Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-019-00533-6 Relations between Reactive and Proactive Aggression and Daily Emotions in Adolescents Christina C. Moore1 & Julie A. Hubbard1 & Megan K. Bookhout1 & Fanny Mlawer1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract The current study examined whether individual differences in reactive and proactive aggression: 1) relate to level of daily emotion, including happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, 2) predict across-day variability in these emotions, and 3) moderate reactivity of these emotions to positive and negative events. Participants were a racially/ethnically diverse sample of 144 adolescents (80 girls, 64 boys; M age = 13.55 years; SD = 1.34). Adolescents self-reported on reactive and proactive aggression in a home visit prior to the collection of daily data. Using daily dairy procedures, adolescents then reported on their daily emotions and positive/negative events over 12 consecutive days. Higher reactive aggression was associated with greater levels of daily anger, more variability in anger across days, and heightened angry reactivity to negative events. Additionally, higher reactive aggression predicted lower levels of daily happiness but greater happy reactivity to positive events. Finally, higher reactive aggression was linked to increased variability in daily fear. In contrast, proactive aggression was largely unrelated to adolescents’ daily emotions, with the exception that higher proactive aggression predicted less variability in happiness across days. Results indicate that reactive aggression is characterized by significant emotionality at the daily level, and proactive aggression is characterized by lack of emotionality. Keywords Aggression . Emotions . Adolescence Emotion has been central to understanding the motivation for Reactive Aggression and Emotionality aggressive behavior and has helped delineate two functions of aggression - reactive and proactive. Researchers have docu- Reactive aggression is driven by anger and the need to retaliate mented the important role that negative emotion plays against provocation (Berkowitz 1993). The construct stems as a catalyst for reactive aggression, as well as the lack from the frustration-aggression model (Berkowitz 1993), which of emotion that characterizes proactive aggression, in posits that aggressive behavior results from frustration, provo- studies assessing emotion via questionnaires, observa- cation, or threat. Berkowitz and Harmon-Jones (2004)expand- tions, and psychophysiology. However, these associa- ed this theory to propose that reactive aggression may be related tions have not been tested within the context of youths’ to heightened emotionality more broadly. daily lives. As such, the present study sought to fill this Empirically, anger is more strongly linked to reactive than gap by investigating relations between adolescents’ reactive proactive aggression (e.g., Jambon et al. 2018;Xuetal.2009), and proactive aggression and their daily feelings of anger, fear, with studies conducted as early as toddlerhood (Vitaro et al. sadness, and happiness. 2006a) and using observational or physiological measures of anger (e.g., Hubbard et al. 2002). Moreover, the link between anger and reactive aggression has been supported both longi- tudinally (Calvete and Orue 2012) and cross-culturally (e.g., in China; Fung et al. 2015). * Christina C. Moore Hostile attribution biases, or the tendency to perceive antag- [email protected] onism in ambiguously provocative social situations, may help to explain this link. Reactive but not proactive aggression is 1 University of Delaware, 105 The Green, Newark, Delaware 19716, positively related to hostile attribution biases (e.g., Orobio de USA Castro et al. 2005). In a recent study, anger co-occurred with J Abnorm Child Psychol hostile attribution biases in real-time, and this co-occurrence Proactive aggression is notable for a lack of affect. The related to reactive but not proactive aggression (Yaros et al. strongest evidence for this notion is borne out of research 2014). These findings suggest that anger and reactive aggres- investigating the psychophysiology of aggressive behavior. sion may result from maladaptive processing of social In general, low baseline autonomic functioning is a robust risk information. In fact, treatments that target these cogni- factor for aggression both concurrently (Lorber 2004) and tive processes (e.g., Coping Power) are effective at re- prospectively (Baker et al. 2013), and this physiological ducing child and adolescent aggression and anger (see Powell underarousal may be especially characteristic of proactive ag- et al. 2011 for review). gression (Raine et al. 2014). Furthermore, recent work