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Childhood aggression and its resulting consequences inflict a huge burden on affected children, their relatives, teachers, peers and society as a whole. Aggression during childhood rarely occurs in isolation and is correlated with other symptoms of childhood psychopathology. In this paper, we aim to describe and improve the understanding of the co-occurrence of aggression with other forms of childhood psychopathology. We focus on the co-occurrence of aggression and other childhood behavioural and emotional problems, including other externalising problems, attention problems and anxiety-depression. The data were brought together within the EU-ACTION (Aggression in Children: unravelling gene-environment interplay to inform Treatment and InterventiON strategies) project. We analysed the co-occurrence of aggression and other childhood behavioural and emotional problems as a function of the child’s age (ages 3 through 16 years), gender, the person rating the behaviour (father, mother or self) and assessment instrument. The data came from six large population-based European cohort studies from the Netherlands (2x), the UK, Finland and Sweden (2x). Multiple assessment instruments, including the Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL), the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and Multidimensional Peer Nomination Inventory (MPNI), were used. There was a good representation of boys and girls in each age category, with data for 30,523 3- to 4-year-olds (49.5% boys), 20,958 5- to 6-year-olds (49.6% boys), 18,291 7- to 8-year-olds (49.0% boys), 27,218 9- to 10-year-olds (49.4% boys), 18,543 12- to 13-year-olds (48.9% boys) and 10,088 15- to 16-year-olds (46.6% boys). We replicated the well-established gender differences in average aggression scores at most ages for parental ratings. The gender differences decreased with age and were not present for self-reports. Aggression co-occurred with the majority of other behavioural and social problems, from both externalising and internalising domains. At each age, the co-occurrence was particularly prevalent for aggression and oppositional and ADHD-related problems, with correlations of around 0.5 in general. Aggression also showed substantial associations with anxiety-depression and other internalizing symptoms (correlations around 0.4). Co-occurrence for self-reported problems was somewhat higher than for parental reports, but we found neither rater differences, nor differences across assessment instruments in co-occurrence patterns. There were large similarities in co-occurrence patterns across the different European countries. Finally, co-occurrence was generally stable across age and sex, and if any change was observed, it indicated stronger correlations when children grew older. We present an online tool to visualise these associations as a function of rater, gender, instrument and cohort. In addition, we present a description of the full EU-ACTION projects, its first results and the future perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The purpose of this study was to examine the association between attachment and psychopathic traits. A systematic search of relevant articles yielded 12 studies (11 independent samples), containing 133 effect sizes based on in total 1876 participants. Results from a three-level random-effects meta-analysis demonstrated a small-to-medium significant, overall association of r = 0.18, indicating that insecure attachment was positively related to psychopathic traits. We also tested moderator effects; six significant moderators were found. First, the magnitude of the effect size depended on which psychopathic trait was investigated; the largest effect size was found for callous-unemotional traits (r = 0.23), and no effect was found for antisocial behavior, narcissism and impulsivity. Second, parent- and caregiver reports on psychopathic traits resulted in stronger associations compared to self-reports and a composite of multiple sources. Third and fourth, the association varied across attachment and psychopathic traits instruments. Fifth, if both attachment and psychopathic traits were reported by the same informant, the association was stronger than when attachment and psychopathic traits were reported by different informants. Sixth, the association differed across sample setting, with the strongest association for a clinical setting followed by a secured setting and no association for both community or combined settings. No moderating effects were found for the attachment categories, attachment to whom and the informant of attachment, publication year, and sample characteristics, such as gender, age, and sample size. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research and clinical practice. Highlights • As a whole, psychopathic traits were positively related to insecure attachment. • Of these traits, only callous-unemotional traits showed a relation with attachment. • Only in clinical and secured settings this relation was present. • Solely parent- and caregiver reports on psychopathic traits showed this relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]