J. Child Psychol. Psychiat. Vol. 41, No. 2, pp.

169179, 2000 Cambridge University Press ' 2000 Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 00219630\00 $15.00j0.00

Antisocial, Angry, and Unsympathetic : Hard-to-manage Preschoolers Peer Problems and Possible Cognitive Inuences
Claire Hughes, Adele White, Joanna Sharpen, & Judy Dunn
Institute of Psychiatry, London, U.K. This study is the rst to provide direct observations of dyadic interactions with friends for preschool-aged disruptive children. Forty preschoolers (mean age 52 months) rated by parents as hard to manage on Goodmans (1997) Strengths and Diculties Questionnaire (SDQ), as well as 40 control children (matched for age, gender, school, and ethnic background) were lmed for 20 minutes on two occasions playing with a teacher-nominated best friend. The videos were transcribed and coded for antisocial behaviour, displays of negative emotion, and empathic\prosocial responses to friends distress. Individual dierences in social behaviour were considered in relation to false-belief performance, aective perspective taking, and executive function skills (planning and inhibitory control). Compared with controls, the hard-to-manage group showed signicantly higher rates of both antisocial behaviour and displays of negative emotion, as well as signicantly lower rates of emphatic\prosocial responses. Across both groups combined, frequencies of angry and antisocial behaviours were related to poor executive control. Mental-state understanding was not signicantly correlated with antisocial behaviour, emotion display, or empathy, suggesting that the interpersonal problems of young disruptive children owe more to failure of behavioural regulation than to problems in social understanding per se. However, given the relatively low power of the study, these ndings require replication with a larger sample. Keywords : ADD\ADHD, antisocial behaviour, emotional expression, empathy, play, preschool children. Abbreviations : BPVS : British Picture Vocabulary Scale ; SDQ : Strengths and Diculties Questionnaire.

Introduction
Disruptive behaviour disorders are extremely common in childhood : 27 % of school children meet diagnostic criteria for attention-decit hyperactivity disorder or conduct disorder (Hinshaw, 1994). Problems in peer relations are almost universal among school-aged disruptive children, aect the lives of their families and peers, and pose a signicant cost to society. For example, disruptive childrens poor peer relationships predict a number of adverse long-term outcomes, including academic failure, criminality, drug abuse, and psychiatric illness (Parker & Asher, 1987). Although most studies have focused on school-aged children, there is evidence that chronic disruptive behaviours can be seen in the preschool years (e.g. Campbell & Ewing, 1990 ; Richman, Stevenson, & Graham, 1982 ; Rose, Rose, & Feldman, 1989). Indeed, early-onset cases have been reported to be at the greatest risk of showing severe and life-course persistent patterns of antisocial behaviour (Mott, 1993). Yet direct observational studies of peer interactions in disruptive preschoolers are practically nonexistent (see Alessandri, 1992, for an exception). In part, this gap reects the diculty in applying diagnostic criteria to
Requests for reprints to : Dr Claire Hughes, Institute of Psychiatry, 111 Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AF, U.K. (E-mail : clare.hughes!iop.kcl.ac.uk). 169

preschoolers (for whom symptoms of disorder are often hard to distinguish from age-appropriate manifestations of transient stress). The rst aim of this study was to observe peer play in overactive and inattentive preschoolers, as these hard to manage children have been described as being at high risk (approximately even odds) of meeting diagnostic criteria for disruptive disorders in school age (Campbell, 1995). Identifying the nature of these hard-to-manage preschoolers diculties in social interaction should therefore prove valuable in establishing the developmental origins of peer problems in school-aged disruptive children. Observations of dyadic (as opposed to group) interactions were chosen as being of especial salience for preschool-aged children, who are just beginning to develop social relationships outside of the family. A second motivation for this focus on dyadic play was that, in a large-scale community study, school-aged hyperactive boys have been found to show more serious impairment in their dyadic interactions than in their general mixing with peers (E. Taylor, Sandberg, Thorley, & Giles, 1991). The observations were lmed, so that the context of antisocial behaviour could be recorded, since details of the proximal context of each antisocial act can illuminate our understanding of underlying processes. For example, Dodge and colleagues have highlighted the clinical value of ethological distinctions between proactive and reactive aggression. The latter is dened as an angry, defensive response to frustration or

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perceived threat, whereas the former is a deliberate instrumental behaviour (i.e. directed towards obtaining a desired goal). Although a large number of aggressive children show both patterns of behaviour (see for example, Crick & Dodge, 1996), subgroups characterised by one type of aggression (proactive or reactive) can be identied, and these subgroups dier from each other in several important respects, including social informationprocessing style, life history, and family background (Dodge, 1991 ; Dodge et al., 1997). A subsidiary aim of the study was therefore to categorise target acts as proactive or reactive, in order to elucidate which form was most characteristic of these young childrens antisocial behaviour. Antisocial acts account for only a small fraction of total behaviour, even for very deviant children. Indeed, individual variation in accompanying displays of prosocial behaviour may be important in predicting the long-term outcome for disruptive children (Tremblay, Vitaro, Gagnon, & Piche, 1992). In recognition of this, the present study included ratings of not only antisocial behaviours (e.g. violence, bullying, refusal to share, and rule-breaking) but also prosocial behaviours (specically, expressions of concern or helpful actions in response to displays of negative emotion or requests for help). The second main aim of the study was to relate observational peer-play codings to task measures of specic cognitive abilities identied in recent theoretical models as contributing to individual dierences in antisocial or disruptive behaviour. For example, schoolaged aggressive children have been shown to display hostile attribution biases in their interpretation of other peoples actions (Dodge, 1980) ; poor understanding of the emotional consequences of transgressions (Arsenio & Fleiss, 1996) ; and delayed development of moral sensibility (Henderson, 1997 ; Zahn-Waxler et al., 1994). For children with ADHD, the underlying problem appears to be not so much a sociocognitive decit as a failure to regulate their own behaviour, suggesting that problems of executive control may be more central to the interpersonal diculties of this group (Barkley, 1997 ; Whalen & Henker, 1992). Note that the above accounts are based on betweengroup dierences in specic abilities, and so overlook both the continuities between disruptive children and their peers, and the signicant individual variation within children labelled as disruptive . Our goal in this study was to attempt to answer the more challenging question of whether cognitive performance can be used to identify a subgroup of disruptive children who are especially likely to experience interpersonal problems in their relations with peers. In a recent paper, we reported three dierent types of cognitive skill that appear impaired in the present sample of hard-to-manage preschoolers (Hughes, Dunn, & White, 1998). The rst of these was false-belief comprehensionthe ability to understand that people can hold (and act upon) mistaken beliefs. Even with dierences in verbal ability taken into account, the hardto-manage preschoolers in this study showed a small but signicant delay in this key stage in the development of a theory of mind . Accelerated development in falsebelief comprehension has been associated with a number of positive outcomes for childrens peer interactions, including increases in shared pretend play (Hughes & Dunn, 1997 ; M. Taylor & Carlson, 1997 ; Youngblade & Dunn, 1995) and connectedness of communication (Slomkowski & Dunn, 1996). Delays in understanding

