Aggression

• AGGRESSION

  • “Behavior intended to harm another behavior.” (Kassin et al, 2014)

  “Physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt someone.” (Myers, 2013)
• Aggression

  • Excludes unintentional harm
  • Actions that may involve pain as an unavoidable side effect of helping someone
• Related Terms:

  1. Violence

  • Extreme acts of aggression

  1. Anger

  • Strong feelings of displeasure in response to a perceived injury
  • Exact nature of these feelings

  1. Hostility

  • Negative, antagonistic attitude toward another person or group
• • Anger and hostility are often closely connected to aggression (but not always)
  • Aggression can occur without a trace of anger or hostility
• 2 Types of Aggression:

  1. Proactive or Instrumental Aggression
  2. 2. Reactive Aggression or Emotional Aggression
• 1. Proactive Aggression or Instrumental Aggression

  • Harm is inflicted as a means to a desired end
  • Aggression aimed at harming someone for personal gain, attention, or even self-defense
• 1. Reactive Aggression or Emotional Aggression

  • Harm is inflicted for its own sake
  • Often impulsive, carried out in the heat of the moment
• 5 Theories of Aggression:

  1. Evolutionary Approach
  2. The Cathartic Approach
  3. Social Approach
  4. Excitation-Transfer Model
  5. Learning theories of Aggression
• 2 Reinforcement of Learning Theories of Aggression

  1. Operant Reinforcement
  2. Social Learning Theory
• 1. Excitation-Transfer Model

  • Non-specific arousal can and inadvertently influence aggression

  e.g., elevated heart rate when we have arguments with someone but also when we find somebody attractive, or ride a rollercoaster

  • We differentiate the physiological arousals by giving them a label, depending on the external cues

  Residual Arousal

  • Arousal in one situation can carry over into a completely different situation
• 1. The Social Approach

  Cognitive Neoassociationistic Model (Berkowitz, 1969, 1989)

  • Provides an explanation for aggression that also takes into account environmental conditions, or cues that are generated by frustrating situations that lead to aggressive behavior
  • Aggressive behavior would only arise if there were appropriate cues in the environment – a person or object
• 1. The Cathartic Approach

  Psychodynamic Theory:

  • Two innate instincts: life (eros) and death (Thanatos)

  Freud: death instinct initially led to self-destructive behavior; later becomes redirected from the self toward others, as aggressive behavior
• The Cathartic Approach

  Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

  • Aggression resulted from frustration at a particular person or event (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939)
  • If aggression cannot be directly targeted at the cause of frustration because the person is too physically or socially powerful, or because the cause is a situation rather than a person, it may be redirected onto a more realistic target
• The Cathartic Approach Limitations:

  • In a study, angry participants continued to show aggression towards the person who caused the anger even after engaging in a cathartic exercise
• 1. The Evolutionary Approach

  • Social behavior has evolved over time, passed down from generation to generation (Simpson & Kenrick, 1997)
  • Use of aggression in ensuring genetic survival is particularly evident in animals
• The Evolutionary Approach Limitations

  1. Inherently difficult to provide supportive evidence because evolutionary tendencies have presumably developed over many thousands of years – hard to test in a laboratory
  2. We are not only aggressive to protect ourselves and our offsprings – people show aggression towards their closest relatives instead of protecting them.