Attribution Of Intentions Research Articles

Knowing me, knowing you: Interpersonal similarity improves predictive accuracy and reduces attributions of harmful intent

To benefit from social interactions, people need to predict how their social partners will behave. Such predictions arise through integrating prior expectations with evidence from observations, but where the priors come from and whether they influence the integration into beliefs about a social partner is not clear. Furthermore, this process can be affected by factors such as paranoia, in which the tendency to form biased impressions of others is common. Using a modified social value orientation (SVO) task in a large online sample (n = 697), we showed that participants used a Bayesian inference process to learn about partners, with priors that were based on their own preferences. Paranoia was associated with preferences for earning more than a partner and less flexible beliefs regarding a partner's social preferences. Alignment between the preferences of participants and their partners was associated with better predictions and with reduced attributions of harmful intent to partners. Together, our data and model expand upon theories of interpersonal relationships by demonstrating how dyadic similarity mechanistically influences social interaction by generating more accurate predictions and less threatening impressions.

Children's Navigation of Contextual Cues in Peer Transgressions: The Role of Aggression Form, Transgressor Gender, and Transgressor Intention.

When faced with transgressions in their peer groups, children must navigate a series of situational cues (e.g., type of transgression, transgressor gender, transgressor intentionality) to evaluate the moral status of transgressions and to inform their subsequent behavior toward the transgressors. There is little research on which cues children prioritize when presented together, how reliance on these cues may be affected by certain biases (e.g., gender norms), or how the prioritization of these cues may change with age. To explore these questions, 138 5- to 7-year-olds (younger children) and 8- to 10-year-olds (older children) evaluated a series of boy and girl characters who partook in physical or relational aggression with ambiguous or purposeful intent. Children were asked to provide sociomoral evaluations (i.e., acceptability, punishment, and intention attribution judgments) and social preferences. Transgressor gender only impacted children’s social preferences. Conversely, aggression form and transgressor intent shifted children’s sociomoral judgments: they were harsher toward physical transgressors with purposeful intent over those with ambiguous intent but made similar evaluations for relational transgressors regardless of intentionality. The present results suggest that gender is perhaps not uniformly relevant to children across all contexts, as other cues were prioritized for children’s sociomoral judgments. Since children likely have less familiarity with relational aggression compared to physical aggression, it follows that intent would only shift judgments about physical transgressors. This research provides insight about how children simultaneously navigate multiple cues in aggression contexts, which is likely reflective of their real-world experiences.

Social Problem Solving in Survivors of Pediatric Brain Tumor

Psychosocial late effects among survivors of pediatric brain tumors are common. For school-aged survivors, social skills deficits and isolation present a particular challenge. Social problem-solving is a social skill that is an important determinant of social outcomes and may yield a potential target for intervention. School-aged youth (N = 65) 8-12 years of age (10.59 ± 1.36 years; 55.4% female, 86.2% white) who were 5.23 (SD = 2.44, range 2-10.9) years post-treatment for a brain tumor completed the Attributions and Coping Questionnaire, a measure of social problem-solving that uses vignettes to assess attribution of intent, subsequent emotional response, and imagined behavioral response to an interpersonal problem. Youth also completed self-reports of social functioning (PROMIS Peer Relationships, Self-Perception Profile). A caregiver completed additional measures of child social functioning (NIH Toolbox-Emotion Measures). Survivors attributed unpleasant situations to accidental causes (neutral attribution) and responded in ways that prioritized the friendship (appeasement) or relied on adult intervention. Self-reported social functioning was higher among those who were less likely to avoid challenging social problem-solving situations. Findings identified characteristic social problem-solving approaches among survivors, including a tendency to attribute ambiguous situations to accidental causes and to request adult assistance and/or maintain social relationships. This may indicate a possible avenue for intervention, with a focus on increasing survivors' understanding of the causes of potentially negative peer interactions and reducing their reliance on adults.

Neuronal responses in social-emotional information processing in impulsive aggressive individuals.