false belief can therefore be hypothesised to be associated with diverse problems in interpersonal interactions. Another type of sociocognitive skill that appeared delayed among the hard-to-manage preschoolers was aective perspective-taking (Hughes et al., 1998). Recently, Arsenio and Fleiss (1996) have argued that disruptive children are more likely than their peers to violate social rules and norms because they are delayed in their understanding of the emotional consequences of sociomoral transgressions. Although this hypothesis is supported by several studies suggesting an inverse relation between emotion understanding and antisocial behaviour (see, for review, Miller & Eisenberg, 1988), it has yet to be tested directly in preschoolers. Here, the proposal that antisocial behaviour amongst disruptive children is related to their poor emotional understanding was tested by examining whether observed frequencies of antisocial behaviour were associated with impairments in the ability to predict a characters feelings, using a series of hypothetical vignettes (Denham, 1986). The third kind of cognitive skill considered in the present study was executive function. The term executive function encompasses a variety of distinct processes that underlie exible goal-directed activity (e.g. inhibition of maladaptive prepotent responses, attentional set-shifting, planning, and working memory). Disruptive behaviour disorders are associated with impairments in some, but not all, of these executive functions (Mott & Henry, 1989 ; Pennington & Ozono, 1996). In particular, Hughes et al. (1998) found that hardto-manage preschoolers display intact working memory and attentional set-shifting, but clear impairments on tests of planning and inhibitory control. The signicance of this impairment can be seen in Whalen and Henkers (1992) proposal that the interpersonal diculties of disruptive children owe more to their problems of behavioural control than to any decit in social understanding per se. In sum, the present study diers from previous investigations both in its focus upon preschool-aged disruptive children (recruited from the community rather than clinics), and in its integration of detailed observational coding with cognitive assessments of these young children. The twin aims of the study were to examine the exact nature of early peer problems in this group, and to investigate whether assessments of sociocognitive ability and executive function provide a means of identifying a subgroup of these disruptive children who are especially likely to display antisocial behaviour towards peers, and who therefore might benet from future targeted intervention programmes.

Method Participants
Recruitment and screening for target group. The 25-item Strengths and Diculties Questionnaire (SDQ ; Goodman, 1997) was sent to families of all rst-year children attending 15 preschools and nurseries in the London boroughs of Wandsworth and Southwark (13 state-run, 2 private). Of the 910 questionnaires sent, 487 were completed and returned. Data from a representative sample of 1500 4-year-olds in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Pregnancy and Childhood (ALSPAC ; Golding, 1996) were used to establish the 90th percentile for the SDQ subscales of hyperactivity (a score of at least 8\10) and conduct disorder (a score of at least 4\10). Maternal ratings for 87 children were above at least one cuto : 66 children exceeded both cutos, 17 children exceeded the hyperactivity cuto only,

ANTISOCIAL PRESCHOOLERS and 4 children exceeded the conduct disorder cuto only. Interviews with the teachers of all the remaining children corroborated parental ratings for 60 children. Of these, 20 children were excluded from the study for the following reasons : not aged between 3 : 6 and 4 : 6 years (N l 4) no parental consent (N l 9) ; known language delay or English not rst language in the home (N l 3) ; family moved out of the area (N l 4). All of the remaining 40 children scored above the 90th percentile for hyperactivity, with 80 % also scoring above the 90th percentile for conduct disorder. This target group included 24 boys and 16 girls, and had a mean age of 51n8 months (SD l 4n7 months). Recruitment and matching for control group. The control group was recruited from a parallel study of childrens friendships, based in the same 15 nursery classes (see Cutting & Dunn, in press). All control children scored below the 50th percentile for both hyperactivity and conduct disorder subscales, and were individually matched with the target group for gender, aged (j\k2 months) and school. The control groups mean age was 50 months (SD l 4n1 months). Chi-squared analyses showed no dierence between the target and control groups in the number of children from Black or Asian families (18 vs. 12, # (1,80) l 2n6, n.s.), or from single-parent families (8 vs. 10, # (1,80) l 0n3, p.s.). Mothers were interviewed at the start of the study, and the interview data were used to construct a three-band coding for parental occupational status (professional\non-manual skills\manual or unskilled) and education (university degree\high-school qualications (GCSE or above)\low CSE or no qualications). Recruitment of friends. For the control group, friends were identied on the basis of three criterianomination as reciprocal friends by teachers and by mothers, and behavioral identication as friends in two 30-minute observations, following Howes and Phillipsens (1992) observational criteria (children maintain 3 ft proximity of each other, engage in interactive social play, and display shared positive aect for at least 30 % of the combined observations). Since it was unlikely that all of the hard-to-manage preschoolers would meet all of these criteria, friends or playmates were identied for this group via interviews with nursery teachers and class assistants. Each friend of a hard-to-manage child had to be named by at least two sta members as a regular playmate for the target child before being included in the study. Recruitment of friends for the hard-to-manage group proved easier than had been expected : 35\40 children had an identied reciprocal friendship, and only 5 children were lmed with a playmate . An important aim of the study was to observe children playing with their closest friends, and so boundary crossings (e.g. friendships within or between the target and control groups) were not excluded.

