knowt logo

Chapter Eleven: Aggression 

What Is Aggression?

  • Aggression: Behavior that is intended to harm another individual

    • Proactive Aggression: Aggression in which harm is inflicted as a means to a desired end

      • Harming someone for personal gain

      • Harming someone for attention

      • Harming someone for self-defense

      • Also called instrumental aggression

    • Reactive Aggression: Harm that is inflicted for its own sake

      • Also called emotional aggression

      • Often impulsive and carried out in the heat of the moment

      • Can also be calm and calculating

  • ex: words, deeds, rumors, failure to act

  • Violence: Extreme acts of aggression

  • Anger: Strong feelings of displeasure in response to a perceived injury

  • Hostility: A negative, antagonistic attitude toward another person or group

Culture, Gender, and Individual Differences

Culture and Aggression

Comparisons Across Societies

  • The US has one of the highest murder rates among politically stable, industrialized nations

  • Murder rates tend to be much higher in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Southern and Middle Africa

  • Countries with wide disparities in income have murder rates almost 4x greater than societies with more equal income distribution

  • Individualistic cultures are most likely to have a relatively high rate of aggression

  • School shootings are high in the US

  • The US has a tremendous amount of gun-related violence

  • Compared to the UK and Canada

    • The rate of violent crime is lower in the US

    • The murder rate is higher in the US

  • Cultural differences in what is considered a crime

    • Domestic violence seen as acceptable in India and Nepal

    • Groping underage girls acceptable in Japan

    • GenItal mutilation acceptable in parts of Africa and Asia

Bullying Around the World

  • Intentional harm, physically or psychologically

  • Repetition: The victim is targeted a number of times

  • Power Imbalance: The bully abuses their power over the victim

  • Cyberbullying: Bullying through electronic devices and social media

  • Victim’s suffering

    • Feelings of panic, nervousness, and distraction in school

    • Recurring memories of abuse

    • Depression and anxiety

    • Suicide

Nonviolent Cultures

  • The Chewong don’t have a words in their language for acts of aggression

  • Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites

  • These cultures cherish peacefulness, and some even have religious or mythological reasons for remaining peaceful

Subcultures Within a Country

  • Teens and young adults have a much greater rate of involvement in violent crime

  • The large majority of murders happen within the murderer’s race

  • Having an ethnic minority background can be tied to higher instances of aggression in other parts of the world

  • Murder rate is consistently highest in the South of the US

    • Culture of honor is prevalent among white males in this region

    • Could also be due to the hot weather

Gender and Aggression

  • Men are more violent than women

  • Men commit the large majority of homicides

  • Men constitute the large majority of murder victims

  • school shooters are male

  • The vast majority of people killed by an intimate partner are women

  • Males are consistently more aggressive than females

  • Females are as likely to feel anger as males, but they’re less likely to act on their anger in aggressive ways

  • Boys tend to be more overtly aggressive than girls

  • Girls tend to be equally as / more aggressive than boys when it comes to indirect and relational aggression

    • Indirect Aggression: Acts like telling lies to get someone in trouble or shutting a person out of desired activities

    • Relational Aggression: A kind of indirect aggression that targets a person’s relationships and social status

      • Threatening to end a friendship

      • Gossipping

      • Trying to get others to dislike the target

    • Why?

      • Females typically care more about relationships and intimacy

        • May see injuring someone socially as particularly effective

      • Strong norms encourage boys to aggress physically and discourage girls from doing so

  • Gay men reported significantly lower levels of physical aggression than straight men

  • No difference with indirect aggression

  • There is no reliable gender difference in the percentage of women and men who physically assault their intimate partners

    • Women are at least as likely to aggress against their intimate partners as men are

    • Men are far less likely to report that their partners physically assaulted them

    • Consequences of aggression and violence are far from equal

      • Women are often killed, seriously injured, or sexually assaulted during domestic disputes

  • Sexual Assault

    • Men are more likely to be perpetrators

    • Females are more likely to be targets

Individual Differences

  • Aggression in childhood predicts aggression in adolescence and adulthood

  • Big Five factors: Five dimensions that account for a great deal of variability in people’s personalities across gender and culture

    • Being low in agreeableness is a particularly strong predictor of aggression

    • Being low in openness and high in neuroticism are also associated with aggression

  • Some traits associated with aggression only predict aggression reliably under conditions of provocation

    • Conditions of Provocation: Situations in which the individual feels threatened, insulted, or stressed

    • Emotional Susceptibility: The tendency to feel distressed, inadequate, and vulnerable to perceived threats

    • Type A Personality: The tendency to be driven by feelings of inadequacy to try to prove oneself through personal accomplishments

    • Impulsivity: Being relatively unable to control one’s thoughts and behaviors

  • Relationship between self-esteem and aggression

    • Evidence is mixed

    • Can be different across cultures

  • Narcissism: Having an inflated sense of self-worth and self-love, having low empathy for others, tending to focus on the self rather than others, and being especially sensitive to perceived insults

    • Consistently and positively correlated with aggression in response to provocation, especially public provocation

  • Dark Triad: A set of three traits that are associated with higher levels of aggressiveness: Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism

