Various studies have shown that childhood and adolescent victimization is a risk factor for the development of externalizing behaviors (e.g, Allen et al., 2021; Fleckman et al., 2016; Tremblay-Perreault & Hébert, 2020; D. Yoon et al., 2021) and socially maladjusted behaviors (e.g., Braga et al., 2018; Degli Esposti et al., 2020; Farrell & Zimmerman, 2017; Ortega et al., 2024; Pittman & Farrell, 2022). This relation is well established and numerous works have sought to understand the mechanisms that underlie the association between the two phenomena (e.g., Guerra et al., 2021; Heleniak & McLaughlin, 2020; Lee & Feng, 2021; Trickett et al., 2011; Yoon et al., 2016). The field of psychology has studied the way in which different distorted cognitive processes may affect the emergence and maintenance of maladaptive behaviors, including social information processing biases (Roncero et al., 2016).

Social information processing (SIP; Crick & Dodge, 1994) is a widely recognized and studied socio-cognitive model for understanding social adjustment in children and adolescents, which mainly focuses on aggressive behavior (Ziv & Elizarov, 2020). This theory posits that when a child or adolescent is confronted by a problematic social situation, six cognitive steps that lead to a behavioral response are activated (Crick & Dodge, 1994). To respond appropriately to social situations, individuals must first correctly encode the contextual information (encoding); second, they must mentally interpret and represent this information accurately (interpretation); third, they must specify an appropriate interaction goal (goal generation); fourth, they must generate response alternatives to achieve this goal (response generation); fifth, they must evaluate the different response alternatives (response evaluation); and sixth, they must select and implement the optimal response (response selection) (Orobio de Castro, 2004).

Many studies have supported this model, noting that aggressive and other maladaptive behaviors in children and adolescents can be explained by the presence of deficits or biases during the various processing steps (e.g., Dodge et al., 2015; Lansford et al., 2010; Orobio de Castro & van Dijk, 2017; Van Dijk et al., 2017; Van Rest et al., 2019). One of the most widely studied biases related to aggressive behavior is the hostile attribution bias (e.g., Martinelli et al., 2018; Orobio de Castro et al., 2002; Verhoef et al., 2019), which may be a key psychological mechanism in children’s chronic aggression (Dodge et al., 2015).

Various mental processes, cognitive schemas, emotions, learning experiences, and memories stored in the long-term memory database contribute in the processing of social information. Together, these elements constitute the social knowledge through which children and adolescents interpret their environment (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Verhoef et al., 2022). When a child is exposed to violence early in life, either directly (e.g., child maltreatment by primary caregivers or peer abuse) or indirectly (e.g., witnessing violence), their “database” is dominated by negative social experiences, which subsequently shapes their understanding of the environment and social interactions (Ziv & Elizarov, 2020).

Children who have experienced maltreatment exhibit a complex and differentiated profile of social understanding (Luke & Banerjee, 2013). Early experiences of socialization establish neural pathways that, through repeated use, become increasingly stable and complex. As a result, children may develop rigid patterns of social cognition that are resistant to change, such as a tendency to be hyper-vigilant to threats in the environment or deficits in attention to social cues (Dodge et al., 2002). Additionally, difficulties in the early processing stage may lead them to inaccurate judgments abouts others’ intentions, reduced access to prosocial behavioral strategies, and poor response decision-making (Camodeca et al., 2003).

Research has shown that the cognitive schemas formed as a result of victimization during childhood and adolescence tend to persist over time (Calvete et al., 2018). Indeed, a large body of evidence suggests that experiences of childhood and adolescent victimization have a negative impact on cognition in both the short and long term (Cubillo, 2022; Estévez et al., 2019; Kellij et al., 2022; Pabian & Vandebosch, 2021; Wang et al., 2023). Numerous studies have shown that victims of school bullying tend to pay greater attention to negative and threatening social cues, exhibit poorer emotion recognition and register social cues less accurately (see Kellij et al., 2022 for a review). Hostile attribution styles have also been observed among victims of child abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual) (e.g., Gibb et al., 2009), as well as in cases of peer victimization and bullying (e.g., Betts et al., 2017; Guy et al., 2017; Kokkinos & Voulgaridou, 2018; Pornari & Wood, 2010), and of indirect victimization and witness victimization (Calvete & Orue, 2011; Ziv, 2012), with children exposed to violence presenting a tendency to generate and positively evaluate aggressive responses (Ziv, 2012; Ziv & Sorongon, 2011). This response evaluation includes self-efficacy evaluation. Self-efficacy was described as the degree to which people perceive that they can successfully perform specific behaviors (Bandura, 1977). Crick and Dodge’s (1994) theoretical model proposes that self-efficacy can influence the selection and enactment of a behavior. Thus, some studies have shown that different types of victimization (e.g., peer victimization) are associated with lower assertive or prosocially oriented self-efficacy and higher aggressive self-efficacy (see van Reemst et al., 2016 for a review).

Previous research has shown that such alterations in SIP skills may explain the relation between childhood and adolescent victimization and social maladjustment (e.g., Calvete & Orue, 2011; Dodge et al., 1995; Lansford et al., 2010; Pettit et al., 2010; Ziv, 2012). Some studies has even been suggested that the SIP skills involved in the relation between victimization and social maladjustment might differ between direct and indirect victims of violence (Calvete & Orue, 2011). This research has a twofold aim: first, to explore how biases in social information processing skills mediate the relation between experiences of direct and indirect childhood victimization and engagement in antisocial behaviors during adolescence and second, to determine whether the mediating effects differ depending on the type of victimization (direct or indirect).