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frequency count for swearing, since this usually occurred in accompaniment with one of the ve categories : (a) Not sharing (snatching, refusing to share). (b) Teasing and bullying (name-calling, intimidating behaviour). (c) Violent acts (damaging toy, hurting peer). (d) Violent talk (aggressive scriptse.g. play ghting). (e) Rule breaking (planned or actual rule break). (f) Sex-play (with dolls, with self or peer). A trumping rule was applied, with behaviours coded as the most severe applicable category (e.g. hurting a peer accompanied by snatching was coded as hurting peer). Single events could involve ratings for both children, according to several parameters : intentional or accidental action ; proactive antisocial acts (i.e. spontaneous and goal-directed antisocial acts) ; reactive antisocial acts (i.e. antisocial behaviour preceded by a provocative act from the friend) ; imitative or joint act ; positive, neutral, or negative aect in the child and friend. Aective responses were coded as follows : positive l clear laughing or smiling ; negative l clear anger or distress ; neutral l all other facial displays. (2) Response to emotion and prosocial behaviour. The above coding was restricted to emotion in the context of antisocial behaviour, and did not provide any information on how children respond to their friends emotions. A second coding system was therefore developed, with a twin focus on childrens own emotional displays and their responses to their friends displays of distress or anger. These were categorised into three types : (a) Anger\distress in response to an intentional action by the target child. (b) Anger\distress in response to an accidental action by the target child. (c) Anger\distress unrelated to the target childs action. In addition, responses were coded for two subsidiary events (treated as main events if accompanied by distress or anger) : (d) verbal requests for help ; (e) nonverbal display of need (e.g. friend hops around, needing to go to the lavatory). For each event, responses were coded into ve mutually exclusive categories : (a) Ignored. (b) Neutral responses (e.g. initiates other game). (c) Expression of concern and\or helpful or conciliatory response. (d) Deliberate refusal to help or deliberate exacerbation of problem for other. (e) No relevant response (e.g. adult intervenes). Event boundaries within each coding system (antisocial behaviour and response to emotion) were dened by either a clear change in childrens activity, or a break of at least ve speaker turns (include nonverbal turns such as nods head ). This is an arbitrary rule, but important in establishing reliability between coders. For example, two refusals to share within four speaker turns would be coded as a single event, if the children were clearly referring to the same toy, but would be coded as two separate events if the refusals concerned two dierent toys. Ambiguous events (e.g. events in which the childs utterance is partly unintelligible, or in which the child was out of view) were not coded. Each event was then expressed as an hourly rate, and as a proportion of speaker turns. A turn was all of a speakers utterances that are bounded by the utterances of another speaker, or by a pause of more than 20 seconds. There was no group dierence in the mean number of turns per child : mean l 169n9, 165n1 (SD l 66n7, 46n8) for the hard-to-manage and control groups respectively. Reliability of coding was assessed via independent doublecoding for 25 % of the transcripts. Cohens modied Kappa (an index of inter-rater agreement that takes chance rates of agreement into account) for each of the antisocial categories

Observational Procedures
Following recruitment and screening, researchers made at least 2 visits (on average 1 week apart) to each of the 15 nurseries in the study. During these nursery visits, two 20minute videotaped observations were made of the child and friend playing alone together in a room equipped with toys and dressing-up clothes, following the procedure of Gottman (1983). The videotapes were than transcribed, including contextual information such as physical aggression, intimidating behaviour, rule-breaking (e.g. sneaking out of the room, stealing sweets from the researchers bag) snatching, damage to toys, sexual behaviour, helpful actions, expression of positive aect or negative aect, and intervals during which either child was out of camera view. Two coding systems" were developed to assess the frequency with which particular features were present in the childrens interactive behaviour. (1) Antisocial behaviour. Six mutually exclusive categories of antisocial behaviour were included, with an additional " Full details of all coding systems are available on request from the rst author.

