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Up until the 1990s, many psychologists favored social learning accounts of aggressive development (discussed by Tremblay, 2017), in which physical aggression was seen as a learned but maladaptive response to frustration, acquired by observing adult models of the behavior. These accounts were undermined by studies showing that the great majority of 18–24-month-old infants sometimes practiced forms of physical aggression (e.g., Alink et al., 2017). Most toddlers use physical aggression from time to time, while a minority almost never use it and another minority use it frequently (Tremblay, 2017). Frequency of physical aggression increases up until the age of about 3 before decreasing steadily thereafter (Côté, Vaillancourt, LeBlanc, Nagin, and Tremblay, 2017): a major longitudinal, multinational study by Broidy et al. (2017) found that most children reduce the frequency of physically aggressive behavior throughout their school careers. Crucially, over the same age range (4–8) at which levels of direct physical aggression start to fall, levels of indirect aggression rise in the same individuals (Côté, Vaillancourt, Barker, Nagin, and Tremblay, 2017; Vaillancourt, Miller, Fagbemi, Côté, and Tremblay, 2017). However, physical aggression then briefly rises again—alongside indirect aggression—during preadolescence. For instance, Björkqvist et al. (1992) compared levels of physical, verbal and indirect aggression in a cross-sectional sample of Finnish boys and girls at ages 8, 11, 15, and 18. All three forms of aggression peaked at age 11; yet verbal and indirect aggression increased in frequency between 8 and 18 and overtook physical aggression, which was initially more common but declined with age (see Figure 1 below). Similarly, Cairns et al. (1989) found that social aggression increased dramatically— at least for girls—as their participants moved from 4th grade (age 9/10) to early adolescence. The later tendency of indirect aggression to decrease slightly in frequency is complicated by the fact that it also seems to become more covert, and therefore perhaps more hidden from researchers. In young adulthood—and presumably even more so at older ages—aggressive moves are sometimes disguised as “rational-appearing” argument, especially perhaps in work contexts (Björkqvist, Osterman, and Lagerspetz, 1994; Kaukiainen et al., 2017). Yet this process of covering up indirect aggression starts well before the frequency of indirect aggression has peaked. In middle childhood, relational aggression gradually becomes more sophisticated (Crick et al., 1999). Instead of directly threatening not to be someone’s friend, as in the preschool years, 8–11-year-old children are “more likely to focus on an individual's social group, with aggressors excluding and ignoring individuals or spreading vicious rumors about them” (Archer and Coyne, 2017, pp. 221–222). This is paralleled by Laursen, Finkelstein, and Betts’s (2017) meta-analytic finding that as young people move through adolescence, disengagement and negotiation become more common responses to conflict relative to coercion, which predominates at earlier ages—raising the possibility that increasing rates of indirect aggression may be just one element of increasingly indirect, sociocentric responses to conflict in general. However, caution should be exercised in considering this proposed developmental trend. Sixteen years after Björkqvist et al. (1992) proposed that a reduction in direct aggression is accompanied by an increase in indirect aggression during middle childhood, Heilbron and Prinstein (2017) argued that it was still premature to regard this theoretical model as well supported by the research evidence, since there have not been many longterm longitudinal studies examining the transition from direct to indirect strategies within particular individuals over many years. (An important exception was the large-scale National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth—NLCSY—in Canada; see Côté et al., 2017; Vaillancourt et al., 2017). The situation is further complicated by the existence of many hard-to-replicate gender effects in the literature, some of which suggests that the rise in indirect aggression during this age range might be specific to girls, or at least much stronger among girls (e.g., Vaillancourt et al., 2017). Another important point is that most studies find that the same individuals practice both physical and nonphysical forms of aggression: in a meta-analysis, Card, Stucky, Sawalani, and Little (2017) were able to demonstrate a strong intercorrelation (r = .76) between direct and indirect aggression at an individual level. This is just what one would expect if