    • Machiavellianism: Characterized by manipulativeness

    • Psychopathy: Characterized by impulsivity, poor self-control, and a lack of empathy

  • Self-control

    • Children low in self-control tend to be more aggressive as young adults

    • Poor self-control is one of the strongest predictors of crime, cyberbullying, and aggression toward strangers and romantic partners

Origins of Aggression

  • Both nature and nurture play their respective roles

Evolutionary Psychology

  • Our ancestors increased their chances of attracting mates and achieving status in a group when they engaged in fighting and warfare

  • Evolution favored the inhibition in aggression against those who’re genetically related to us

  • Males are competitive with each other because females select high-status males for mating and aggression is a way males were able to achieve and maintain status

  • Male-to-male violence is most likely to occur when one male is perceived as challenging the other’s status or social power

  • Male-to-female violence is predominantly triggered by sexual jealousy

  • Evolution favored women who could protect their children

  • Relational aggression can harm the reputations of rival females, which can make men less interested in them

Genes, Hormones, and the Brain

Genes

  • Heritability explains between a third and a half of the variation in aggression in children

  • MAOA gene has been linked to aggressive behavior

The Role of Testosterone

  • Strong link between testosterone levels and aggression

  • Association between testosterone and human aggression is weaker and less reliable than expected

  • Combination of high testosterone and low cortisol is what predicts aggression

  • When cortisol levels are high, the effects of testosterone on aggression are more likely to be blocked or inhibited

The Role of Serotonin

  • Low levels of serotonin in the nervous systems of humans and many animals are associated with high levels of aggression

  • Drugs that boost serotonin’s activity can dampen aggressiveness

Brain and Executive Functioning

  • Evidence linking abnormalities in frontal lobe structures with tendencies toward aggressive and violent behavior

  • Impaired prefrontal processing can disrupt executive functioning

    • Executive Functioning: The cognitive abilities and processes that allow humans to plan or inhibit their actions

  • Link between poor executive functioning and high aggression

  • Aggression and brain activity

    • Very aggressive teens don’t show empathy in response to witnessing pain

    • Exhibit a pattern of brain activity associated with experiencing rewards

    • Less activation in areas associated with self-regulation and moral reasoning

  • Concussions

    • Damage to the uncinate fasciculus was associated with more aggression and impulsivity and compromised executive functioning

    • Uncinate Fasciculus: The part of the brain that connects the orbitofrontal cortex with the anterior temporal lobe

How Is Aggression Learned?

  • Positive Reinforcement: When aggression produces desired outcomes

  • Negative Reinforcement: When aggression prevents or stops undesirable outcomes

  • Children who see aggression producing more good outcomes and fewer bad outcomes are more aggressive than other children

  • Punishment is most likely to decrease aggression when it

    • Immediately follows the aggressive behavior

    • Is strong enough to deter the aggressor

    • Is consistently applies and perceived as fair and legitimate by the aggressor

    • (When these conditions aren’t met, punishment can backfire)

  • The certainty of punishment is more important than its severity

Corporal Punishment

  • Physical force intended to cause a child pain, but not injury, for the purpose of controlling or correcting the child’s behavior

  • Less prevalent than it used to be

  • Majority of children in the US today experience spanking and other forms of corporal punishment

  • Remains common around the world

  • Spanking may result in immediate obedience but doesn’t work in the long run

  • More corporal punishment now is associated with more aggression later

  • Teaches the child that physical force is an effective and appropriate way to deal with problems

  • Less likely to increase aggressiveness when it’s administered in the context of an overall warm and supportive parent-child relationship

  • Association between corporal punishment and later aggressiveness was weaker in African American families

Social Learning Theory

  • The theory that behavior is learned through the observation of others as well as through the direct experience of rewards and punishments

  • Models affect antisocial, aggressive behavior

  • Bandura’s Bobo Dolls

  • A wide range of aggressive models can elicit a wide range of aggressive imitations

  • Models don’t have to be present (ex: TV)

  • Children can learn aggression by seeing it modeled by cartoon characters

  • People can also learn aggressive scripts that serve as guides for how to behave and solve social problems

    • Can be activated automatically in various situations

    • Can learn from their parents

      • Watching their parents fight

      • Parents using physical force to discipline their children

  • Cycle of Violence: Children who witness parental violence or who are themselves abused are more likely as adults to inflict abuse on intimate partners or their children or be victims of intimate violence

  • Nonaggressive models can decrease aggressive behavior

  • Males and females are taught different lessons about aggression

    • Boys are more likely than girls to be taught that physical aggression is an appropriate and rewarding way to handle conflict or manipulate other people

    • Relational aggression may be rewarded for girls

    • Overt aggression was associated with more popularity for boys and less popularity for girls

    • Relational aggression was more strongly associated with popularity for girls than boys

Culture and Honor

  • Socialization of aggression varies from culture to culture

  • Adolescent boys in traditional villages in Italy are encouraged to aggress as an indication of their sexual prowess and in preparation for their dominant role in the household

  • Machismo: Challenges, abuse, and even differences of opinion must be met with fists or other weapons

  • Culture of Honor: A culture that emphasizes honor and social status, particularly for males, and the role of aggression in protecting that honor

  • Cultures of honor are associated with school violence

  • Suicide rates are higher in culture-of-honor states

Situational Influences on Aggression

The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

  • Frustration, which is produced by interrupting a person’s progress toward an expected goal, will always elicit the motive to aggress

  • All aggression is caused by frustration

  • Displacement: Aggressing against a substitute target because aggressive acts against the source of the frustration are inhibited by fear or lack of access

  • Catharsis: Displacing aggression in these ways can be effective at reducing the drive to aggress further

The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: Does the Evidence Support It?