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C. HUGHES et al. adopted by Hughes (1998), children were rated as successful if they passed at least two of the three trials. Emotion understanding. Childrens aective perspectivetaking abilities were assessed using Denhams (1986) puppet task. First, four Velcro stick-on emotion faces (happy, sad, angry, and scared) were placed in turn on the puppet and the child was asked How does X feel ? Receptive identication of emotions was tested by placing the four faces in a row and asking the child Show me the happy face. Show me the sad face (etc) . Next, 16 vignettes were enacted, portraying situations in which the main puppet felt either happiness, sadness, anger or fear. The rst eight stories involved unambiguous situations (e.g. receiving an ice cream). The next eight stories selected portrayed situations that were likely to evoke dierent emotions in dierent children (e.g. meeting a big friendly dog). These stories were individually tailored to each child, following a telephone interview with the childs mother, in which the childs most likely response to each situation was established. For example, if a mother predicted that her child would be happy on seeing a big friendly dog, the experimenter enacted a story in which the main puppet was scared about the dog. The 8 stories for each child were chosen from a series of 14 vignettes, such that all children received 2 stories for each emotion. Stories were enacted using vocal and facial cues for the puppets feelings, and at the end of each story children were asked how the puppet felt. Children could respond verbally, or by selecting the appropriate face (and were credited with their best answers). Following Denhams (1986) coding system, children were credited with 2 points if they chose the exact emotion portrayed, 1 point if they identied the correct valence, but chose the wrong emotion (e.g. sad instead of scared), and 0 points if they chose the incorrect valence. Across the whole sample, Cronbachs alpha for the aggregate score was n78 (eight items : angry\sad\happy\scared stories in nonambiguous and ambiguous conditions). Executive function tasks. From the set of executive function tasks used by Hughes et al. (1998), two tasks were selected for this study as being particularly sensitive to the young disruptive childrens impairments in inhibitory control and planning ability. The rst of these tasks (the detour-reaching box) was a marble-retrieval game that involved a mechanical apparatus, designed by the rst author, which is reported fully elsewhere (Hughes & Russell, 1993). Briey, the apparatus consisted of a metal box (350 mmi350 mmi350 mm) with a large perspex window in the front face with a circular hole (180 mm in diameter) at its centre. Each time the child reached through the hole to retrieve a marble from its platform inside the box, an infra-red beam activated a photo-electric circuit, causing a trapdoor in the platform to open and the marble to drop out of sight. Also on the front face of the box were two lights (one yellow, one green). When the yellow light was switched on, a knob on the right-hand face (attached to a lever-paddle inside the box) could be used to knock the marble down a chute to a small catch-tray at the front (the knob route). When the green light was switched on, a toggle-switch on the left-hand face could be used to deactivate the photo-electric circuit so that the marble could be retrieved by a direct reach through the front window (the switch route). Hughes and Russell (1993) found that 3-year-olds have no diculty in retrieving the marble by the knob route, but experience more diculty in the means-end switch route. To avoid the frustration of starting with a dicult task, the knob route was always given rst. The experimenter invited the child to take the marble out of the box ; when the marble dropped out of reach the experimenter retrieved and repositioned the marble before encouraging the child to have another go. This familiarisation phase continued for twothree trials, or until it was clear that the child understood that it was not possible to obtain the marble by reaching directly into the box. The child was then shown the yellow light, and told that when this was lit the way to get the marble was to turn the knob at the side of the box. The experimenter demonstrated the knob route procedure, before asking the child and to try and get the marble the same way. After three consecutive correct knob route trials, the next

was as follows : not sharing, 1n0 ; teasing\bullying, n70 ; violence, n93 ; rule-breaking, n71 ; swearing, 1n0. The Kappa values for the event-based parameters were as follows : intent, 1n0 ; spontaneity, n92 ; childs aect, n79 ; friends aect, n77. For the coding of emotion and response to emotion, the inter-rater agreement for the total number of events was 80n8 %, with perfect agreement on event type, and a Cohens Kappa value of n91 for the response type. These Kappa values indicate good to excellent inter-rater reliability for each coding system.

Task Procedures
Theory of mind tasks. Children received a comprehensive battery of standard experimental tasks that included counterbalanced forced-choice questions designed to tap their ability to recall their own false belief and to predict or explain a characters action (or emotion) on the basis of a mistaken belief. In total, children received four unexpected identity questions, four unexpected location questions, two emotion inference questions, and two deception tasks. For each task, children received credit on the test question only if they also responded correctly to all corresponding control questions (e.g. memory for story, reality check, understanding contingency between emotion and desire-outcome match\mismatch). For reasons of space, the exact procedures are reported for one task only ; an unexpected identity story that used a peepthrough pop-up storybook (procedural details for the other tasks are available in Hughes et al., 1998). The rst ve pages of this picture-book showed an eye peeping through a hole in the page. On the nal page, instead of an eye, there was a spot on a snakes tail. After turning back to the penultimate page, the child was asked a test question Before we turned the page, what did you think this would be, an eye or a spot ? and a reality question What is it really, an eye or a spot ? Next, the researcher showed the child a puppet and said Look, this is Charlie. Charlie has never seen this book before. If we show him this picture, what will he think it is, an eye or a spot ? and a second reality control question What is it really, an eye or a spot ? The order of these alternatives was counterbalanced across children, who were credited with success on the memory-for-own-false-belief and predicting-others-false-belief questions only if they also passed the corresponding reality control question. Two further unexpected identity questions were presented within belief-desire reasoning tasks that involved either a nice or nasty surprise ; children were asked to attribute a false belief, and if successful, to predict (and justify) how the puppet felt before discovering the surprise (happy or sad). Four unexpected location questions were asked using puppet stories in which the contents of a prototypical container (eggbox\cereal box\Lego box\BandAid box) were revealed to be in a dierent container. These stories were presented in a randomised order interleaved with other tasks in the test session, and included at least one ller story to prevent children guessing that the prototypical box would always be empty. The rst deception task involved four kinds of trial : nonverbal\verbal ; cooperation\competition. To win prizes, children had to cooperate with the nice puppet (by opening a lockable box, or by telling the puppet the box was open) and deceive the mean puppet (by locking the box or by telling the puppet a liethat the box was locked). Two points were awarded for success on all four test trials, 1 point if the child failed the verbal deceit and cooperation but managed nonverbal deceit and cooperation, and 0 points for any other pattern of performance. The second deception task was a penny-hiding game : the researcher showed the child a penny, then hid it behind her back before bringing both hands forward for the child to guess which hand held the penny. After three such trials, the child was invited to hide the penny in the same way for the three test trials. Success on each trial depended on three criteria : (1) coin hidden behind back ; (2) coin kept out of view ; (3) both hands closed throughout. Following the procedure