How we perceive and interpret signals from others' behavior, known as social-emotional information processing (SEIP), is key when responding to social threat. Impulsively aggressive individuals, behaviorally, demonstrate impaired SEIP for encoding relevant social stimuli, attribution of intent of the other person in the interaction, and responding negatively to potentially threatening social situations. In this study, we sought to explore how neural processing differs between healthy controls (HC) and individuals with impulsive aggressive behavior (individuals with Intermittent Explosive Disorder, I-IED), during a validated SEIP paradigm. Forty-five adults (19 I-IED, 26 HC) participants underwent a validated SEIP tasks during an fMRI scan. The task utilized video clips depicting a socially ambiguous, but possibly aggressive (AGG), act by one person to another and control video clips in which where possibly aggressive act does not occur (CON). Behavioral anomalies in SEIP are also manifest in altered neural activation in distributed networks/brain regions in each phase of SEIP examined. Overall, neural responses during the SEIP paradigm were characterized as reduced discrimination of the AGG vs. CON videos for I-IEDs compared to HCs. These data suggest the presence of compromised neural circuits underlying impaired social cognition in individuals with IED and highlights potential neural targets of intervention for impaired social cognition in I-IED and other behavioral disorders as well.

Attribution of intentions in autism spectrum disorder: A study of event-related potentials.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by social cognition deficits, including difficulties inferring the intentions of others. Although deficits in attribution of intentions (AI) have been consistently replicated in ASD, their exact nature remains unexplored. Here we registered the electrophysiological correlates of a nonverbal social cognition task to investigate AI in autistic adults. Twenty-one male autistic adults and 30 male neurotypical volunteers performed a comic strips task depicting either intentional action (AI) or physical causality with or without human characters, while their electroencephalographic signal was recorded. Compared to neurotypical volunteers, autistic participants were significantly less accurate in correctly identifying congruence in the AI condition, but not in the physical causality conditions. In the AI condition a bilateral posterior positive event-related potential (ERP) occurred 200-400 ms post-stimulus (the ERP intention effect) in both groups. This waveform comprised a P200 and a P300 component, with the P200 component being larger for the AI condition in neurotypical volunteers but not in autistic individuals, who also showed a longer latency for this waveform. Group differences in amplitude of the ERP intention effect only became evident when we compared autistic participants to a subgroup of similarly performing neurotypical participants, suggesting that the atypical ERP waveform in ASD is an effect of group, rather than a marker of low-task performance. Together, these results suggest that the lower accuracy of the ASD group in the AI task may result from impaired early attentional processing and contextual integration of socially relevant cues. LAY SUMMARY: To understand why autistic people have difficulties in inferring others' intentions, we asked participants to judge the congruence of the endings of comic strips depicting either intentional actions (e.g., fetching a chair to reach for something) or situations solely following physical rules (e.g., an apple falling on someone's head), while their electrical brain activity was recorded. Autistic individuals had more difficulties in inferring intentions than neurotypical controls, which may reflect impaired attention and contextual integration of social cues.

Exploring Changes in Social Inferencing and Negative Attributions Following an Intervention for Individuals with Brain Injury

<h3>Research Objectives</h3> To investigate changes in social inferencing abilities and negative attribution tendencies in participants with traumatic brain injury (TBI) before and after receiving an intervention designed to teach more benign interpretations of others' behaviors. Secondarily, to examine the correlation between changes in social inferencing and negative attributions. <h3>Design</h3> Secondary analyses of measures employed in a randomized waitlist-controlled trial. <h3>Setting</h3> One TBI rehabilitation center <h3>Participants</h3> 15- 21 participants with complicated mild to severe TBI who were ≥1 year post-injury. All participants eventually received the ICAN intervention. <h3>Interventions</h3> Intervention to Change Attributions that are Negative (ICAN), is a 6-week group therapy that utilizes role-playing and perspective-positioning as techniques to alter participants' interpretations and judgments of others' actions. <h3>Main Outcome Measures</h3> The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) is a 3-part video assessment: Emotional Evaluation Test (EET); Social Inference-Minimal (SI-M) and Social Inference-Enriched (SI-E). EET involves identifying actors' emotions from multiple cues. SI-M requires inferences from sincere and sarcastic exchanges, and SI-E requires inferences from sarcasm and lies with additional context. The Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ) uses hypothetical scenarios to evaluate participants' negative attributions of intent, hostility, and blame regarding characters' actions, as well as how much anger and aggression participants felt in response to the scenarios. <h3>Results</h3> Due to low enrollment, subject data was pooled for before/after analyses. On average, scores on the TASIT subtests (n=21) did not significantly change post-ICAN; however, a minimum clinically important difference of .5 SD was identified in 38%, 19%, and 29% for EET, SI-M, and SI-E, respectively. On the AIHQ (n=15), attributions of intent, anger response, and aggression response significantly reduced post-intervention (p <.05). Hostility and blame attributions trended towards significant improvements (p=.084 and .094 respectively). Changes in SI-M scores correlated with changes in blame (r=-.620, p<.05) and aggression (r=-.836, p<.01). <h3>Conclusions</h3> The ICAN intervention may reduce negative attributions post TBI, which may be related to changes in social inferencing. These promising results warrant more research. <h3>Author(s) Disclosures</h3> No conflicts of interest.