  • Frustration doesn’t always produce aggressive inclinations

  • Not all aggression is caused by frustration

  • Catharsis is a two-step sequence

    • Aggression reduces the level of physiological arousal

    • Because arousal is reduced, people are less angry and less likely to aggress further

  • The catharsis idea is a myth

  • Frustration can simply dissipate over time

  • In the long run, successful aggression sets the stage for more aggression later

Negative Affect

  • Negative feelings can trigger aggression

Heat and Aggression: Losing Your Cool

  • People lose their cool in hot temperatures and behave more aggressively

  • More violent crimes occur in the summer, in hot years, and in hot cities

  • Reports of violence peak in the summer months

  • Global warming will make this a huge issue

  • Culture of honor also an important factor

    • May interact with the heat

    • The relatively high temps of the region may support aggressive norms

Provocation and Social Rejection

  • Provocation causes negative affect, which plays an important role in triggering aggression

  • Insults and rejections increases the likelihood of aggressive responses

  • Social rejection is the most significant risk factor for adolescent violence

Culture and Negative Affect

  • American participants are relatively more likely to experience anger than japanese participants

  • Japanese participants are relatively more likely to experience shame than american participants

  • For people in collectivist cultures, anger in reaction to frustration might violate cultural values of social harmony

  • Japanese individuals of relatively low status expressed anger less often than those of higher status

Arousal

  • Noise, violent movies, and arousing music have been shown to increase aggression

  • Heat increases arousal

  • Excitation Transfer: The arousal created by one stimulus can intensify an individual’s emotional response to another stimulus

    • People are likely to misattribute arousal caused by heat to something else

    • Leads to aggression

Thought: Automatic and Deliberate

Aggressive Cues

  • The presence of a weapon can act as a situational cue that automatically triggers aggressive thoughts and feelings

    • Increases the likelihood of aggression

    • Berkowitz and LePage

    • Weapons Effect: The tendency for the presence of guns to increase aggression

  • Individuals may differ in what associations they have with various weapons

    • Hunters were less likely to associate hunting guns with aggression bc they linked them with sport and fun

    • Hunters had more negative, aggressive associations with assault guns than nonhunters

  • Weapons increase men’s testosterone levels

  • Any object or external characteristic that’s associated with successful aggression, pain, or unpleasantness, can serve as an aggression-enhancing situational cue

Higher-Order Cognition

  • An angry person might refrain from acting aggressively if they realize that the potential costs of fighting seems too high

  • Hostile Attribution Bias: People tend to perceive hostile intent in others

    • Associated with both physical and relational aggression

  • Violent prisoners were much more likely to interpret the ambiguous faces as angry

  • Violent men perceive more hostility in others, which is likely to trigger more aggressive responses in turn

The Struggle for Self-Control: Rumination, Alcohol, and Other Factors

  • Ability to practice self-control is vital to the inhibition of aggression

  • Behind a majority of aggressive and violent acts lies the failure of self-control

  • Rumination: Repeatedly thinking about and reliving an anger-inducing event, focusing on angry thoughts and feelings, and even planning or imagining revenge

  • Rumination contributes to direct and displaced aggression

  • Rumination impairs people’s ability to inhibit aggression

  • High arousal impairs the cognitive control of aggression

    • When you’re very emotional and angry, it’s hard to focus on anything else

  • Alcohol as an obstacle to self-control

    • Alcohol consumption often increases aggressive behavior

    • Reduces inhibitions ➝ facilitates aggressive behaviors

    • Impairs people’s executive functioning

    • Alcohol Myopia: Alcohol narrows people’s focus of intention

      • May focus on a perceived provocation

      • Fail to think about info that’d explain away this provocation

      • Makes aggression much more likely to occur unless the drunk person’s focus can be distracted

  • Non-alcoholic sugar-rich drinks can boost people’s executive functioning and self-control

  • Being hangry leads to heightened arousal bc the low glucose leaves our brain with less of the energy required for self-control

  • Caffeine significantly increases arousal, which can increases aggression

Situational Influences: Putting It All Together

General Aggression Model

  • Various aversive experiences, situational cues, and individual differences can create negative affect, high arousal, and aggressive thoughts, which can lead to aggressive behavior

  • Depends on the outcome of higher-order thinking

    • Can inhibit aggression

    • Can facilitate aggression

L-cubed theory

  • Emphasizes the role of self-control in aggression

  • Instigation: Social factors that often trigger aggressive impulses, such as provocation or social rejection

  • Impellance: Personality and situational factors that promote the urge to aggress when encountering instigating factors

    • Angry rumination

    • Trait aggressiveness

  • Inhibition: The various factors of self-control

Media Effects

Violence in Popular Media: Does Life Imitate Art?