ANTISOCIAL PRESCHOOLERS phase of the task, the switch route trials, began.# At this stage, the child was shown that now the green light was on, and told that now the way to get the marble was to ick a switch on the right-hand side of the box, before reaching in for the marble. Having demonstrated that when the green light was on the knob route was blocked by the padlock, the experimenter modelled the switch route procedure, and asked the child to try and get the marble the same way. Following the procedures developed by Hughes and Russell (1993), the criterion for success was three consecutive correct switch route trials. A maximum of 15 trials were allowed. Performance was rated by subtracting the number of trials to criterion from this maximum of 15 trials. The second executive task was Shallices (1982) Tower of London. This task is an adaptation of the Tower of Hanoi (Piaget, 1976) and involves high-level skills such as focused and sustained attention, generation of plans, and inhibition of maladaptive responses (but is not associated with lower-order skills such as visuomotor coordination, spatial processing, and short-term memory). The apparatus for the Tower of London task included two wooden pegboards (approx. 100 mmi 250 mmi10 mm), one for the examiner and one for the child. Each board had three pegs of dierent sizes (big, middle, and small) and three sponge balls (one red, one green, and one blue), each approximately 80 mm in diameter. The big peg was 240 mm long, and could carry all three balls, the middle peg was 160 mm long and could carry two balls, and the little peg was 80 mm long and could carry just one ball. At the start of the task, children were shown a simple onemove problem (i.e. the childs arrangement of balls could be made to match the target arrangement by moving just one ball). The child was told that the aim of the task was to copy the target arrangement by moving the balls one at a time. On each problem the child was told how many moves were needed to copy the target, and asked to think about how s\he would solve the problem before beginning. Children were told that they would be able to choose their favourite sticker if they worked well. The task began with a warm-up of three 1-move problems. Next, children were given the set of three problems at each of three levels (2-, 3-, and 4-move problems) used by Shallice (1982).$ If children failed to solve a problem in the required number of moves, they were given a second attempt before moving on to the next problem. However, only rstattempt solutions were included in the analyses. On each subproblem, children were awarded 2 points for a perfect (minimum number of moves l n) solution, 1 point for solutions within the allowed number of moves (2nj1), and 0 points for any other response. Children could therefore score a maximum of 18 points on the Tower of London task.

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in verbal ability was signicant [t(79) l 3n3, p n01]. Similarly, although every eort was made to individually match children in the two groups, interviews with mothers revealed group dierences in family background. Data from fathers were missing for more than a quarter of each group, and so analysis of group dierences in family background focused on mothers, for whom data were available for 34 target children and 38 controls. In both groups, mothers showed a relatively even distribution across the three occupational status categories, with no signicant group dierence [#(69) l 3n6, n.s.]. However, only 7 mothers in the target group had a university education, as compared with 18 mothers in the control group. A chi-square comparison showed a marginal group dierence in mothers education [#(72) l 5n8, p n06]. These group dierences in childrens verbal ability and in mothers education will be taken into account in subsequent analyses. Since each group included only 14 girls, gender will not be considered in the main analyses.

Do Hard-to-manage Preschoolers Show Antisocial Behaviour in Dyadic Play with Friends ?

Figure 1 shows the percentage of children in each group displaying at least one antisocial act, by type of behaviour. Snatching, hurting friend, bullying, teasing, and rule-breaking were widespread amongst the hard-tomanage children, and signicantly more common than in the control group [#(80) 4n0 for all, p n05]. A marginal group dierence was also found in the number of children destroying toys [#(80) l 3n2, p l n08]. However, controls were more likely than hard-to-manage children to refuse to share [#(80) l 4n1, p n05]. This surprising nding may reect the fact that the control children showed more absorbed and focused play than did the hard-to-manage group (Dunn & Hughes, 1999). Sex-play was observed in seven hard-to-manage children but in no controls, and swearing was equally infrequent in both groups. Note also that there was no group dierence in the number of children who engaged in violent talk [#(80) l 0n5, n.s.]. Mean hourly rates for each kind of antisocial act were relatively low (see Table 1), although there was wide variation and a skewed distribution (a few hard-tomanage children showed very high rates of antisocial behaviour). MannWhitney tests were therefore used to examine group dierences in mean rates of antisocial behaviour. These analyses showed the same contrasts as the chi-square comparisons. That is, compared with controls, the hard-to-manage group were signicantly more likely to snatch, bully, tease, hurt friend, damage toy, or rule-break, but signicantly less likely to refuse to share (p n05 for all) and equally likely to engage in violent talk (z l 1n08, n.s.).

Results Preliminary Analyses

The two groups showed very similar nonverbal ability levels. Mean standard scores on the Stanford Binet Bead Memory task were 85n1 (SD l 10n9) and 85n2 (SD l 14n4) for the target and control groups respectively. Corresponding mean standard vocabulary scores on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS) were 89n3 (SD l 11n4) and 98n8 (SD l 14n2). This group dierence

# This change was eected by drawing a small padlock across the lever paddle, such that the knob could no longer be used to reach the marble. The circuitry was arranged such that drawing the padlock extinguished the yellow light and illuminated the green lightwhen the padlock was open the lights were set in the opposite conguration. $ Pilot work showed that the set of 5-move problems was too taxing for preschoolers and so was not administered in this study.

Which Antisocial Acts Are Most Likely to Upset the Childrens Friends ?
The initial coding of antisocial behaviour included any act that violated norms of social behaviour. Our next step was to examine the friends emotional response to each type of event, since it was possible that certain categories (e.g. deviant behaviours) may not be perceived as antisocial by the friend, and may actually be a source of shared enjoyment. The proportion of positive, negative,

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Figure 1.

