Effortful Control and Community Violence Exposure as Predictors of Developmental Trajectories of Self-serving Cognitive
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EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Effortful Control and Community Violence Exposure as Predictors of Developmental Trajectories of Self-serving Cognitive Distortions in Adolescence: A Growth Mixture Modeling Approach Concetta Esposito
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Gaetana Affuso2 Mirella Dragone1 Dario Bacchini1 ●
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Received: 15 July 2020 / Accepted: 12 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Self-serving cognitive distortions are biased or rationalizing beliefs and thoughts that originate from the individual persistence into immature moral judgment stages during adolescence and adulthood, increasing the individual’s engagement in antisocial or immoral conducts. To date, the literature examining trajectories of cognitive distortions over time and their precursors is limited. This study sought to fill this gap, by examining effortful control and community violence exposure as individual and environmental precursors to developmental trajectories of cognitive distortions in adolescence. The sample consisted of 803 Italian high school students (349 males; Mage = 14.19, SD = 0.57). Three trajectories of cognitive distortions were identified: (1) moderately high and stable cognitive distortions (N = 311), (2) moderate and decreasing cognitive distortions (N = 363), and (3) low and decreasing cognitive distortions (N = 129). Both low effortful control and high exposure to community violence were significant predictors for moderately high and stable trajectory of cognitive distortions. These results point to the importance of considering moral development as a process involving multiple levels of individual ecology, highlighting the need to further explore how dispositional and environmental factors might undermine developmental processes of morality. Keywords Adolescence Community violence exposure Developmental trajectories Effortful control Self-serving cognitive distortions ●
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Introduction Social-cognitive theories posit that people act upon their interpretation of social events (Crick and Dodge 1994). According to Bandura’s (1986) social-cognitive formulations, the cognitive evaluation of events that take place in the child’s environment, how the child interprets these events, and how competent the child feels in responding in various ways provide the basis for child’s purposeful action. Growing up in a violent environment may lead children to see the world as a hostile and dangerous place (Guerra et al.
* Concetta Esposito [email protected] 1
Department of Humanistic Studies, University of Naples “Federico II”, Napoli, Italy
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Department of Psychology, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Caserta, Italy
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2003; Schwartz et al. 2000), and that violence itself is a useful means for conflict resolution (Dodge et al. 2006). The internalization of these schemas of the world, along with the development of normative beliefs about violence, amplify the risk for behaving aggressively. In terms of such cognitive process models, self-serving cognitive distortions well represent schemas that influence th
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