The Research Findings

  • Media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts

  • Significant link between violent media and actual aggressive thoughts and behaviors

  • Playing violent video games was associated with

    • Increased aggressive behavior, cognition, and affect

    • Decreased prosocial behavior and affect

    • Playing prosocial games has the opposite effect

  • Indirect or relational aggression in children’s TV

    • Indirect aggressors tended to be rewarded for their aggression

    • More likely to be female and attractive

    • Exposure had immediate effects on adolescents’ behavior

  • Not everyone exposed to media violence will become more aggressive

  • Not all acts of aggression are fueled by media violence

  • Frequent exposure to media violence should be seen as an important risk factor for real-world aggression

How Does Media Violence Cause These Effects?

  • Desensitization: Reduction in emotion-related physiological reactivity to real violence

    • Form of habituation

    • Reduces physiological arousal and corresponding brain activity to new incidents of violence

    • Makes us become more accepting of violence

  • Influences people’s values and attitudes toward aggression, making it seem more legitimate

    • Fuels the aggressive scripts that we develop, which we then use to guide our behavior

  • Cultivation: The process by which the mass media constructs a version of social reality for the public

    • People perceive it as true even when it isn’t

    • The media tends to depict the world as much more violent than it actually is

    • Makes people more fearful, distrustful, and likely to arm themselves

    • More likely to behave aggressively in what they perceive as a threatening situation

Pornography: explicit sexual material

Nonviolent and Violent Pornography

  • Little support for a direct causal link between the use of nonviolent porn and sexual aggression

  • Evidence for an association between porn use and attitudes supporting violence against women

  • Violent porn brings together high arousal, negative emotional reactions, and aggressive thoughts

  • Porn sites focus specifically on images of sexual violence against women and use depictions of women’s pain as a selling point

  • Effects of violent porn are gender-specific

    • Male-to-male aggression is no greater after exposure to violent porn

    • Male-to-female aggression is markedly increased after exposure to violent porn

Individual Differences

  • Not everyone is affected by pornography in the same way

  • Risk Factors:

    • Men who have relatively high levels of sexual arousal in response to violent porn

    • Men who express attitudes and opinions indicating acceptance of violence toward women

    • Men who regularly use pornography and whose parents frequently used harsh corporal punishment

  • Confluence Model of Sexual Aggression: For the subset of individuals who already score high on multiple known risk factors of sexual aggression, consuming pornography increases the risk of sexually aggressive attitudes and behaviors

    • The presence of multiple risk factors at once is especially dangerous

    • Porn becomes a greater risk factor for aggression

Objectification and Dehumanization

  • Men who automatically associated women with animals or objects showed stronger inclination to sexually harass or rape women

  • Prejudice and aggression toward outgroups are more likely to result when people perceive outgroup members like objects

  • Dehumanization is a common by-product of conflict and war between groups

    • Fighting between groups fosters a biased perspective of the other group

    • Makes engaging in violence more tolerable and seemingly necessary

    • Makes finding peace more difficult

    • Lowers the restraints against stepping over the ethical line into abuse and torture

  • Cure for dehumanization is to restore the human connection

Reducing Aggression and Violence

  • Norms have changed dramatically to discourage aggression

Thoughts, Feelings, and Self-Control

  • Enhanced education, intelligence, reasoning, and empathy

  • Aggression Replacement Training:

    • Social competence training

    • Improved moral reasoning

    • Aggression control

  • Most promising interventions for reducing reactive aggression

    • Improve self-control

      • Two-week self-control training task

    • Emphasize cognitive reappraisal

      • Train individuals to interpret provocations in more neutral, less emotional terms

      • Think about the events from an objective, non-personal perspective

    • Cognitive control

      • Training the regulation of emotion in response to emotionally relevant stimuli

      • Related to self-control

    • Mindfulness

      • Getting people to be in a nonjudgmental, nonreactive state in which they more easily just accept their physical and mental experiences

  • Behavioral Modification: Treatments that try to alter an individual’s behavior through learning principles that reinforce nonaggressive actions

Sociocultural Approaches

  • Improved economy, healthier living conditions, and social support would reduce the factors that fuel aggression

  • Reducing the prevalence of guns in society would have a number of calming effects

  • Teach and model nonviolent responses to frustrations and social problems

  • Fostering cooperation and shared goals across groups

  • Select shows and games for children that provide compelling, vivid prosocial models

Multiple-Level Approaches: Programs to Prevent Violence and Bullying

Multisystemic Therapy

  • Addresses individuals’ problems at several different levels

  • Individualized treatment

  • Works with patient’s family and environment

  • Takes a lot of time and resources

  • Significantly reduces the rates of violent crimes

Bullying Prevention

  • Comprehensive programs that operate on multiple levels

  • Most successful bullying prevention programs are the more intensive and long-lasting ones

  • Empathy-training programs

  • Specifically target bystanders

Chapter Eleven: Aggression 

What Is Aggression?

