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This research was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIH NICHD) Grant RO1-HD054805 and Fogarty International Center Grant RO3-TW008141. Patrick S. Malone is supported by Grant K01DA024116 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Kenneth A. Dodge is supported by Senior Scientist Award 2K05 DA015226 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. This research was also supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH/NICHD. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or the NICHD.
Rare is the scientist who can claim to have changed the way that an entire discipline regards even one phenomenon. Nicki R. Crick stands out as a researcher whose contributions changed developmental science in more than one major way. It would be difficult to overstate the lasting legacy that Crick has had on the understanding of children's social information processing (SIP) and relational aggression, in particular. As a tribute to her legacy, the present study builds on her foundational work in SIP (e.g., Crick & Dodge, 1994) and extends it to an international domain that became increasingly important in Crick's later research (e.g., Kawabata, Crick, & Hamaguchi, 2010), testing for gender differences in aggressive responses, which were a focus of much of her research (e.g., Cullerton-Sen et al., 2008).
SIP and Aggressive Behavior
SIP encompasses a set of cognitive steps through which individuals proceed to take in and respond to social stimuli. SIP biases influence how individuals interpret a given set of social cues, generate possible responses, and evaluate those possibilities (Crick & Dodge, 1994). SIP has emerged as a key factor in understanding social, emotional, and behavioral adjustment, largely because these biases serve as proximal links between individuals' experiences and their in-the-moment responses. Although a wide array of relatively distal factors can put individuals at risk of behaving aggressively, exposure to violent media (Anderson & Bushman, 2002) and community violence (Guerra, Huesmann, & Spindler, 2003), for example, SIP biases are likely responsible for whether an individual behaves aggressively in a particular social situation because such biases mediate links between more distal risk factors and aggressive behavior (Dodge, Bates, & Pettit,...