One hundred twenty 4-year-old children (30 from each culture, half girls) told two stories using toys with aggressive and neutral cues. Preschool teachers rated children's social competence and classroom behavior and parents completed a questionnaire about their child-rearing practices. Children's narratives were coded for length, complexity, story characteristics, thematic content, and number of aggressive words. Results showed that American children's narratives had more aggressive content, aggressive words, unfriendly characters, and mastery of situations with aggression than those of the Swedish, German, and Indonesian children. Although there were cross-cultural differences in the frequency of aggression in the narratives, there were similar intracultural patterns in children's individual characteristics that were related to aggression in the stories. The findings suggest that children's narratives reflect their knowledge and experience of aggression in their culture.
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