Acting nasty in the face of failure? Longitudinal observations of "hard-to-manage" children playing a rigged competitive game with a friend.

Peer problems are almost universal among children with disruptive behavior disorders, and have been linked to social information processing deficits that lead to heightened threat responses. This 2-year longitudinal study uses direct observations to examine the real-life significance of this finding. Forty "hard-to-manage" children and 40 typically developing control children were filmed at ages 5 and 7 playing a rigged competitive game in which they experienced a clear threat of losing. Group differences in negative behavior (hard-to-manage > controls) were stable over time and independent of verbal ability. Predictors of individual differences in negative behavior were also examined. Previous studies with this sample have shown that at 4 years of age, the hard-to-manage children displayed elevated frequencies of violent pretend play, coupled with poor performance on tests of executive function and theory of mind. In this study, 4-year-olds whose pretend play indicated a preoccupation with violence were more likely to respond negatively to the threat of losing a competitive game at age 5 and at age 7. Four-year-olds who performed poorly on tests of theory of mind and executive function showed higher rates of negative behavior at age 5 but not age 7. These findings highlight just a few of the multiple paths leading to peer problems among children with disruptive behavior problems.