Percentage of each group displaying at least one antisocial act, by category (H2M : hard to manage).

Table 1 Hourly Rates of Antisocial Behaviours, by Group and Event Type

Hard to manage (N l 40) Event type Not share Bully\tease Violence Deviant Event Snatchingb Refusal to shareb Bullyingb Teasing Hurt peerb Destroy toy Aggressive talk Rule break Sex play Swearing Mean 3n1 1n3 1n0 1n5 2n2 1n2 3n6 1n8 0n6 1n6 (SD) (3n3) (2n2) (1n9) (2n1) (2n9) (2n1) (4n7) (3n6) (1n5) (5n4) Range 0n09n5 0n012n1 0n09n6 0n09n0 0n010n0 0n07n5 0n018n9 0n019n5 0n05n9 0n026n5 Mean 1n5 1n7 0n2 0n5 0n8 0n5 2n 3 0n3 0n 6 0n1 Control (N l 40) (SD) (1n9) (1n9) (0n6) (1n1) (1n5) (1n1) (2n8) (1n5) (1n4) (0n4) Range 0n09n6 0n07n4 0n02n8 0n04n7 0n06n5 0n07n0 0n011n3 0n09n0 0n06n5 0n01n8 Group dierencea p n05 p l n06 p n005 p n01 p n05 p n05 p l n10 p n005 n.s. n.s.

a Group dierences shown by nonparametric MannWhitney comparisons. b Only these antisocial behaviours evoked predominantly negative emotional

responses from the friend.

and neutral aective responses from the friend for each type of antisocial behaviour in the hard-to-manage group is shown in Fig. 2. As Fig. 2 illustrates, certain antisocial behaviours (rule-breaking, swearing, and sex-play) evoked at least as many positive as negative responses from the friend, whereas for other behaviours, the friends aective response was either neutral or negative. These behaviours (snatching, bullying, hurting friend, refusal to share) therefore seem particularly likely to jeopardise harmonious interactions, and so appear antisocial from the peers perspective as well as from an adult viewpoint. The

mean frequency of peer-disliked antisocial behaviour (these four antisocial events combined) was 6n3 events\ hour for the hard-to-manage group (SD l 6n3) and 3n7 events\hour for the control group (SD l 3n2). An analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that this group dierence was signicant [F(1,79) l 4n3, p n05].

Are Hard-to-manage Preschoolers Antisocial Acts Predominantly Proactive or Reactive ?

Proactive antisocial behaviour was dened as spontaneous peer-disliked antisocial acts for which the pri-

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Figure 2.

Percentage of antisocial acts eliciting positive, neutral, or negative emotional responses from friend.

Table 2 Proactive and Reactive Peer-disliked Antisocial Behaviours, by Group

Mean hourly rates (SD) Type Proactive Snatch Not share Bully Hurt friend Snatch Not share Bully Hurt friend H2M 2n79 (2n78) 1n15 (2n07) 0n60 (1n27) 0n83 (1n85) 0n23 (0n86) 0n09 (0n34) 0n14 (0n76) 0n07 (0n33) Control 1n30 (1n66) 1n63 (2n02) 0n16 (0n53) 0n25 (0n58) 0n07 (0n32) 0n07 (0n31) 0n00 (0n00) 0n06 (0n37) T 2n98** k1n08 2n04* 1n93a 1n16 0n33 1n21 0n33 N showing behaviour H2M 31 16 11 13 2 3 2 2 Control 19 23 4 7 2 2 0 1 # 7n11** 2n35 4n00* 2n72a

Reactive

H2M : hard to manage. a Nonsignicant trend (p n10). * p n05 ; ** p n01. Chi-square tests not done for small cell-values.

mary motivation appeared to be the achievement of a goal (e.g. possession of an attractive toy). Reactive antisocial behaviour was dened as peer-disliked antisocial acts that were immediately preceded by a provocative act from the friend. Since the groups diered in terms of which peer-disliked antisocial act was most frequent (snatching for the hard-to-manage group and refusal to share for the controls), the results are presented separately for each category of peer-disliked behaviour

(see Table 2). For both groups, the majority of antisocial acts (90 % for the hard-to manage group, and 94 % for controls) were categorised as proactive. As Table 2 shows, the two groups diered signicantly (both in mean rates and in numbers of children displaying behaviour) for proactive snatching and bullying, with a nonsignicant trend for a group dierence in proactive hurting friend. There were no group dierences in proactive refusals to share, or in any of the events categorised as reactive .

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Figure 3.

Percentage of each group (H2M : hard to manage) displaying negative emotion, by friends action (intentional, accidental, or unrelated).

Note, however, that reactive antisocial events were infrequent, and so this lack of group dierence should be interpreted with caution.

Do Hard-to-manage Preschoolers Show More Negative Emotion Than Their Peers ?

Displays of anger\distress were coded into three types : responses to an intentional or accidental action by the friend, and displays unrelated to the friends act. The percentage of children who displayed anger or distress is shown by group and type in Fig. 3. Over half the hard-to-manage group showed anger\ distress in response to an intentional act, and 80 % displayed anger\distress at an accidental act (as compared with 35 % of the control group, for both types). Just over a third of the hard-to-manage group (but only 14 % of the control group) also showed anger\distress that was unrelated to the friends behaviour. Chi-square comparisons showed that all three of these group dierences were signicant [#(8) 5n5, p n05 for all]. Next, a mixed factorial ANOVA was conducted, with group as a between-child factor, and a within-child factor of display type (response to intentional\accidental act, unrelated). This analysis demonstrated signicant main eects of group and display type [F(1,78) l 7n2, 26n5 respectively, p n01]. There was also a signicant interaction between group and display type [F(2,77) l 4n4, p n05], with group dierences being most marked for displays in response to intentional acts.

likely than controls to provide a helpful response to their friends distress\need [F(1,79) l 15n7, p n001]. Given the strong group contrast in prosocial responses to requests for help it is important to note that there were no group dierences in the childrens own hourly rates of requests for help or displays of need [F(1,79) 1n0 for both, n.s.]. That is, it is not the case that the hard-tomanage group showed fewer prosocial responses simply because they interacted less with their friends, since they themselves requested help as frequently as controls. However, across both groups combined, a strong negative association was found between the proportion of helpful responses and childrens own hourly rates of negativeemotion displays [r(80) lkn46, p n01]. This result suggests an alternative account of the group dierence in prosocial behaviour : children in the hard-to-manage group may have been less empathic as a result of their own anger and distress.

