Cognitive mediation and response generation in victimized children

It was hypothesized that victimized children are less able than other children to think of competent responses when in danger of being attacked by a peer. Two other factors hypothesized to influence the ability to generate competent responses were the subject's level of aggressiveness and the subject's sex. Subjects were 48 third through sixth graders. Children were read four scenarios describing provocative behavior toward them by a peer and asked to state all the things a child might do if the situation really happened. Results indicated that victim girls generated more incompetent responses than control girls (when controlled for redundancy), but victim status did not influence boy's data. Deficits were also found for high aggressive children and boys in their greater production (uncorrected for redundancies) of incompetent responses that were aggressive. It was concluded that victimized girls, but not boys may have cognitive deficits in response generation processes.