The first research question addressed in this study is: does bias in social information processing skills serve as an intervening mediator in the relation between experiences of direct and indirect childhood victimization and adolescents’ engagement in antisocial behavior? We hypothesize that social information processing skills—such as problem recognition, hostile interpretation, aggressive response generation, and aggressive self-efficacy—mediate the relation between experiences of childhood and adolescent victimization and engagement in antisocial behavior during adolescence (see Figure 1).

Our second research question is: are there differences in the mediating effects between direct and indirect victimization and biases in social information processing? Accordingly, we hypothesize that the mediating effects will vary depending on whether an individual has been a direct or indirect victim of violence. Specifically, we hypothesize that the mediating effects will be greater for indirect victimization than for direct victimization.

Table 2 shows the descriptive results of the study variables. The hypothesized model was then tested. First, the comparison with the one-factor solution showed a significant chi-square variation: Δχ² = 34.34, Δdf = 8, p < .001. Since the chi-square of the SEM model (χ² = 74.511) was lower than the one-factor one (χ² = 108.851), the SEM model was considered significantly superior. Furthermore, this model showed a good fit: CMIN/df = 2.258, GFI = .965; CFI = .929, SRMR = .048; RMSEA = .059 (see Figure 1).

More specifically, a significant total effect was found in the relation between childhood victimization and antisocial behavior ( β = .93, p < .001). Moreover, childhood victimization was significantly and positively related to aggressive self-efficacy ( β = .148, p < .05), i.e., a social information processing skill which was also positively predicted by aggressive response generation ( β = .215, p < .001) and hostile interpretation ( β = .233, p < .001), which was, in turn, negatively influenced by problem recognition ( β = -.121, p < .05). Furthermore, aggressive self-efficacy was significantly and positively associated with antisocial behavior ( β = .166, p < .05). In addition, when included in the model, the social information processing skills partially mediated the effect of childhood victimization on antisocial behaviors, which, despite being lower, remained significant ( β = .90, p < .001). The bias-corrected bootstrap procedure was employed to test the stability of the model’s findings: this confirmed that the total, direct, and indirect effects were statistically significant, as shown in Table 3.

Finally, the analysis revealed a strong positive relation between the independent variables and the dependent variable, with a squared multiple correlation coefficient (R²) of .890. This indicates that approximately 89% of the variance in antisocial behaviors can be explained by the variables involved in the model.

Descriptive results indicate that adolescents in our sample have experienced an average of 5.3 direct victimizations and 1.31 indirect victimizations across their lifetimes. The mean scores for SIP skills indicate that adolescents partially recognize the problems presented in the video-based social scenarios and tend to interpret others’ intentions as being a little mean. Meanwhile, adolescents do not tend to spontaneously generate aggressive responses to problematic social situations (mean of .26 out of 3), and their perceived self-efficacy in engaging in aggressive responses is not particularly high (2.39 out of 5). Finally, the most frequently reported antisocial behaviors among adolescents in the past year were drug-related activities, followed by aggression, and vandalism. A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated that early victimization experiences influence individuals’ cognitive functioning both in the short and long term (Cubillo, 2022). Specifically, it has been observed that different types of victimization during childhood and adolescence are related to alterations and biases in social information processing skills (Hepp et al., 2021; Kellij et al., 2022; van Reemst et al., 2016), and that these biases are associated with aggressive and maladaptive behaviors in children and adolescents (e.g., Crick & Dodge, 1996; Dodge et al., 2013; Orobio de Castro & van Dijk, 2017; Van Rest et al., 2019).

The results of our study suggest that, among the adolescents in our sample, victimization during childhood primarily affects their self-perception and their evaluation of personal skills and abilities. Previous research has shown that children who experience victimization may develop more negative views of themselves and their social environments during childhood (Sinclair et al., 2012) and early adulthood (Pabian & Vandebosch, 2021). In the present study, victimization experiences are linked to positive self-efficacy of individuals’ abilities to act aggressively. Perceived self-efficacy has a direct influence on behavioral choices and also affects cognitive processes, emotional responses, and the motivation to engage in specific behaviors or to overcome obstacles and challenges (Bandura, 1977). Previous studies have shown that aggressive self-efficacy is associated with normative beliefs about aggression and reactive aggression (Hadley et al., 2017), and that children who have experienced victimization but also exhibit aggressive behaviors have lower prosocial self-efficacy (Levy & Gumpel, 2022). Arguably, the adolescents in our sample consider themselves capable of acting aggressively because they have learned this behavior through their personal experience and observation of the environment, integrating maladaptive cognitive schemas that favor aggression into their databases (Calvete et al., 2018; Huesmann, 2018; Van Cappellen et al., 2023).

Children that have been victimized exhibit difficulties in the early stages of social information processing (e.g., Godleski & Murray-Close, 2023; Guy et al., 2017; ; Kokkinos & Voulgaridou, 2018; Yao & Enright, 2022; Zhao et al., 2023). However, our findings provide no evidence that childhood victimization affects problem recognition or hostile attribution bias, nor that this bias is directly linked to the development of antisocial behaviors. Several studies have also found no evidence of a direct relation between childhood victimization and hostile attribution bias (Kawabata et al., 2013) or of an association between hostile attribution bias and social maladjustment (Van Nieuwenhuijzen et al., 2017; Van Rest et al., 2019). These associations may be due to the format used to measure the variables (Dodge et al., 2002). Evaluating the early stages of processing presents a certain difficulty, as encoding of cues may require specific methods, such as eye tracking. (e.g., Garon et al., 2018; Horsley et al., 2010; Troop-Gordon et al., 2018). This study assesses problem recognition which does not refer purely to the encoding step, but is rather a process that is combined with the interpretation of the social situation, with it being hard to disentangle them using the video vignettes method (Van Rest et al., 2014).