Role of Observational Learning in Domestic and Family Violence

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Article 3: Children's exposure to violent political conflict stimulates aggression at peers by increasing emotional distress, aggressive script rehearsal, and normative beliefs favoring aggression.

Huesmann, Dubow, Boxer, Landau, Gvirsman and Shikaki investigated the violence exposure to children by establishing loads of tests to show the violent political conflict that simulates aggression at peers. This article hypothesised that children exposed to cultural-political conflict and violence over the development of a year stimulates their increased aggression towards their own in-group peers in following years. In addition, it inspected what social cognitive and emotional procedures arbitrate these effects and how these effects are moderated by gender, age, and cultural group. It accentuated observational learning as the main process of obtaining aggression-prompting social perceptions that are then reinforced by conditioning.

This was an independent study which samples participants conveniently. The participants were Palestinian and Israeli (Jews & Arabs) children in 3 age cohorts (ages 8, 11, and 14) and their parents contributed in this report between 2008 and 2010. The Palestinian participants were questioned 3 times based on the parent’s background. Whereas, the Israeli participants were sampled by random phone calls, random door-to-door cluster samplings based on neighbourhoods, and nonprobability sampling using interviewee recommendations for families who fit the sample criteria.

Overall, the end results of the Palestinian study discovered that parents of no resampled children regarded their child as lower in aggression. Whereas, the Israeli study revealed that the attrition of being resampled 3 times was linked with higher exposure rates to violence. Therefore, the relation amongst exposure and hostility is more believable due to exposure to cultural-political aggression motivating later hostility. In the end, the results were consistent with the theory that exposure to aggression points to variations both in emotional procedures indorsing violence and in the procurement through observational learning of social perceptions promoting violence. However, there were a few limitations included; the data’s exposure to violence being constructed on child self-report or parent report, the difference in CFIs test for measurement invariance, and the Israeli studies level of conflict and violence being relatively low in major population centres of Israel so Machshov Survey Research Institute oversampled major high-conflict areas. Despite these limitations, the study still effectively expresses the hypotheses of parental violence against aggression in a child.

References

Contreras, L., & Cano, M, D, C. (2016). Child-to-parent violence: The role of exposure to violence and its relationship to social-cognitive processing. The European Journal of Psychology Applied to Legal Context, 8(2), 43-50. doi: 10.1016/j.ejpal.2016.03.003

Fowler, D, R., Cantos, A, L., & Miller, S, A. (2016). Exposure to violence, typology, and recidivism in a probation sample of domestic violence perpetrators. Child Abuse & Neglect, 59(1), 66-77. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2016.07.007

Huesmann, L, R., Dubow, E, F., Boxer, P., Landau, S, F., Gvirsman, S, D., & Shikaki, K. (2017). Children's exposure to violent political conflict stimulates aggression at peers by increasing emotional distress, aggressive script rehearsal, and normative beliefs favoring aggression. Development and Psychopathology, 29(1), 39-50. doi: 10.1017/S0954579416001115