  • Aggression: Behavior that is intended to harm another individual

    • Proactive Aggression: Aggression in which harm is inflicted as a means to a desired end

      • Harming someone for personal gain

      • Harming someone for attention

      • Harming someone for self-defense

      • Also called instrumental aggression

    • Reactive Aggression: Harm that is inflicted for its own sake

      • Also called emotional aggression

      • Often impulsive and carried out in the heat of the moment

      • Can also be calm and calculating

  • ex: words, deeds, rumors, failure to act

  • Violence: Extreme acts of aggression

  • Anger: Strong feelings of displeasure in response to a perceived injury

  • Hostility: A negative, antagonistic attitude toward another person or group

Culture, Gender, and Individual Differences

Culture and Aggression

Comparisons Across Societies

  • The US has one of the highest murder rates among politically stable, industrialized nations

  • Murder rates tend to be much higher in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Southern and Middle Africa

  • Countries with wide disparities in income have murder rates almost 4x greater than societies with more equal income distribution

  • Individualistic cultures are most likely to have a relatively high rate of aggression

  • School shootings are high in the US

  • The US has a tremendous amount of gun-related violence

  • Compared to the UK and Canada

    • The rate of violent crime is lower in the US

    • The murder rate is higher in the US

  • Cultural differences in what is considered a crime

    • Domestic violence seen as acceptable in India and Nepal

    • Groping underage girls acceptable in Japan

    • GenItal mutilation acceptable in parts of Africa and Asia

Bullying Around the World

  • Intentional harm, physically or psychologically

  • Repetition: The victim is targeted a number of times

  • Power Imbalance: The bully abuses their power over the victim

  • Cyberbullying: Bullying through electronic devices and social media

  • Victim’s suffering

    • Feelings of panic, nervousness, and distraction in school

    • Recurring memories of abuse

    • Depression and anxiety

    • Suicide

Nonviolent Cultures

  • The Chewong don’t have a words in their language for acts of aggression

  • Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites

  • These cultures cherish peacefulness, and some even have religious or mythological reasons for remaining peaceful

Subcultures Within a Country

  • Teens and young adults have a much greater rate of involvement in violent crime

  • The large majority of murders happen within the murderer’s race

  • Having an ethnic minority background can be tied to higher instances of aggression in other parts of the world

  • Murder rate is consistently highest in the South of the US

    • Culture of honor is prevalent among white males in this region

    • Could also be due to the hot weather

Gender and Aggression

  • Men are more violent than women

  • Men commit the large majority of homicides

  • Men constitute the large majority of murder victims

  • school shooters are male

  • The vast majority of people killed by an intimate partner are women

  • Males are consistently more aggressive than females

  • Females are as likely to feel anger as males, but they’re less likely to act on their anger in aggressive ways

  • Boys tend to be more overtly aggressive than girls

  • Girls tend to be equally as / more aggressive than boys when it comes to indirect and relational aggression

    • Indirect Aggression: Acts like telling lies to get someone in trouble or shutting a person out of desired activities

    • Relational Aggression: A kind of indirect aggression that targets a person’s relationships and social status

      • Threatening to end a friendship

      • Gossipping

      • Trying to get others to dislike the target

    • Why?

      • Females typically care more about relationships and intimacy

        • May see injuring someone socially as particularly effective

      • Strong norms encourage boys to aggress physically and discourage girls from doing so

  • Gay men reported significantly lower levels of physical aggression than straight men

  • No difference with indirect aggression

  • There is no reliable gender difference in the percentage of women and men who physically assault their intimate partners

    • Women are at least as likely to aggress against their intimate partners as men are

    • Men are far less likely to report that their partners physically assaulted them

    • Consequences of aggression and violence are far from equal

      • Women are often killed, seriously injured, or sexually assaulted during domestic disputes

  • Sexual Assault

    • Men are more likely to be perpetrators

    • Females are more likely to be targets

Individual Differences

  • Aggression in childhood predicts aggression in adolescence and adulthood

  • Big Five factors: Five dimensions that account for a great deal of variability in people’s personalities across gender and culture

    • Being low in agreeableness is a particularly strong predictor of aggression

    • Being low in openness and high in neuroticism are also associated with aggression

  • Some traits associated with aggression only predict aggression reliably under conditions of provocation

    • Conditions of Provocation: Situations in which the individual feels threatened, insulted, or stressed

    • Emotional Susceptibility: The tendency to feel distressed, inadequate, and vulnerable to perceived threats

    • Type A Personality: The tendency to be driven by feelings of inadequacy to try to prove oneself through personal accomplishments

    • Impulsivity: Being relatively unable to control one’s thoughts and behaviors

  • Relationship between self-esteem and aggression

    • Evidence is mixed

    • Can be different across cultures

  • Narcissism: Having an inflated sense of self-worth and self-love, having low empathy for others, tending to focus on the self rather than others, and being especially sensitive to perceived insults

    • Consistently and positively correlated with aggression in response to provocation, especially public provocation

  • Dark Triad: A set of three traits that are associated with higher levels of aggressiveness: Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism

