Sex differences in childhood anger and aggression

Anger often goes hand in hand with aggression in childhood, but recent findings suggest that ethical guilt (i.e., feeling bad over violating ethical principles, such as not causing harm or caring for others) can disrupt the anger–aggression link. However, anger is difficult to diffuse and may persist even in high-guilt children. For the present study, we explored whether high-anger, high-guilt children would display their anger as non-aggressive disruptive behavior (i.e., behaviors like screaming and disobedience that do not violate ethical principles) rather than as aggression (N = 150 eight-year-olds; 50% female). Anger was unassociated with aggression but positively associated with non-aggressive disruptive behavior in high-guilt children. Results suggest that angry children with a strong sense of ethical guilt engage in less anger-induced, intentional acts of aggression than angry children who report less ethical guilt; such children may instead dispel anger as non-aggressive disruptive behaviors and thus avoid acting against their ethical compasses.

Given the prevalence of anger-related aggression in school and out-of-school contexts, research on counteracting the anger-aggression link in children and adolescents is likely to have implications for educators and practitioners. Here, we tested moral guilt and sympathy as potential moderators of the anger-aggression link in a sample of 4-, 8-, and 12-year-olds (N = 242). Caregivers reported their children’s aggression and anger levels with a questionnaire. Children reported their moral guilt (in response to vignettes depicting intentional harm) and sympathy levels in an interview. Moral guilt and sympathy interacted with anger in relation to aggression. Controlling for age, sex, socio-economic status, and inhibitory control, high anger was significantly related to high aggression, but not when children and adolescents had high guilt or sympathy. We discuss the potential roles of moral guilt and sympathy in mitigating the anger-aggression link.

Background: Studies on animal models have implicated arginine vasopressin signalling pathway in aggressive behaviour. The role of arginine vasopressin in childhood onset aggression is unclear.

Methods: We investigated 11 single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the genes coding for arginine vasopressin and its receptors in our sample of 177 aggressive child cases paired with adult controls matched for sex and ethnicity.

Results: We found the non-synonymous polymorphism AVPR1B_rs35369693 to be associated with child aggression in our sample (P=0.007). We also found two-marker haplotype window containing AVPR1B_rs35369693 and AVPR1B_rs28676508 to be associated (P=0.003). The haplotype findings survived multiple-testing adjusted significance threshold of 0.0063.

Conclusions: This is the first report of a genetic association between vasopressin receptor 1B and child aggression. Replication in independent samples are required to confirm these findings.

Interest in sex-related differences in psychological functioning has again come to the foreground with new findings about their possible functional basis in the brain. Sex differences may be one way how evolution has capitalized on the capacity of homologous brain regions to process social information between men and women differently. This paper focuses specifically on the effects of emotional valence, sex of the observed and sex of the observer on regional brain activations. We also discuss the effects of and interactions between environment, hormones, genes and structural differences of the brain in the context of differential brain activity patterns between men and women following exposure to seen expressions of emotion and in this context we outline a number of methodological considerations for future research. Importantly, results show that although women are better at recognizing emotions and express themselves more easily, men show greater responses to threatening cues (dominant, violent or aggressive) and this may reflect different behavioral response tendencies between men and women as well as evolutionary effects. We conclude that sex differences must not be ignored in affective research and more specifically in affective neuroscience.