Psychobiology of Aggression and Antisocial Behaviour across the Lifespan Section: Research Annual Report 2003

Head: Dr. Leslie Atkinson

Aggression and antisocial behaviour pose tremendous risks to individuals, families and society. The Psychobiology of Aggression and Antisocial Behaviour across the Lifespan Section incorporates researchers from the Law and Mental Health and Child, Youth and Family Programs, facilitating lifespan research. In the past year, we have conducted research into risk, intervention/management and knowledge transfer.

Infant Stress

Dr. Leslie Atkinson and others are investigating genetic and environmental influences on infants' response to stress. This group is examining normal infants at 12 to 18 months of age to determine their response to mild stressful events, such as maternal separation.

Chemical analysis of the saliva of the children will determine the levels of important stress hormones in these children. Investigators in the Neuroscience Research Department will then be able to investigate a variety of factors in the hormones and blood samples of these children that may contribute to our understanding of how humans develop both adaptive and maladaptive responses to stress. In addition, these stress hormones are involved in a variety of other behaviours throughout the lifespan, including aggression.

Risk Factors for Aggressive and Antisocial Behaviour

Drs. Joe Beitchman and James Kennedy and colleagues have been focusing on the role of select serotonin genes and family and personality factors in aggression.

This year, they found that one form of serotonin transporter gene was less common in aggressive children than in non-aggressive children. A second variant of this gene was not significantly linked with aggression, but was linked to a diagnosis of ADHD. These findings could have implications, in future, for assessing risk of aggression and implementing early intervention strategies.

Dr. Martin Lalumiere and colleagues showed that, among sex offenders, number of older brothers is positively related to a greater interest in coercive and violent sexuality. Number of older sisters, or younger brothers or sisters, is unrelated to sexual interest. Dr. Lalumiere and colleagues speculate that the link involves maternal immunoreactivity to something involved in sexual differentiation of the brain.These findings may eventually contribute to early identification of risk and intervention strategies.

Dr. Fiona Miller and colleagues studied the risks of childhood disturbance associated with low socioeconomic status (SES) and harsh, inconsistent parenting practices. They found that, although the absolute risk of children developing disorders associated with low SES and harsh parenting is low, the relative risk is high.
For example, relative to his or her mid-SES peers, a child eight or nine years old from a low-SES family is five times more likely to develop conduct disorder, while a child eight or nine years old who experiences harsh parenting is four times more likely to show symptoms of conduct disorder.

Dr. Christine Wekerle is surveying teenagers who have been maltreated by their caregivers; question topics include health risk behaviours (problem substance use, dating violence, risky sexual practices, mental health problems) and resiliency factors (school achievement, leisure activity). The primary hypothesis of the study is that maltreated youth have a high prevalence of risk behaviours and a greater number of overlapping problems.

The survey will also measure mediators (e.g., cognitive expectancies, motives for risky sexual practices), enhancing the study's potential for identifying targets for intervention.

In another study, of reported child abuse, Dr. Wekerle is studying the association of caregiver substance use and maltreatment. Dr. Wekerle found that parents with substance use problems are more likely than parents without substance use problems to neglect and emotionally abuse their children and less likely to sexually abuse them. No relation was found between substance abuse and physical abuse.

In a third survey, Dr. Wekerle and colleagues identified a small group of adolescent males whose behaviour was broadly antisocial, whose activities included, for example, gambling, weapons possession, stealing, frequent physical violence and bullying. These youths had more difficult backgrounds, a higher rate of depression, more frequent suicidal ideation and reported more problem substance use than other youths.

These findings highlight the unmet mental health needs of antisocial male youth and the challenges to getting help for substance use problems.

Dr. Michael Seto and colleagues compared young people who had been charged with a juvenile sex offence with young people who had been charged with other, non-sexual, juvenile offences. They found a meaningful distinction between juvenile sex offenders who have few conduct problems but engage in sexual misconduct and those who engage in non-sexual forms of criminal behaviour. These findings will help target and focus interventions to better treat the sexual aspects of juvenile delinquency.

Dr. Seto reviewed the literature on pornography's effects on attitudes, aggression in the laboratory and sexual arousal. He concluded that there is an interaction between individual characteristics and the effects of pornography exposure. These findings have relevance to an ongoing debate about the impact of pornography -- again, that the impact of pornography depends on the individual involved with it.

Students within the section have also been active. Ms Karen Milligan, under the supervision of Dr. Leslie Atkinson, explored how attachment security and maternal sensitivity relate to children's aggressive behaviour. Studying typically developing best-friend pairs, Ms Milligan found that children who were less securely attached exhibited higher levels of aggression.

In a second study of children with Down syndrome, Ms Milligan found that the effect of child intellectual level on aggressive behaviour is moderated by maternal sensitivity. This finding is important, because it had previously been assumed that aggression in this population was entirely due to intellectual factors, which are difficult to change. Interventions focused on the mother-child relationship may reduce later incidents of aggression between the child and his or her peers.

Mr. Calvin Langton (now Dr. Langton), under the supervision of Dr. Howard Barbaree, completed a doctoral dissertation contrasting approaches to risk assessment and violence prediction among adult offenders.

The findings confirmed the validity of actuarial devices but also suggested that structured clinical approaches hold promise. Additional findings indicated that information about offenders' completion of and response to institutional treatment improves the accuracy of sexual recidivism predictions. Drs. Langton and Barbaree are now studying which treatment components are most important for this purpose.

Mr. Mark Watson, Mr. Mark Levi, Ms Carey Sturgeon and Ms Sandy Greenberg, under the supervision of Dr. David Nussbaum, successfully applied a neurobiological model to the prediction of violence and also demonstrated the need to carefully match predictive instrumentation to the population being studied (e.g., different predictors may be necessary when studying people who carry out planned acts of aggression as opposed to people who aggress in reaction to some stressor).

Aggressive and Antisocial Behaviour Interventions and Management

Dr. Wekerle studied the effectiveness of a dating violence prevention and dating health promotion program for youth who have experienced childhood maltreatment. The program reduced incidents of physical and emotional abuse in dating and symptoms of emotional distress. Dr. Wekerle and colleagues are extending their studies to incorporate an intervention for substance use problems into the program.

Dr. Joe Ducharme and student Ms Kimberly Harris are evaluating innovative interventions to improve child compliance with teacher requests and on-task behaviour. The interventions, referred to as errorless remediation, are based on the sophisticated use of learning strategies. In this type of intervention, maladaptive responses are treated like errors, and the environment is rearranged to ensure that low levels of these errors occur. Gradually, conditions associated with problem behaviour are introduced at a rate that ensures that these behaviours remain at low levels. This approach has produced gains in compliance, on-task behaviour and peer relationships.

Conducting the largest quantitative review of studies evaluating sex offender treatment outcome published to date, Dr. Seto and colleagues found that treated sex offenders repeated their crimes significantly less often than non-treated sex offenders.

Knowledge Transfer

Ms Joanna Henderson (now Dr. Henderson), under the supervision of Dr. Sherri MacKay, conducted a provincial study of factors affecting the adoption and use of TAPP-C, a community-based children's mental health program for juvenile firesetting. This study revealed that adopter, innovation, dissemination and organizational characteristics are all important in understanding knowledge-transfer from academic settings to community-based settings.

In addition, analyses to examine the relative importance of each group of variables revealed that different variables are particularly important at different stages of program dissemination. For example, innovation characteristics were important in the adoption process, but not at the utilization stage. This study provides preliminary data that will help close the research-practice gap in children's mental health.

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