Aggressive children's memory for attachment relevant information

Abstract

This study examined a measure of children's memory for information from a story about a hypothetical mother and child, the Story Task, as a potential tool to delineate subtypes of aggressive children based on the pattern of information processing revealed through their Story Task performance. The Story Task scores of 263 second and third grade aggressive children were subjected to a cluster analytic procedure. Although four apparently distinct subgroups emerged from the cluster analysis (negative recall, low recall, defensive processing, and positive projection), validation analyses of these clusters against external variables failed to reveal significant group differences. Potential exaplanations for the failure to find meaningful subgroups of aggressive children and general limitations of the study are discussed.