sug- Deficits in emotion regulation may also help to explain gests that youth experience blunted physiological arousal at these associations. In one study, the relation over time be- the moment that proactive aggression occurs (Moore et al. tween children’s anger and reactive aggression was weaker 2018), giving rise to terms such as Bcool-headed^ or Bcold- for children with stronger emotion regulation skills (Calvete blooded^ in descriptions of proactive aggression (Dodge and Orue 2012). Studies examining effortful control as an 1991; Hubbard et al. 2010). index of emotion regulation have also revealed unique links Theoretically, low baseline arousal may index fearlessness. to reactive but not proactive aggression in middle childhood Fearlessness theory posits that aggression results from an in- (Rathert et al. 2011) and adolescence (Dane and Marini 2014). ability to experience appropriate levels of fear, placing youth Hyper-arousal of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) at increased risk for aggression due to lack of proper sociali- may underlie regulatory deficits in reactive aggression zation (e.g., Fung et al. 2005; Raine 2002). Empirically, fear- (Scarpa and Raine 2000). Work on the physiology of reactive lessness has been linked to proactive but not reactive aggres- and proactive aggression indicates that children’s SNS reac- sion (Kimonis et al. 2006). Fearlessness theory complements tivity to peer provocation predicts reactive but not proactive social learning theory; if youth do not fear the negative con- aggression (Hubbard et al. 2002; Moore et al. 2018). More sequences of aggressive behavior, such as punishment or recent work suggests that children with low resting vagal tone, harm, then they are more likely to focus on the positive out- an index of emotion regulation, are more likely to engage in comes of aggression, including achieving desired instrumental reactive but not proactive aggression (e.g., Scarpa et al. 2010; or social goals. Xu et al. 2014). Alternatively, low arousal may index sensation seeking. Emotion dysregulation may be a key facet of reactive ag- Sensation-seeking theory posits that aggression occurs when gression in youth. In a meta-analysis combining 11 studies, individuals experience physiological underarousal and engage reactive but not proactive aggression related to emotion dys- in dangerous behaviors to increase arousal (e.g., Raine 2002). regulation (Card and Little 2006). In line with this thinking, Questionnaire measures of sensation-seeking are linked to reactive aggression is linked to negative emotions beyond proactive but not reactive aggression (Xu et al. 2014). anger, including depressive and anxious symptoms in children Moreover, sensation-seeking assessed in early adoles- and adolescents both concurrently and longitudinally (Card cence mediated the relation between boys’ low resting and Little 2006; Evans and Fite 2018; Fite et al. 2014). heart rate in childhood and aggression in late adolescence Reactive but not proactive aggression is also uniquely linked (Sijtsema et al. 2010), a finding replicated in a concurrent to suicidal ideation and behavior (Fite et al. 2017; Hartley study (Portnoy et al. 2014). et al. 2018). These findings raise interesting questions about The lack of emotionality typical of proactive aggression the specificity of reactive aggression to anger dysregulation, may also be explained through intact regulatory abilities. as opposed to emotional dysregulation more broadly. Two studies suggest a positive relation between emotion regulation and proactive aggression (Ostrov et al. 2013; Rathert et al. 2011); these authors theorized that youth Proactive Aggression and Unemotionality whoareskilledinregulatingemotionmaybemore adept at the purposeful, goal-oriented behaviors that Proactive aggression is an unemotional behavior displayed to characterize proactive aggression. Similarly, proactive aggres- reach a goal, whether instrumental (e.g., stealing lunch mon- sion positively relates to response inhibition (Feilhauer et al. ey) or social (e.g., respect from peers; Dodge 1991). The con- 2012) in youth and anger control in adults (Ramirez and struct is based in social learning theory and conceptualized as Andreu 2006). a learned behavior motivated by the expectation of reward The unemotional nature of proactive aggression may also (Vitaro et al. 2006b). Indeed, proactive aggression is associat- be linked to callous-unemotional (CU) traits (e.g., Thomson ed with a propensity to prioritize instrumental over social and Centifanti 2018;Thorntonetal.2013). CU traits parallel goals (e.g., Salmivalli et al. 2005), as well as with more pos- the affective dimension of psychopathy in adults; the construct itive outcome expectations for aggressive