficult life paths.

Types of aggression

• There are two types of aggression that represent differing emotional temperatures: cold-calculated and hot-reactive.
• Although these types of aggression seem opposite, someone who is a cold-calculated aggressor in one situation can also be a hot-reactive aggressor in another.
• Until now, it was unclear how children’s abilities to read facial expressions might differ between these “hot” and “cold” types of aggression.

Difficulty recognizing emotions

• We found that blindness to others’ anger, fear and sadness was consistently related to using cold-calculated aggression.
• In other words, children who have difficulty understanding that they upset someone are more likely to harm others to get what they want.
• So, perhaps young reactive aggressors are particularly sensitive to rewarding emotions.
• Trouble figuring out the valence of an emotion (mistaking negative for positive emotions) could also be causing social blunders that result in conflict.

What causes aggression in children?

• Our study was correlational, meaning we can’t say for sure whether reduced emotion recognition causes aggression in children — only that these two things seem to be related.
• In our study, children’s ability to recognize emotions explained five per cent or less of their aggression, depending on their age.
• Addressing systemic causes of violence (e.g., poverty) and investing in tailored early interventions that target multiple areas of child development and family well-being are necessary for promoting meaningful changes in children’s aggression.