A process model linking physiological arousal and fear recognition to aggression via guilt in middle childhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aggression coincides with emotional underarousal in childhood, but we still lack an understanding of how underarousal contributes to aggression. With an ethnically diverse sample of 8-year-olds (N = 150), we tested whether physiological underarousal and lower fear recognition were indirectly associated with heightened aggression through dampened guilt feelings. Caregivers rated children's aggressive behavior. We assessed children's skin conductance (SC) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) while they imagined transgressing norms and measured their fear recognition with a facial morph task. Children reported guilt or lack thereof after hypothetically transgressing. The interaction of decreasing SC and increasing RSA (i.e., physiological underarousal) and poor fear recognition were indirectly associated with higher aggression through their associations with lower guilt. Emotional underarousal may contribute to aggression by disrupting the normative development of guilt. We discuss strategies to improve social-emotional acuity and reduce aggression in children with blunted physiological arousal and fear recognition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".