Aggressive boys become stronger physically as teens

Washington: A new study has observed that boys who are aggressive in their childhood tend to develop greater physical strength as teenagers. This work was motivated by a long-standing controversy over the relationship between physical development and personality and the physiques of boys and girls increasingly diverge during adolescence, leading to a profound sex difference in physical strength, and there's also an observable sex difference in personality traits like physical aggression and risk taking.

Aggressive-antisocial tendencies were measured using a combination of teacher and self-report ratings, while strength was measured using hand-grip strength, which is highly correlated with other measures of muscular strength and to gauge hand-grip strength, the children were instructed to squeeze a dynamometer as hard as they could in both their left and right hands. The data revealed that boys who showed high levels of aggression and those who showed low levels of aggression were equally strong at age 11, but their strength seemed to diverge over time.