Life satisfaction is a key indicator of children’s healthy development. Although the developmental changes of life satisfaction during adolescence have been investigated, the developmental trajectories of life satisfaction and related predictors during childhood remain unclear. Thus, the current study aimed to identify the developmental trajectories of life satisfaction covering the period from middle to late childhood as well as to examine the predictive roles of environmental factors (i.e., family dysfunction and basic psychological needs satisfaction at school), personality factors (i.e., neuroticism and extraversion), and their interactions in these developmental trajectories. An accelerated longitudinal design was used with Chinese elementary school students (N?=?1069, 45.8% girls, Mage?=?9.43, SD?=?0.95) of 3 cohorts (grade 3, grade 4, and grade 5) on 4 occasions at 6-month intervals. Growth mixture modeling analyses revealed three distinct trajectories of life satisfaction: “High-Stable” (88.8%), “High-Decreasing” (6.8%), and “Low-Increasing” (4.4%). Multivariate logistic regression analyses revealed that family dysfunction and neuroticism served as risk factors for adverse developmental trajectories of life satisfaction; whereas basic psychological needs satisfaction at school served as a protective factor. Furthermore, the interaction between family dysfunction and extraversion suggested that higher levels of extraversion buffered children against the negative effect of family dysfunction on the development of life satisfaction. The identification of three heterogeneous trajectory groups of children’s life satisfaction and key personality and environmental predictors associated with the trajectories suggests that specific interventions need to be tailored to the unique characteristics of the relevant trajectory groups.
Abundant research conducted in Western contexts has shown that biological risk factors such as low resting heart rate (HR) might be related to childhood aggression. However, it was unclear (1) how resting HR, as well as other markers of cardiac functions such as resting vagal tone, may be related to subtypes of aggression such as reactive and proactive aggression, and (2) whether the HR-aggression relation can be replicated in non-Western contexts. Therefore, this study examined the concurrent and prospective relations between resting HR, vagal tone, and Chinese children’s reactive and proactive aggression. Participants were 183 children (M age?=?7.64 years, 91 girls) recruited from an elementary school in Zhenjiang, PRC. Children’s resting HR and vagal tone were assessed in the second grade (T1). Teachers rated children’s reactive and proactive aggression in the second (T1) and fourth grade (T2). Results showed that lower resting HR at T1 was associated with higher reactive and proactive aggression at T1 and T2, and higher vagal tone was associated with lower HR, which in turn was related to higher reactive and proactive aggression at T1 and T2. Lower vagal tone was directly related to higher reactive but not proactive aggression at T1 and T2, whereas lower HR was related to higher reactive aggression at T2 for children with low or moderate vagal tone but was not for children with high vagal tone. These psychophysiological findings from a non-Western context add additional support for both similarities and differences between reactive and proactive aggression in childhood. 相似文献