Covariations among attachment, attributions, self-esteem, and psychological aggression in early marriage.

The associations between insecure attachment (anxious and avoidant dimensions), maladaptive relational attributions, self-esteem, and psychological aggression were examined in a sample of couples (N = 96 couples) across the early years of marriage. Studying these constructs within a single sample is a novel contribution to the literature. Attachment was assessed at marriage, whereas maladaptive attributions, self-esteem, and psychological aggression were evaluated annually over the first 7 years of marriage. For the present study, specific maladaptive relational attributions about the spouse's hypothetical aggressive behavior were investigated. Data from both spouses were examined simultaneously using growth curve analytic and actor-partner interdependence modeling techniques. Results indicated that self locus attributions (i.e., attributing the cause of the spouse's hypothetical aggressive behavior to the self), intentionality attributions (i.e., attributing the spouse's motivation for the hypothetical behavior as intentional), and self-esteem were predicted by insecure attachment and covaried longitudinally with psychological aggression. Husbands' self-esteem and wives' intentionality attributions were particularly consistent in these associations. The results replicate and extend previous research by examining these constructs using a longitudinal dyadic approach. The findings of this study provide specific targets for intervention efforts to reduce psychological aggression and support conceptualizing psychological aggression within a dyadic and dynamic framework. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Belief in Free Will Is Related to Internal Attribution in Self-Perception

Past research indicates that individuals’ belief in free will is related to attributing others’ behavior to internal causes. An open question is whether belief in free will is related to the attribution of one’s own action. To answer this question, we tested two opposing predictions against each other by assessing the relation of belief in free will with the self-serving bias—individuals’ tendency to attribute personal success more strongly to internal forces and failure to external forces. The resource hypothesis predicts that a higher endorsement in free will belief relates to a lower self-serving bias. The intention attribution hypothesis predicts that belief in free will relates to higher internal attributions, as compared with external attributions, irrespective of success and failure. Meta-analytic evidence across five high-powered studies (total N = 1,137) supports the intention attribution hypothesis, but not the resource hypothesis (materials and data are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/2a89c/).

Capturing mechanisms of change: Weekly covariation in anger regulation, hostile intent attribution, and children's aggression.

Interventions for children's aggression typically target assumed underlying mechanisms, such as anger regulation and hostile intent attribution. The expectation here is that targeting these mechanisms will result in within‐person changes in aggression. However, evidence for these mechanisms is mostly based on between‐person analyses. We, therefore, examined whether within‐person changes in adaptive anger regulation and hostile intent attribution covaried with within‐person changes in children's aggression. Children (N = 223; age 7–12; 46% boys) filled out four weekly report measures to assess adaptive anger regulation, hostile intent attribution, and aggression. The psychometric properties of these novel measures were adequate. Results of multi‐level analyses revealed within‐person effects: weekly changes in adaptive anger regulation and hostile intent attribution covaried with changes in children's aggression. This corresponded with between‐person findings on the same data: children with lower levels of adaptive anger regulation and higher levels of hostile intent attribution reported more aggression than other children. These findings support the idea that targeting anger regulation and hostile intent attribution in interventions may lead to changes in individual children's aggression.