    • Machiavellianism: Characterized by manipulativeness

    • Psychopathy: Characterized by impulsivity, poor self-control, and a lack of empathy

  • Self-control

    • Children low in self-control tend to be more aggressive as young adults

    • Poor self-control is one of the strongest predictors of crime, cyberbullying, and aggression toward strangers and romantic partners

Origins of Aggression

  • Both nature and nurture play their respective roles

Evolutionary Psychology

  • Our ancestors increased their chances of attracting mates and achieving status in a group when they engaged in fighting and warfare

  • Evolution favored the inhibition in aggression against those who’re genetically related to us

  • Males are competitive with each other because females select high-status males for mating and aggression is a way males were able to achieve and maintain status

  • Male-to-male violence is most likely to occur when one male is perceived as challenging the other’s status or social power

  • Male-to-female violence is predominantly triggered by sexual jealousy

  • Evolution favored women who could protect their children

  • Relational aggression can harm the reputations of rival females, which can make men less interested in them

Genes, Hormones, and the Brain

Genes

  • Heritability explains between a third and a half of the variation in aggression in children

  • MAOA gene has been linked to aggressive behavior

The Role of Testosterone

  • Strong link between testosterone levels and aggression

  • Association between testosterone and human aggression is weaker and less reliable than expected

  • Combination of high testosterone and low cortisol is what predicts aggression

  • When cortisol levels are high, the effects of testosterone on aggression are more likely to be blocked or inhibited

The Role of Serotonin

  • Low levels of serotonin in the nervous systems of humans and many animals are associated with high levels of aggression

  • Drugs that boost serotonin’s activity can dampen aggressiveness

Brain and Executive Functioning

  • Evidence linking abnormalities in frontal lobe structures with tendencies toward aggressive and violent behavior

  • Impaired prefrontal processing can disrupt executive functioning

    • Executive Functioning: The cognitive abilities and processes that allow humans to plan or inhibit their actions

  • Link between poor executive functioning and high aggression

  • Aggression and brain activity

    • Very aggressive teens don’t show empathy in response to witnessing pain

    • Exhibit a pattern of brain activity associated with experiencing rewards

    • Less activation in areas associated with self-regulation and moral reasoning

  • Concussions

    • Damage to the uncinate fasciculus was associated with more aggression and impulsivity and compromised executive functioning

    • Uncinate Fasciculus: The part of the brain that connects the orbitofrontal cortex with the anterior temporal lobe

How Is Aggression Learned?

  • Positive Reinforcement: When aggression produces desired outcomes

  • Negative Reinforcement: When aggression prevents or stops undesirable outcomes

  • Children who see aggression producing more good outcomes and fewer bad outcomes are more aggressive than other children

  • Punishment is most likely to decrease aggression when it

    • Immediately follows the aggressive behavior

    • Is strong enough to deter the aggressor

    • Is consistently applies and perceived as fair and legitimate by the aggressor

    • (When these conditions aren’t met, punishment can backfire)

  • The certainty of punishment is more important than its severity

Corporal Punishment

  • Physical force intended to cause a child pain, but not injury, for the purpose of controlling or correcting the child’s behavior

  • Less prevalent than it used to be

  • Majority of children in the US today experience spanking and other forms of corporal punishment

  • Remains common around the world

  • Spanking may result in immediate obedience but doesn’t work in the long run

  • More corporal punishment now is associated with more aggression later

  • Teaches the child that physical force is an effective and appropriate way to deal with problems

  • Less likely to increase aggressiveness when it’s administered in the context of an overall warm and supportive parent-child relationship

  • Association between corporal punishment and later aggressiveness was weaker in African American families

Social Learning Theory

  • The theory that behavior is learned through the observation of others as well as through the direct experience of rewards and punishments

  • Models affect antisocial, aggressive behavior

  • Bandura’s Bobo Dolls

  • A wide range of aggressive models can elicit a wide range of aggressive imitations

  • Models don’t have to be present (ex: TV)

  • Children can learn aggression by seeing it modeled by cartoon characters

  • People can also learn aggressive scripts that serve as guides for how to behave and solve social problems

    • Can be activated automatically in various situations

    • Can learn from their parents

      • Watching their parents fight

      • Parents using physical force to discipline their children

  • Cycle of Violence: Children who witness parental violence or who are themselves abused are more likely as adults to inflict abuse on intimate partners or their children or be victims of intimate violence

  • Nonaggressive models can decrease aggressive behavior

  • Males and females are taught different lessons about aggression

    • Boys are more likely than girls to be taught that physical aggression is an appropriate and rewarding way to handle conflict or manipulate other people

    • Relational aggression may be rewarded for girls

    • Overt aggression was associated with more popularity for boys and less popularity for girls

    • Relational aggression was more strongly associated with popularity for girls than boys

Culture and Honor

  • Socialization of aggression varies from culture to culture

  • Adolescent boys in traditional villages in Italy are encouraged to aggress as an indication of their sexual prowess and in preparation for their dominant role in the household

  • Machismo: Challenges, abuse, and even differences of opinion must be met with fists or other weapons

  • Culture of Honor: A culture that emphasizes honor and social status, particularly for males, and the role of aggression in protecting that honor

  • Cultures of honor are associated with school violence

  • Suicide rates are higher in culture-of-honor states

Situational Influences on Aggression

The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

  • Frustration, which is produced by interrupting a person’s progress toward an expected goal, will always elicit the motive to aggress

  • All aggression is caused by frustration

  • Displacement: Aggressing against a substitute target because aggressive acts against the source of the frustration are inhibited by fear or lack of access

  • Catharsis: Displacing aggression in these ways can be effective at reducing the drive to aggress further

The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: Does the Evidence Support It?