both forms of aggression were practiced by people with high levels of aggressive impulses, but the external forms of their aggressive behavior were altered by socialization processes (Berkowitz, 2017). According to the limited evidence that is currently available, we can say that across children as a group there are two major developmental transitions relating to a reduction in physically aggressive behavior. The first reduction begins in early childhood, following a rise in physical aggression during toddlerhood, and is certainly associated with a broadly simultaneous rise in indirectly (but not covertly) aggressive behavior. The second reduction takes place during adolescence, following a brief rise in physical aggression during preadolescence and early adolescence, and may be associated with a simultaneous but less dramatic fall in indirect aggression. Before considering what is responsible for these shifts, I will examine parallel changes in a related form of behavior that is not necessarily classed as aggressive: the everyday verbal activity of gossip. Development of Gossip and Tattling A key contention of this article is that aggression, as classically defined, is not the only type of behavior that becomes increasingly indirect as children get older. Overt verbal protests about another individual’s norm violations are theoretically likely to be replaced by covert gossip, since the former can trigger emotionally damaging verbal conflicts (Goodwin, 1990), which can even spill over into physical conflicts. While malicious gossip is often used as an index of indirect, relational or social aggression, here I am defining gossip more broadly as any behind-the-scenes talk about another individual’s behavior. The relatively low frequency of indirect aggression in early childhood is paralleled by the very low frequencies of gossip found by the few studies that have focused on gossip in children younger than 10. After coding and analyzing the natural conversations of dyads of girls aged 6–7, 11–12, and 16–17, Mettetal (1983) found that the frequency of gossip increased dramatically between the youngest and middle age groups, remaining at a similar level— about one-third of all conversation—in the oldest group. A similar longitudinal pattern, for younger age groups, was found by Engel and Li (2017), who asked three groups of children—aged 4, 7 and 10—to tell stories about their friends in semi-structured interviews. The length, descriptiveness and evaluative content of the stories all increased significantly with age, implying that the younger children’s stories were far less informative than the older children’s. This supported Engel and Li’s naturalistic observation, from tape recordings of conversations in a daycare center, that 4-year-old children very rarely tell stories about absent peers: “It was surprisingly difficult to catch the children gossiping” (2017, p. 160). Preschoolers’ lack of gossip is reflected in aggression researchers’ methods: whilst negative gossip is used as one of the main indices of indirect aggression and related constructs in older age groups, even those questionnaires designed for preschool children that measure indirect rather than relational aggression make little mention of gossip, presumably because it is not a category of discourse that makes sense for such young children (but see Ostrov, Woods, Jansen, Casas, and Crick, 2017, p. 367, for an example of misfired secret-telling among preschoolers). While covert gossip is rare among young children, there is another kind of verbal discourse that is very common in this age group. Tattling has been defined as “the ing to a second party of a third party’s counter-normative behavior” (Ingram and Bering, 2017, p. 945). This broad definition actually subsumes negative gossip, since tattling may be overt or covert; but in practice, with young children, it is normally overt (Ingram, 2017). Tattling has been observed to take place in home settings against siblings (Den Bak and Ross, 1996; Ross and Den Bak-Lammers, 1998), in preschool and elementary school settings against peers (Ingram and Bering, 2017; Lancelotta and Vaughn, 1989), and in laboratory settings against puppets (Rakoczy, Warneken, and Tomasello, 2017; Schmidt et al., 2017; Vaish et al., 2017). Tattling may not be a prototypical form of indirect aggression, since the intended audience is typically an adult rather than a peer; and as long as the content of tattling is not too trivial, parents or teachers may see it as justified. Yet tattling was often used as an example of indirect aggression in earlier studies, before the latter construct was formalized (e.g., Lancelotta and Vaughn, 1989; Lesser, 1959). More recently, Ingram and Bering (2017) found