Attributional and emotional determinants of aggression among African-American and Latino young adolescents.

Attribution theorists propose that negative actions of others perceived as intended elicit anger, and anger then functions as a motivator of hostile behavior. We examined the understanding of these attribution-affect-action linkages among young ethnic minority adolescents. Forty-four Latino and African-American middle-school children labeled as aggressive and a matched group of nonaggressives read causally ambiguous scenarios describing negative outcomes initiated by a hypothetical peer. They then made judgments about the peer's intentions, their own feelings of anger, and the likelihood that they would behave aggressively toward that peer