Why and when others reciprocate my knowledge sharing in work teams: Attribution of intention and social values

Knowledge sharing is a fundamental method for transferring expertise among individuals and capitalizing on knowledge resources. In this study we used attribution theory to explore why and when people reciprocate in text context of knowledge sharing. We conducted a field survey of 94 leaders and 334 members of their teams and demonstrated that team members reciprocated knowledge sharing because they attributed the knowledge sharers' intentions to internal reasons. Moreover, this tendency was strengthened when knowledge sharers held prosocial, collectivistic values compared to when they hold proself, individualistic values. We have contributed to the knowledge and organizational literature by examining the two-way knowledge exchange process and establishing attribution theory as a core underlying mechanism in the process.

Working memory guidance of visual attention to threat in offenders.

Aggression and trait anger have been linked to attentional biases toward angry faces and attribution of hostile intent in ambiguous social situations. Memory and emotion play a crucial role in social-cognitive models of aggression but their mechanisms of influence are not fully understood. Combining a memory task and a visual search task, this study investigated the guidance of attention allocation toward naturalistic face targets during visual search by visual working memory (WM) templates in 113 participants who self-reported having served a custodial sentence. Searches were faster when angry faces were held in working memory regardless of the emotional valence of the visual search target. Higher aggression and trait anger predicted increased working memory modulated attentional bias. These results are consistent with the Social-Information Processing model, demonstrating that internal representations bias attention allocation to threat and that the bias is linked to aggression and trait anger.

Looking to relate: observations of a proactive and resilient infant who, with the support of father’s nurturing, helped draw mother out of her unresponsive and disconnected state of mind

ABSTRACT The author describes eleven months of observations of baby Meena, whose mother was unresponsive to and disconnected from her during the first five months of observations after the birth. The observations illustrate the key role and contribution of the baby’s individual temperament in the development of the relationship with the Mother. It is further argued that, in this family, Meena’s father nurtured her and her own proactivity and, critically, her capacity, resilience and motivation assisted in carrying over positive aspects of her relationship with her Father to the relationship with her Mother. This seemed helpful in bringing Mother out of her more cut-off state of mind. Meena and her Mother were able to go on to achieve a reciprocally responsive relationship. These factors also helped Meena not to withdraw or to give up on trying to connect with her mother, as do the infants of unresponsive mothers in the still-face studies [Weinberg, M. K., & Tronick, E. Z. (1996). Infant affective reactions to the resumption of maternal interaction after the still-face. Child Development, 67(3), 905–914. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131869]. The presence of the observer and the extended family’s attribution of intelligence and communicative intent to Meena, even in utero, are seen as part of her ‘facilitating environment’ [Winnicott, D. W. (2018). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. Routledge. first published in 1965 by the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.].

Cognitive and affective theory of mind double dissociation after parietal and temporal lobe tumours

Abstract Extensive neuroimaging literature suggests that understanding others’ thoughts and emotions engages a wide network encompassing parietal, temporal and medial frontal brain areas. However, the causal role played by these regions in social inferential abilities is still unclear. Moreover very little is known about theory of mind deficits in brain tumours and whether potential anatomical substrates are comparable to those identified in functional MRI literature. This study evaluated the performance of 105 tumour patients, before and immediately after brain surgery, on a cartoon-based non-verbal task evaluating cognitive (intention attribution) and affective (emotion attribution) theory of mind, as well as a non-social control condition (causal inference). Across multiple analyses, we found converging evidence of a double dissociation between patients with right superior parietal damage, selectively impaired in intention attribution, and those with right anteromedial temporal lesion, exhibiting deficits only in emotion attribution. Instead, patients with damage to the frontal cortex were impaired in all kinds of inferential processes, including those from the non-social control conditions. Overall, our data provide novel reliable causal evidence of segregation between different aspects of the theory of mind network from both the cognitive and also the anatomical point of view.

Peer relations and different functions of cyber-aggression: A longitudinal study in Chinese adolescents.

