This paper aimed to review the international literature on Social Information Processing Model published from 1980 to 2004 using the keywords social cognition and information-processing social (PsycINFO). The authors analyze the convergence of these studies in regard to information processing by aggressive children and adolescents. According to the model, a child and adolescent's behavioral response to a problematic social stimulus is a function of different steps of processing: encoding of social cues, interpretation of social cues, response search, response evaluation, and enactment. After a short historical introduction about the model and its main postulates, empirical studies were described. The relation between social information-processing and aggressive behavior was confirmed in this revision but a low incidence of articles based on clinical samples was noted.
aggressive behavior; information-processing; social cognition