  • Frustration doesn’t always produce aggressive inclinations

  • Not all aggression is caused by frustration

  • Catharsis is a two-step sequence

    • Aggression reduces the level of physiological arousal

    • Because arousal is reduced, people are less angry and less likely to aggress further

  • The catharsis idea is a myth

  • Frustration can simply dissipate over time

  • In the long run, successful aggression sets the stage for more aggression later

Negative Affect

  • Negative feelings can trigger aggression

Heat and Aggression: Losing Your Cool

  • People lose their cool in hot temperatures and behave more aggressively

  • More violent crimes occur in the summer, in hot years, and in hot cities

  • Reports of violence peak in the summer months

  • Global warming will make this a huge issue

  • Culture of honor also an important factor

    • May interact with the heat

    • The relatively high temps of the region may support aggressive norms

Provocation and Social Rejection

  • Provocation causes negative affect, which plays an important role in triggering aggression

  • Insults and rejections increases the likelihood of aggressive responses

  • Social rejection is the most significant risk factor for adolescent violence

Culture and Negative Affect

  • American participants are relatively more likely to experience anger than japanese participants

  • Japanese participants are relatively more likely to experience shame than american participants

  • For people in collectivist cultures, anger in reaction to frustration might violate cultural values of social harmony

  • Japanese individuals of relatively low status expressed anger less often than those of higher status

Arousal

  • Noise, violent movies, and arousing music have been shown to increase aggression

  • Heat increases arousal

  • Excitation Transfer: The arousal created by one stimulus can intensify an individual’s emotional response to another stimulus

    • People are likely to misattribute arousal caused by heat to something else

    • Leads to aggression

Thought: Automatic and Deliberate

Aggressive Cues

  • The presence of a weapon can act as a situational cue that automatically triggers aggressive thoughts and feelings

    • Increases the likelihood of aggression

    • Berkowitz and LePage

    • Weapons Effect: The tendency for the presence of guns to increase aggression

  • Individuals may differ in what associations they have with various weapons

    • Hunters were less likely to associate hunting guns with aggression bc they linked them with sport and fun

    • Hunters had more negative, aggressive associations with assault guns than nonhunters

  • Weapons increase men’s testosterone levels

  • Any object or external characteristic that’s associated with successful aggression, pain, or unpleasantness, can serve as an aggression-enhancing situational cue

Higher-Order Cognition

  • An angry person might refrain from acting aggressively if they realize that the potential costs of fighting seems too high

  • Hostile Attribution Bias: People tend to perceive hostile intent in others

    • Associated with both physical and relational aggression

  • Violent prisoners were much more likely to interpret the ambiguous faces as angry

  • Violent men perceive more hostility in others, which is likely to trigger more aggressive responses in turn

The Struggle for Self-Control: Rumination, Alcohol, and Other Factors

  • Ability to practice self-control is vital to the inhibition of aggression

  • Behind a majority of aggressive and violent acts lies the failure of self-control

  • Rumination: Repeatedly thinking about and reliving an anger-inducing event, focusing on angry thoughts and feelings, and even planning or imagining revenge

  • Rumination contributes to direct and displaced aggression

  • Rumination impairs people’s ability to inhibit aggression

  • High arousal impairs the cognitive control of aggression

    • When you’re very emotional and angry, it’s hard to focus on anything else

  • Alcohol as an obstacle to self-control

    • Alcohol consumption often increases aggressive behavior

    • Reduces inhibitions ➝ facilitates aggressive behaviors

    • Impairs people’s executive functioning

    • Alcohol Myopia: Alcohol narrows people’s focus of intention

      • May focus on a perceived provocation

      • Fail to think about info that’d explain away this provocation

      • Makes aggression much more likely to occur unless the drunk person’s focus can be distracted

  • Non-alcoholic sugar-rich drinks can boost people’s executive functioning and self-control

  • Being hangry leads to heightened arousal bc the low glucose leaves our brain with less of the energy required for self-control

  • Caffeine significantly increases arousal, which can increases aggression

Situational Influences: Putting It All Together

General Aggression Model

  • Various aversive experiences, situational cues, and individual differences can create negative affect, high arousal, and aggressive thoughts, which can lead to aggressive behavior

  • Depends on the outcome of higher-order thinking

    • Can inhibit aggression

    • Can facilitate aggression

L-cubed theory

  • Emphasizes the role of self-control in aggression

  • Instigation: Social factors that often trigger aggressive impulses, such as provocation or social rejection

  • Impellance: Personality and situational factors that promote the urge to aggress when encountering instigating factors

    • Angry rumination

    • Trait aggressiveness

  • Inhibition: The various factors of self-control

Media Effects

Violence in Popular Media: Does Life Imitate Art?