Although previous studies have focused on the associations between peer group relations and cyber-aggression, limited attention has been paid to the heterogeneity in the functions of cyber-aggression. This study explored the unique associations of peer relations with proactive and reactive cyber-aggression and the possible mechanisms underlying them in a sample of adolescents using a longitudinal study design. A total of 829 middle school students completed the Cyber-rage and Cyber-reward Aggression Subscales of the Cyber-Aggression Typology Questionnaire, the Peer Relations Scale, the Social Information Processing-Attributional Bias Questionnaire, and the Self-efficacy for Aggression Scale twice at a 6-month interval. Multiple mediation analyses and bootstrapping were conducted using the Mplus 8 software. The results indicated that satisfying peer relations were negatively correlated with reactive cyber-aggression and positively associated with proactive cyber-aggression. Moreover, hostile intent attribution and self-efficacy for aggression mediated the associations between peer relations and both functions of cyber-aggression, however, in different ways. Unsatisfying peer relations were associated with higher levels of hostile intent attribution and lower levels of self-efficacy for aggression and predicted increases in reactive cyber-aggression. In contrast, satisfying peer relations were associated with lower levels of hostile intent attribution and higher levels of self-efficacy for aggression and predicted increases in proactive cyber-aggression. The findings indicated that different functions of cyber-aggression might be related to different mediation mechanisms, which sheds light on the prevention of cyber-aggression in the future.

Intention Attribution in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An EEG Study

The ability to infer intentions from observed behavior and predict actions based on this inference, known as intention attribution (IA), has been hypothesized to be impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The underlying neural processes, however, have not been conclusively determined. The aim of this study was to examine the neural signature of IA in children and adolescents with ASD, and to elucidate potential links to contextual updating processes using electroencephalography. Results did not indicate that IA or early contextual updating was impaired in ASD. However, there was evidence of aberrant processing of expectation violations in ASD, particularly if the expectation was based on IA. Results are discussed within the context of impaired predictive coding in ASD.

The neural association between awareness of the self and of others: A brain imaging study of anosognosia and social cognition in early Alzheimer’s disease

AbstractBackgroundA major proportion of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) shows disorders of awareness in the early stages of disease that manifest as lack of/limited self‐awareness of their own cognitive deficits (anosognosia). Additionally, social awareness, i.e. aspects of social cognition, might also be impaired and reflect negatively on the patient’s capacity for self‐appraisal. The present study intends to explain the behavioural, brain structural and functional relationship between the presence of anosognosia and alterations in emotion and intention attribution in early‐AD, to understand the interaction between self/others awareness in the early stages of the disease.MethodsTwenty‐nine early‐AD individuals underwent neuropsychological assessment to detect the presence of anosognosia and alterations in proxies of affective ToM. Additionally, T1‐weighted structural and resting‐state functional MRI scans were acquired and pre‐processed using the Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) 12 software. An independent component analysis (ICA) was performed at a group level to isolate and reconstruct four intrinsic connectivity large‐scale brain networks, namely fronto‐parietal, salience, and anterior and posterior default mode networks (DMN). Non‐parametric partial correlations were performed between the neuropsychological proxies of self‐other awareness. Functional and voxel‐based morphometry multiple regression outcome maps of anosognosia and ToM were visually overlapped and brain‐masks were devised to show statistical maps of the intersecting regions.ResultsA significant negative correlation was found between cognitive outcomes of anosognosia with emotion recognition (ρ= ‐.549, p=.004) and Theory of Mind (ρ=‐.671, p=.001). There were significant brain structure intersections between anosognosia and Theory of Mind in relation to grey matter reduction in the right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (BA24/32) and left caudate. Anosognosia/ToM functional maps showed only visual intersections of connectivity between the anterior DMN and the inferior occipital gyrus and precentral gyrus (FWE&lt;0.05).ConclusionThere seems to be an association between self and others awareness in early‐AD patients and its impairment appears to be underpinned by loss of neural tissue in the right ACC and subcortical regions. Similarly, the DMN seems to interact with specific occipito‐frontal regions, where visual information and mirror system dynamics might provide valuable resources to achieve self to other awareness in the presence of a neurodegenerative disease such AD.

Large-Scale Functional Networks, Cognition and Brain Structures Supporting Social Cognition and Theory of Mind Performance in Prodromal to Mild Alzheimer's Disease.