Is Antisocial Behaviour Related to Cognitive Performance ?

Before considering whether antisocial behaviour was associated with cognitive performance, associations between antisocial behaviour and maternal education were examined, since data from maternal interviews indicated a marginal group dierence. Across both groups, mothers educational level was negatively correlated with the frequency of childrens rule-breaking [r(71) lkn30, p n05], but was not associated with any other kind of antisocial behaviour, nor with displays of negative emotion or prosocial behaviour. Taking each group separately, mothers education was not correlated with any antisocial behaviour within the hard-to-manage group, but was negatively correlated with frequency of swearing within the control group [r(38) lkn39, p n05]. The two groups also diered in terms of verbal ability. Across both groups, BPVS scores were negatively correlated with frequencies of rule-breaking and hurting playmate [r(79) lkn25, p n05 for both] and positively correlated with frequencies of refusal to share [r(79) l n32, p n01]. Taking each group separately, BPVS scores

Do Hard-to-Manage Preschoolers Show Fewer Prosocial Responses Than Their Peers ?

The proportion of friends displays of need\distress to which children provided prosocial responses of empathic concern\practical assistance was next calculated for each group. The mean proportions were n26 (SD l n19) and n50 (SD l n30) for the hard-to-manage and control groups respectively. Individual proportion data were arcsin-transformed for an ANOVA comparison of the two groups. This analysis showed a clear group dierence, with the hard-to-manage group being signicantly less

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remained negatively correlated with the frequency of hurting playmate for the hard-to-manage group [r(39) l k32, p n05], and positively correlated with frequency of refusal to share for the control group [r(39) l n43, p n05]. A single explanation for this positive correlation between refusal to share and verbal ability is that more able children became more absorbed in their play, and so were less willing to surrender their toys (see earlier note on group dierences in refusal to share). To take eects of family background and verbal ability on antisocial behaviour into account, a hierarchical regression analysis approach was adopted, with frequency of peer rated antisocial behaviour as the dependent variable, and both mothers education and childs verbal ability taken into account at the rst step, before entering each cognitive measure as a predictor at the second step. These hierarchical regression analyses were conducted separately for each group and each cognitive measure. For the hard-to-manage group there was no signicant increase in explained variance in antisocial behaviour when scores on either the theory-ofmind or the aective perspective-taking tasks were entered at the second step (R# n03, n.s.). However, antisocial behaviour was predicted by performance on the detour-reaching box [R# l n16, F(3,30) l 3n8, l kn40, p n05] and on the Tower of London [R# l n32, F(3,30) l 14n4, lkn59, p n001]. Note that these two executive-function measures were only marginally associated with each other [r(39) l n29, p l n08]. For the control group, similar stepwise regression analyses showed no predictive eect on antisocial behaviour for either theory-of-mind, aective perspective-taking, or Tower of London performance (R# n06, n.s.). In contrast, the relation between detour-reaching performance and antisocial behaviour was signicant [R# l n10, F(3,37) l 4n1, lkn34, p n05]. An alternative median-split analysis was also conducted, to examine whether high and low scorers on each executive function task showed contrasting levels of peerdisliked antisocial behaviour. Nonparametric comparisons were used, because of the reduced group size. These conrmed the results from the regression analyses. That is, within the hard-to-manage group, low scorers on both the Tower of London task and the detour-reaching task showed signicantly elevated levels of antisocial behaviour when compared with hard-to-manage children who performed well on these tasks (z l 2n1, p n05 for both). Within the control group, poor performance on the detour-reaching box (only) was associated with raised levels of antisocial behaviour. That is, poor meansend motor control was associated with antisocial behaviour for both groups.

associated with displays of anger\distress [r(78) lkn24, p n05]. With verbal ability partialled, the association between detour-reaching performance and prosocial behaviour was slightly reduced [r(78) l n22, p n06], but the associations between negative emotion display and performance on either executive task was unchanged. However, these correlations all fell below signicance when each group was considered separately. That is, unlike the conclusions for antisocial behaviour, there was no evidence that problems of behavioural control and planning contributed to within-group variation in the frequency of either prosocial behaviour or negative emotion displays.

