Implications of aggressive children's positively biased relatedness views for future relationships

The present study examined the tendency of aggressive children to generaliz e the positive bias in their perceptions of relatedness across different in terpersonal relationships. Secondly, it examined the implications of distor ted perceptions of relatedness for quality of aggressive children's future relationships. Subjects included 62 second and third grade children nominat ed and rated by teachers as aggressive. Self- and others' appraisals of rel ationship quality were gathered across four interpersonal domains (i.e., mo ther, teacher, mentor, and peer). Children's positively biased perceptions of social relatedness were concordant across adult relationship domains but not across the peer domain, suggesting that children's relationships with adults and peers represent somewhat distinct socialization contexts. As exp ected, children who inflate levels of social relatedness establish less clo se relationships with novel partners (mentors). The findings emphasize the need for clinicians to focus on mental representations while planning inter ventions with aggressive children.