Marsee Aggression & Delinquency Lab

While traditional (e.g., physical and relational) and cyber aggression and victimization often co-occur, individuals may differ in terms of their experiences with aggression and victimization as well as social-psychological adjustment. Our research investigated whether there are distinct groups of college students who experience different forms of aggression and victimization, and the extent to which these groups differ from one another in their maladaptive personality characteristics and psychopathology symptoms.

Previous measures of the functions and forms of aggression often neglected the measurement of relational aggression (i.e., harmful gossiping, social exclusion, manipulation of social relationships). In light of the need for accurate measurement, Dr. Marsee 

and colleagues developed a self-report measure called the Peer Conflict Scale (PCS), which integrates form and function into each item, resulting in four scales of aggression:  reactive physical, proactive physical, reactive relational, and proactive relational. The PCS is now a widely used instrument to assess the forms and functions of aggression, and hasbeen translated into several languages including Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, and Turkish (Vagos et al.,2014). Click here for more information on the PCS.

Dating partners often engage in a number of poor conflict management strategies including both physically and relationally aggressive behaviors. Aggression can serve either a reactive (impulsive) or a proactive (calculating) function, and these functions are differentially associated with aggression severity, psychopathology, and personality traits. However, existing measures that assess conflict and aggression in dating relationships mainly assess the forms of aggression, and measures that assess the functions are limited in number of items assessing proactive and reactive aggression. The development of a measure that assesses both forms and functions in dating relationships will aid in our understanding of factors associated with these behaviors. The overarching goal of this project is the development and refinement of the Romantic Conflict Measure (RCM), which assesses both the forms and functions of aggression in dating relationships.

Dr. Marsee's research focuses on the measurement of social-cognitive biases in aggressive youth. Guided by the social information processing model, Dr. Marsee's research has examined several cognitive biases that are associated with increased aggression: hostile attributional bias (HAB), attentional bias, and outcome expectancies (Marsee & Frick, 2007). Dr. Marsee has used new technologies to improve the accuracy of existing measures, and is creating new measures using attentional bias tasks.