Antisocial Behavior Health Article

Definition

Antisocial behaviors are disruptive acts characterized by covert and overt hostility and intentional aggression toward others. Antisocial behaviors exist along a severity continuum and include repeated violations of social rules, defiance of authority and of the rights of others, deceitfulness, theft, and reckless disregard for self and others. Antisocial behavior can be identified in children as young as three or four years of age. If left unchecked these coercive behavior patterns will persist and escalate in severity over time, becoming a chronic behavioral disorder.

Description

Antisocial behavior may be overt, involving aggressive actions against siblings, peers, parents, teachers, or other adults, such as verbal abuse, bullying and hitting; or covert, involving aggressive actions against property, such as theft, vandalism, and fire-setting. Covert antisocial behaviors in early childhood may include noncompliance, sneaking, lying, or secretly destroying another's property. Antisocial behaviors also include drug and alcohol abuse and high-risk activities involving self and others.

Demographics

Between 4 and 6 million American children have been identified with antisocial behavior problems. These disruptive behaviors are one of the most common forms of psychopathology, accounting for half of all childhood mental health referrals.

Gender differences in antisocial behavior patterns are evident as early as age three or four. There has been far less research into the nature and development pattern of antisocial behavior in girls. Pre-adolescent boys are far more likely to engage in overtly aggressive antisocial behaviors than girls. Boys exhibit more physical and verbal aggression, whereas antisocial behavior in girls is more indirect and relational, involving harmful social manipulation of others. The gender differences in the way antisocial behavior is expressed may be related to the differing rate of maturity between girls and boys. Physical aggression is expressed at the earliest stages of development, then direct verbal threats, and, last, indirect strategies for manipulating the existing social structure.

Antisocial behaviors may have an early onset, identifiable as soon as age four, or late onset, manifesting in middle or late adolescence. Some research indicates that girls are more likely than boys to exhibit late onset antisocial behavior. Late onset antisocial behaviors are less persistent and more likely to be discarded as a behavioral strategy than those that first appear in early childhood.

As many as half of all elementary school children who demonstrate antisocial behavior patterns continue these behaviors into adolescence, and as many as 75 percent of adolescents who demonstrate antisocial behaviors continue to do so into early adulthood.

Causes and symptoms

Antisocial behavior develops and is shaped in the context of coercive social interactions within the family, community, and educational environment. It is also influenced by the child's temperament and irritability, cognitive ability, the level of involvement with deviant peers, exposure to violence, and deficit of cooperative problem-solving skills. Antisocial behavior is frequently accompanied by other behavioral and developmental problems such as hyperactivity, depression, learning disabilities, and impulsivity.

Multiple risk factors for development and persistence of antisocial behaviors include genetic, neurobiological, and environmental stressors beginning at the prenatal stage and often continuing throughout the childhood years.

Genetic factors are thought to contribute substantially to the development of antisocial behaviors. Genetic factors, including abnormalities in the structure of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, may play a role in an inherited predisposition to antisocial behaviors.

Neurobiological risks include maternal drug use during pregnancy, birth complications, low birth weight, prenatal brain damage, traumatic head injury, and chronic illness.

High-risk factors in the family setting include the following:

• parental history of antisocial behaviors
• parental alcohol and drug abuse
• chaotic and unstable home life
• absence of good parenting skills
• use of coercive and corporal punishment
• parental disruption due to divorce, death, or other separation
• parental psychiatric disorders, especially maternal depression
• economic distress due to poverty and unemployment

Heavy exposure to media violence through television, movies, Internet sites, video games, and even cartoons has long been associated with an increase in the likelihood that a child will become desensitized to violence and behave in aggressive and antisocial ways. However, research relating the use of violent video games with antisocial behavior is inconsistent and varies in design and quality, with findings of both increased and decreased aggression after exposure to violent video games.

Companions and peers are influential in the development of antisocial behaviors. Some studies of boys with antisocial behaviors have found that companions are mutually reinforcing with their talk of rule breaking in ways that predict later delinquency and substance abuse.