Silent Girls in Fairy Tales: Against the Grain of Violence

The poems selected here explore the hidden side of some of the most popular fairy tales. Girls become women guided by myths that define their passive role, their submission to violent behavior by men in their lives, be they fathers, husbands, or lovers. These poems look at a girl's fantasies from a different perspective: that a woman's life becomes the work of demystifying the myths that dominated her childhood to create a newly informed and subversive version of the myth.

Prospective test of the developmental propensity model of antisocial behavior: from childhood and adolescence into early adulthood

BACKGROUND

The developmental propensity model of antisocial behavior posits that several dispositional characteristics of children transact with the environment to influence the likelihood of learning antisocial behavior across development. Specifically, greater dispositional negative emotionality, greater daring, and lower prosociality-operationally, the inverse of callousness- and lower cognitive abilities are each predicted to increase risk for developing antisocial behavior.

METHODS

Prospective tests of key predictions derived from the model were conducted in a high-risk sample of 499 twins who were assessed on dispositions at 10-17 years of age and assessed for antisocial personality disorder (APD) symptoms at 22-31 years of age. Predictions were tested separately for parent and youth informants on the dispositions using multiple regressions that adjusted for oversampling, nonresponse, and clustering within twin pairs, controlling demographic factors and time since the first assessment.

RESULTS

Consistent with predictions, greater numbers of APD symptoms in adulthood were independently predicted over a 10-15 year span by higher youth ratings on negative emotionality and daring and lower youth ratings on prosociality, and by parent ratings of greater negative emotionality and lower prosociality. A measure of working memory did not predict APD symptoms.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings support future research on the role of these dispositions in the development of antisocial behavior.

Early-onset Conduct Problems: Predictions from daring temperament and risk taking behavior

OBJECTIVE

Given its considerable public health significance, identifying predictors of early expressions of conduct problems is a priority. We examined the predictive validity of daring, a key dimension of temperament, and the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART), a laboratory-based measure of risk taking behavior, with respect to two-year change in parent, teacher-, and youth self-reported oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), and antisocial behavior.

METHOD

At baseline, 150 ethnically diverse 6- to 10-year old (M=7.8, SD=1.1; 69.3% male) youth with (n=82) and without (n=68) DSM-IV ADHD completed the BART whereas parents rated youth temperament (i.e., daring); parents and teachers also independently rated youth ODD and CD symptoms. Approximately 2 years later, multi-informant ratings of youth ODD, CD, and antisocial behavior were gathered from rating scales and interviews.

RESULTS

Whereas risk taking on the BART was unrelated to conduct problems, individual differences in daring prospectively predicted multi-informant rated conduct problems, independent of baseline risk taking, conduct problems, and ADHD diagnostic status.

CONCLUSION

Early differences in the propensity to show positive socio-emotional responses to risky or novel experiences uniquely predicted escalating conduct problems in childhood, even with control of other potent clinical correlates. We consider the role of temperament in the origins and development of significant conduct problems from childhood to adolescence, including possible explanatory mechanisms underlying these predictions.

Child and Adolescent Disposition Model: An Examination of the Temperament Factor Structure Within Early Childhood

Lahey and Waldman proposed a temperament theory of conduct disorder (CD). Critical is the hypothesized temperament structure in which three relatively uncorrelated temperament dimensions (i.e., negative emotionality, daring, prosociality) central to CD are theorized to emerge in early childhood. The validity of this hypothesized factor structure in early childhood is unknown. The current study seeks to fill this gap by examining Lahey and Waldman's hypothesized temperament structure utilizing a Canadian sample ( n = 283) of preschoolers. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were performed to compare the hypothesized relatively uncorrelated temperament structure with two alternative models (i.e., correlated three-factor and single-factor structure). The CFA indicated that the temperament dimensions are present in early childhood and are relatively uncorrelated consistent with previous work at later developmental stages. Of importance, the findings highlighted key gender differences observable at 3 and 4 years of age. The theoretical implications are discussed.