The Research Findings

  • Media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts

  • Significant link between violent media and actual aggressive thoughts and behaviors

  • Playing violent video games was associated with

    • Increased aggressive behavior, cognition, and affect

    • Decreased prosocial behavior and affect

    • Playing prosocial games has the opposite effect

  • Indirect or relational aggression in children’s TV

    • Indirect aggressors tended to be rewarded for their aggression

    • More likely to be female and attractive

    • Exposure had immediate effects on adolescents’ behavior

  • Not everyone exposed to media violence will become more aggressive

  • Not all acts of aggression are fueled by media violence

  • Frequent exposure to media violence should be seen as an important risk factor for real-world aggression

How Does Media Violence Cause These Effects?

  • Desensitization: Reduction in emotion-related physiological reactivity to real violence

    • Form of habituation

    • Reduces physiological arousal and corresponding brain activity to new incidents of violence

    • Makes us become more accepting of violence

  • Influences people’s values and attitudes toward aggression, making it seem more legitimate

    • Fuels the aggressive scripts that we develop, which we then use to guide our behavior

  • Cultivation: The process by which the mass media constructs a version of social reality for the public

    • People perceive it as true even when it isn’t

    • The media tends to depict the world as much more violent than it actually is

    • Makes people more fearful, distrustful, and likely to arm themselves

    • More likely to behave aggressively in what they perceive as a threatening situation

Pornography: explicit sexual material

Nonviolent and Violent Pornography

  • Little support for a direct causal link between the use of nonviolent porn and sexual aggression

  • Evidence for an association between porn use and attitudes supporting violence against women

  • Violent porn brings together high arousal, negative emotional reactions, and aggressive thoughts

  • Porn sites focus specifically on images of sexual violence against women and use depictions of women’s pain as a selling point

  • Effects of violent porn are gender-specific

    • Male-to-male aggression is no greater after exposure to violent porn

    • Male-to-female aggression is markedly increased after exposure to violent porn

Individual Differences

  • Not everyone is affected by pornography in the same way

  • Risk Factors:

    • Men who have relatively high levels of sexual arousal in response to violent porn

    • Men who express attitudes and opinions indicating acceptance of violence toward women

    • Men who regularly use pornography and whose parents frequently used harsh corporal punishment

  • Confluence Model of Sexual Aggression: For the subset of individuals who already score high on multiple known risk factors of sexual aggression, consuming pornography increases the risk of sexually aggressive attitudes and behaviors

    • The presence of multiple risk factors at once is especially dangerous

    • Porn becomes a greater risk factor for aggression

Objectification and Dehumanization

  • Men who automatically associated women with animals or objects showed stronger inclination to sexually harass or rape women

  • Prejudice and aggression toward outgroups are more likely to result when people perceive outgroup members like objects

  • Dehumanization is a common by-product of conflict and war between groups

    • Fighting between groups fosters a biased perspective of the other group

    • Makes engaging in violence more tolerable and seemingly necessary

    • Makes finding peace more difficult

    • Lowers the restraints against stepping over the ethical line into abuse and torture

  • Cure for dehumanization is to restore the human connection

Reducing Aggression and Violence

  • Norms have changed dramatically to discourage aggression

Thoughts, Feelings, and Self-Control

  • Enhanced education, intelligence, reasoning, and empathy

  • Aggression Replacement Training:

    • Social competence training

    • Improved moral reasoning

    • Aggression control

  • Most promising interventions for reducing reactive aggression

    • Improve self-control

      • Two-week self-control training task

    • Emphasize cognitive reappraisal

      • Train individuals to interpret provocations in more neutral, less emotional terms

      • Think about the events from an objective, non-personal perspective

    • Cognitive control

      • Training the regulation of emotion in response to emotionally relevant stimuli

      • Related to self-control

    • Mindfulness

      • Getting people to be in a nonjudgmental, nonreactive state in which they more easily just accept their physical and mental experiences

  • Behavioral Modification: Treatments that try to alter an individual’s behavior through learning principles that reinforce nonaggressive actions

Sociocultural Approaches

  • Improved economy, healthier living conditions, and social support would reduce the factors that fuel aggression

  • Reducing the prevalence of guns in society would have a number of calming effects

  • Teach and model nonviolent responses to frustrations and social problems

  • Fostering cooperation and shared goals across groups

  • Select shows and games for children that provide compelling, vivid prosocial models

Multiple-Level Approaches: Programs to Prevent Violence and Bullying

Multisystemic Therapy

  • Addresses individuals’ problems at several different levels

  • Individualized treatment

  • Works with patient’s family and environment

  • Takes a lot of time and resources

  • Significantly reduces the rates of violent crimes

Bullying Prevention

  • Comprehensive programs that operate on multiple levels

  • Most successful bullying prevention programs are the more intensive and long-lasting ones

  • Empathy-training programs

  • Specifically target bystanders