that tattling had a number of features that suggest it is related to indirect aggression in interesting ways. First, observed frequency of tattling correlated with the Relational Aggression subscale of the PSBS-T form (Preschool Social Behavior Scale—Teacher form; see Crick, Casas, and Mosher, 1997, and Ostrov et al., 2017, for discussion of this instrument): the children who tattled the most tended to be rated by teachers as engaging most often in relational aggression (Ingram and Bering, 2017). Second, tattling usually takes place to an adult authority figure such as a parent or teacher, and often results in punishment for the target of tattling but not for the tattler themselves, thereby reducing the target child’s standing relative to the child who is doing the ing. Third, tattling is a very common form of discourse for young children, making up about 60% of all talk about third parties in Ross and Den Bak-Lammers’s (1998) sample of 6-year-olds, 80% in their sample of 4- year-olds, and as much as 90% in Ingram and Bering’s (2017) sample of 3–4-year-olds. Fourth, tattling has been observed in younger children (23–31 months in Den Bak and Ross, 1996; 34–38 months in Schmidt et al., 2017) than have taken part in indirect aggression studies—yet Ross and Den Bak-Lammers (1998) also showed that tattling between siblings increased in frequency between the ages of 2 and 4, and 4 and 6, just as indirect aggression does. Therefore, even if tattling is not a prototypical form of indirect aggression, it looks like it may fill a gap, in terms of providing an outlet for aggressive impulses, that is left by the decline in physical aggression from age 3 and the relative absence of prototypical indirect (i.e., covert) aggression until a few years later. Of course, From hitting to tattling to gossip Evolutionary Psychology – ISSN 1474-7049 – Volume 10(x). 2017. -15- there may be individual differences here in that for some children who rarely tattle, the behavior may simply represent justified outrage at another individual’s norm violation. As children enter middle childhood, the absolute frequency of tattling may continue to rise, even as there is a fall in the proportion of conversation about others that it comprises. Ross and Den Bak-Lammers (1998) found that 6-year-olds tattled on their younger siblings 40% more frequently than when they were 4, but over the same age range their rate of positive or neutral descriptions of sibling behavior more than quadrupled. Unfortunately, to my knowledge there has not been any systematic observational study of tattling in children older than six. I therefore turn to vignette studies, which have examined changes in the acceptability of tattling and gossip for older children. As part of his classic investigation into the development of moral judgment, Piaget (1932, ch. 3) told 6–10-year-old children a story about a father with two sons, one “good” and one “silly”, who went away on a long journey, and on his return asked the good son to tell him about anything “naughty” that the silly son had done. The participants were then asked what the good son ought to do. The younger children tended to say that he should obey his father and on his brother’s actions, while the older children more frequently said that he should not, as it would lead to the brother being punished. Loke, Heyman, Forgie, McCarthy, and Lee (2017) recently used a very similar methodology to update and extend Piaget’s findings. They found that 8–11-year-old-children children distinguished between tattling on major transgressions (e.g., putting worms in someone’s shoes) and on minor transgressions (e.g., not eating one’s vegetables at lunch), seeing the former kind of tattling as appropriate but the latter as inappropriate. However, 6–7-year-old children made no such distinction. So what this seems to indicate is that as children move out of middle childhood, they start to recognize that trivial tattling—in the sense of ing minor norm violations—is something that causes unnecessary harm or annoyance to other children and should therefore be avoided. Conversely, the use of covert gossip may be increasingly positively evaluated over a similar age range: Kuttler, Parker, and La Greca (2017) examined preadolescents’ attitudes to hypothetical instances of gossip, and found that surprisingly, 5th/6th graders (average age: 11.40 years) expressed significantly less skepticism about gossip than 3rd/4th graders (average age: 9.65 years). This parallels the increasing frequency in gossip ed by Mettetal (1983) and by Engel and Li (2017)— reviewed at the start of this section—and perhaps reflects preadolescents’ increasing use of gossip to make social evaluations in everyday life.()，英语论文，英语毕业论文 |