Discussion
Preschoolers rated by parents as overactive and inattentive were lmed on two occasions playing with a best friend. Compared with their peers, these hard-tomanage children displayed high rates of anger and antisocial behaviour, and were less likely to show empathic\prosocial responses to their friends needs. One conclusion that can therefore be drawn from this study is that the poor peer relations reported for school-aged disruptive children (e.g. Hinshaw & Melnick, 1995 ; Pelham & Bender, 1982 ; Whalen & Henker, 1992) are unlikely to be simply secondary consequences of academic failure or problems in school adjustment, since these direct observations demonstrate that disruptive children experience signicant interpersonal problems very early in life, even before the transition to school. Antisocial behaviour varied signicantly in frequency across children, even within the hard-to-manage group. The second aim of this study was to explore whether early individual dierences in antisocial behaviour could be explained by childrens cognitive characteristics. In particular, can individual dierences in specic cognitive skills explain not only between-group dierences but also within-group dierences in antisocial behaviour ? Two main types of cognitive abilities were considered : (1) mental understanding (false belief attribution and aective perspective taking), and (2) executive control. Several studies (cited earlier) have shown that individual dierences in mental understanding are associated with important interpersonal behaviours such as empathy, pretend play, mental-state talk, and connectedness of communication. However, these links appear to be relatively specic ; in this study mental state awareness was not related to several negative aspects of social interaction, such as snatching, not sharing, displays of negative emotion, and hurting peer. These negative ndings reect the large sample sizes needed to detect weak associations, but may also be explained by methodological factors. For example, in a review of the literature (Miller & Eisenberg, 1988), empathy and aggressive behaviour were negatively associated in studies involving questionnaire ratings, but not in studies employing vignette-based assessments. However, this methodological contrast was confounded by age dierences in the children involved in these studies, suggesting that links between empathy and antisocial behaviour may only be reliably found in studies of school-aged children. In contrast, antisocial behaviour was signicantly (and negatively) correlated with performance on a simple test of executive control (Hughes & Russell, 1993), the detourreaching box, for both disruptive children and controls, and with performance on the Tower of London planning

Are Emotional Control and Prosocial Behaviour Related to Cognitive Performance ?

Rather surprisingly, false belief performance and aective perspective taking were unrelated to the frequency of either negative emotion displays or prosocial behaviour, even before verbal ability was taken into account [r(78) n10 for all, n.s.]. In contrast, performance on the detour-reaching box was signicantly associated with prosocial responses to friends need [r(78) l n29, p n02] and marginally associated with displays of anger\distress [r(78) lkn20, p n08], whereas performance on the Tower of London was unrelated to prosocial behaviour [r(78) l n11, n.s.], but signicantly

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task (for disruptive children only). That is, within the group of disruptive children, meansend performance and planning ability could be used to identify which children were most likely to engage in antisocial behaviour. This supports Whalen and Henkers (1992) proposal that disruptive childrens interpersonal problems owe more to failures in behavioural regulation than to problems in social understanding per se. However, neither executive function skills nor mental-state awareness could explain within-group variation in negative emotion displays, or in prosocial behaviour. A possible explanation for this negative result is that displays of emotion and of prosocial behaviour are heavily inuenced by social (rather than cognitive) factors, such as the quality of the childrens friendships. Associations between these aspects of dyadic play and the quality of hard-to-manage childrens friendships are considered separately elsewhere (J. Dunn & Hughes, 1999). A third set of conclusions from this study relate to the particular methodology used. In particular, whereas most studies of disruptive children have involved clinical groups, the present study involved a community sample of children, recruited on the basis of parental ratings of activity and attention. This methodological distinction is important. Disruptive behaviour varies widely in frequency and severity in normally developing children ; the categorical approach used in diagnostic systems is based on the assumption that such behaviour is likely to have harmful consequences only above a threshold level. However, a continuum approach may be more appropriate (especially for common disorders, such as antisocial behaviour) since it is not known to what extent the aetiologies of extreme externalising problems are similar to the aetiologies of individual dierences in these behaviour problems (Deater-Deckard, Reiss, Hetherington, & Plomin, 1997). The results of this study conrm the importance of a dimensional approach to antisocial behaviour. In particular, although clear group dierences were observed in mean levels of anger, antisocial behaviour, and empathy, the correlates of these behaviours were very similar between the two groups. For example, both groups showed a signicant association between antisocial behaviour and poor meansend performance on the one hand and frequency of anger on the other. In general, dierences in behaviour between the two groups appeared quantitative rather than qualitative, suggesting substantial continuities in the processes contributing to antisocial behaviour across children. In addition, the detailed methodology adopted in this study revealed three unexpected ndings : (1) not all antisocial acts provoked negative aect in playmate ; (2) not all antisocial acts were more frequent in hard-to-manage children (refusal to share was signicantly more common in controls) ; and (3) lack of empathic or prosocial response to friends need was closely associated with childrens own negative emotion. If replicated, these ndings may shed light on the specic nature of problems in peer relationships among young disruptive children. Taken together, the results of this study have some important implications for intervention programmes aimed at improving disruptive childrens interpersonal relations. For example, cognitive interventions that are likely to be particularly successful at reducing antisocial behaviours that tend to upset peers would be those aimed at remediating problems of planning and inhibitory control, rather than improving disruptive childrens

mental understanding. Similarly, the preponderance of instrumental antisocial acts (coupled with the absence of associations with mental-state awareness) suggest that prosocial behaviour may be elicited by emphasising longterm benets (e.g. maintenance of friendship, reciprocated favours) rather than relying on empathic responses to a friends distress. That said, at least two caveats surround the ndings on the proportion of proactive and reactive antisocial acts in this study. The rst is that antisocial acts were only categorised as reactive if they were immediately preceded by a provocative act from the friend. Yet what is important in Dodges (1991) model is not the view of an outside observer, but whether the children themselves perceive particular acts as provocative. The second caveat is that all the observations were made in a specic context in which the possession of attractive toys was an obvious goal for the children, which may have encouraged instrumental antisocial acts (recall that snatching and refusal to share were the two most frequent antisocial events). Further work is needed to establish whether the conclusions drawn from this study can be generalised to childrens interactions across a variety of social contexts.

AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank all children and sta at the following South London nurseries and schools for their participation in the study : Belleville ; Bessemer ; Crawford ; Dulwich Wood ; Garden ; Goodrich ; Grove ; Grove Vale ; Heber ; Honeywell ; Ivydale ; Langbourne ; Oakeld ; Peckham Rye ; Swaeld. The title for this paper was inspired by Henderson (1997).

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