Impairment of social cognition (SC) skills such as recognition and attribution of intentions and affective states of others (Theory of Mind, ToM) has been evidenced in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). This study investigated the neuropsychological, neuroanatomical and brain-functional underpinnings of SC processing to obtain an understanding of the social neurophenotype in early probable AD. Forty-six patients with mild cognitive impairment and mild probable AD underwent SC assessment including emotion recognition (Ekman-60-faces task) and cognitive and affective ToM (Reading-the-Mind-in-the-Eyes test and Story-based Empathy task). Linear models tested the association between SC scores and neuropsychological measures, grey matter maps and large-scale functional networks activity. The executive domain had the most predominant association with SC scores in the cognitive profile. Grey matter volume of the anterior cingulate, orbitofrontal, temporoparietal junction (TPJ), superior temporal, and cerebellar cortices were associated with ToM. Social cognition scores were associated with lower connectivity of the default-mode network with the prefrontal cortex. The right fronto-parietal network displayed higher inter-network connectivity in the right TPJ and insula while the salience network showed lower inter-network connectivity with the left TPJ and insula. Connectivity coupling alterations of executive-attentional networks may support default mode social-cognitive-associated decline through the recruitment of frontal executive mechanisms.

Hostile Attribution Biases in Vulnerable Narcissists Depends on the Socio-Relational Context

Abstract. Narcissism, especially the vulnerable kind, is associated with anger and hostility. In a sample of outpatients, group psychotherapy ( N = 74) and community members ( N = 153), we replicated and extended previous work linking vulnerable, but not grandiose, narcissism to hostile attributions across different socio-relational contexts. We also examined if the level of ambiguity of social situations, assessed from the other-referent position, influences the relationship between vulnerable narcissism and attributing hostile intentionality, and whether narcissistic individuals distinguish hostile interpretations, depending on the level of ambiguity of the scene. In ambiguous vignettes, assessed from the self-referent position, higher levels of vulnerable narcissism were associated with a greater tendency to infer more attributions of hostile intentions with people with whom there was no close relationship (except for authority in the patient group). In the case of visual scenes, the positive relationship between vulnerable narcissism and attributed hostile intentionality appeared in accidental scenes, but not in hostile and ambiguous ones. In addition, the higher the vulnerable narcissism the lower the ability to differentiate between contextual nuances (e.g., the level of ambiguity). We replicated previous research indicating a relationship between vulnerable narcissism and hostile attribution bias, but shed new light on the phenomenon of this bias in that it appears to depend on the socio-relational context and the level of ambiguity of the situation.

Model-based representational similarity analysis of blood-oxygen-level-dependent fMRI captures threat learning in social interactions.

Past research has shown that attributions of intentions to other's actions determine how we experience these actions and their consequences. Yet, it is unknown how such attributions affect our learning and memory. Addressing this question, we combined neuroimaging with an interactive threat learning paradigm in which two interaction partners (confederates) made choices that had either threatening (shock) or safe (no shock) consequences for the participants. Importantly, participants were led to believe that one partner intentionally caused the delivery of shock, whereas the other did not (i.e. unintentional partner). Following intentional versus unintentional shocks, participants reported an inflated number of shocks and a greater increase in anger and vengeance. We applied a model-based representational similarity analysis to blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD)-MRI patterns during learning. Surprisingly, we did not find any effects of intentionality. The threat value of actions, however, was represented as a trial-by-trial increase in representational similarity in the insula and the inferior frontal gyrus. Our findings illustrate how neural pattern formation can be used to study a complex interaction.

Associations of preschoolers’ language skills with aggressive behaviour, positive peer relations, and the hostile intent attribution from preschool to early adolescence

ABSTRACT Deficits in language skills are a risk factor for later aggressive behaviour. However, previous research has mainly addressed clinical or high-risk samples and relations between language and aggressive behaviour in preschoolers and children in primary school. Based on a German longitudinal project with N = 547 typically developing children, the present study investigated whether the effects of young children’s language skills on their aggressive behaviour and their hostile intent attribution (HIA) can still be observed in adolescence. Path models showed that language at age 3 predicted aggressive behaviour (measured with self-ratings of various facets of aggression) and HIA (assessed with the Intent Attributions and Feelings of Distress Measure adopted from) over a 10-year period, while controlling for important child and family characteristics and initial levels of aggressive behaviour at age 3. Moreover, the predictive impact of early language on aggressive behaviour was mediated by HIA but not by parental ratings of their children’s positive peer relations with classmates at age 7. Implications and directions for future research are proposed.