From Witness to Perpetrator: The Psychological Pathway of Violence Exposure

The SCIP and pathological adaptation models will be further described and examined in this study to explain how the impact of exposure to violence on youth aggression is shaped by cognitive and emotional factors. Many studies that are grounded in SCIP and pathological adaptation models to examine the relation of exposure to violence and individual adjustment over time often focus on mediational pathways to explain the effects of different cognitive and emotional factors (e.g., Huesmann et al., 2017). That is, exposure to violence is seen to shape social-cognitive skills (e.g., normative beliefs supporting aggression) by middle childhood (Davis-Kean et al., 2008; Guerra et al., 2003), but after middle childhood, these social cognitions become relatively stable. Boxer et al. (2011) suggested that once stabilized, these emotional and cognitive factors may serve to moderate the relation between exposure to violence and individual adjustment.