L. Rowell Huesmann

TL;DR: A principle of “discrepancy-proportional peer-influence” for small group intervention is derived, and the implications of this for aggregating aggressive children in small group programs are discussed.

Abstract: Aggression, as a variable of psychological study, has the hallmarks of a deeply ingrained personality trait. It is related to genetic and physiological factors; it emerges early in life but is influenced and shaped by a chilďs life experiences; it is consistently associated with gender and is stable or predictable over time and across situations. However, it does not follow that aggression must be viewed as a drive. On the contrary, in this article we argue that aggression is best represented internally as a collection of specific 'scripts' for social behaviour, emphasizing aggressive responding, and the associative structure relating these scripts to each other, to external cues, and to outcome expectancies. The construction and maintenance of these scripts obey well-understood principles of human information processing. Once established, these networks of scripts may be extremely resistant to change. The result is a set of cognitive structures that promote consistent forms of instrumental and hostile aggression over time and across situations.

TL;DR: An extensive meta-analysis of the effects of violent video games confirms what these theories predict and what prior research about other violent mass media has found: thatviolent video games stimulate aggression in the players in the short run and increase the risk for aggressive behaviors by the players later in life.

TL;DR: Research that my colleagues and I have been doing indicates, in fact, that aggressive behavior is consistent over time and across situations despite the fact that a number of factors contribute to the behavior in varying degrees.

TL;DR: Results using quasi-simplex structural equation models suggest that self-beliefs become more strongly related to behavior as children grow older independent of the reliability of the measures used.