Abstract
This longitudinal study examined how shame and guilt contribute to the development of reactive and proactive aggression in adolescents with and without hearing loss. Adolescents between 9 and 16 years old (adolescents with hearing loss (n = 80; Mage = 11.91) and without hearing loss (n = 227; Mage = 11.63)) completed self-reports on three occasions with an interval of 9 months. Mixed model analyses revealed that both reactive aggression and proactive aggression decreased with age, whereas shame and guilt peaked in early adolescence. Adolescents with hearing loss reported higher levels of proactive aggression, lower levels of shame and guilt, and showed protracted development for guilt compared to their hearing peers. In both groups, shame contributed to an increase in reactive aggression, whereas guilt contributed to a decrease in proactive aggression. These longitudinal associations highlight the unique role that shame and guilt play in the development of adolescent aggression.
Highlights
A contributing factor to the development of shame and guilt and aggression could be one’s degree of access to the social world
When examining how levels of self-reported shame and guilt contributed to this linear development, we found that higher levels of shame were related to increasing levels of reactive aggression over time, whereas increasing levels of guilt were related to decreasing levels of proactive aggression
The current longitudinal study showed that adolescents with and without hearing loss engage in less reactive and proactive aggression as they mature from early to middle adolescence
Summary
A contributing factor to the development of shame and guilt and aggression could be one’s degree of access to the social world. Communication is generally less frequent and of a lower quality between children with hearing loss and their hearing family members or care-givers (Ambrose et al, 2015) These adolescents have fewer opportunities to engage in either explicit or incidental learning, due to the limits their hearing loss imposes on overhearing others in noisy environments, on language skill development, and on the overall level of communication (Lederberg et al, 2013; Tomblin et al, 2015). These communication difficulties are assumed to affect the social-emotional adjustment of these children. Proactive aggression is linked to biases toward instrumental over interpersonal goals, and to positive expectations about obtaining instrumental goals by means of aggression (Hubbard et al, 2001)
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