Aggression Notes

Defining Harm and Aggression

  • Aggression: Behavior designed to harm or injure another human being who is motivated to avoid such treatment.

Forms of Harm

  • Physical Harm: Obvious interpersonal harm, especially in children (hitting, fighting, shoving, tripping, slapping, pinching, headlocks).
  • Cyberbullying: Aggression via digital devices (cell phones, computers, tablets) through texts, apps, social media, and online forums.
    • Includes sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content.
    • Sharing personal/private information causing embarrassment or humiliation.
    • Can escalate to unlawful/criminal behavior.
    • Common platforms: Social media (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok), messaging apps, online forums (Reddit), email, online gaming communities.

Types of Aggression

  • Spontaneous Aggression: Not premeditated.
  • Premeditated Aggression: Planned in advance.
  • Instrumental Aggression: Motivated by achieving a goal incidental to the aggression.
    • Aimed at hurting someone to gain something (attention, reward, objects, status).
    • Aggression is less likely if an easier path to the goal exists.
    • Example: A child shoving another to get to a slide is spontaneous instrumental aggression.
    • Premeditated example: A cruel prank to impress friends.

Development of Aggression

  • Around age 1.5, physical aggression increases until ages 2-3.
  • With language development, physical aggression decreases, and verbal aggression (insults, taunting) increases.
  • Frequent cause of aggression in toddlers: conflicts over possessions.
    • Toddler's rules of property ownership:
      • "If I like it, it's mine."
      • "If it's in my hand, it's mine."
      • "If I can take it from you, it's mine."
      • "If I had it a while ago, it's mine."
      • "If it's mine, it will never be yours."
      • "If I'm building something, all the pieces are mine."
      • "If it looks like mine, it's mine."
      • "If I saw it first, it's mine."
      • "If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine forever."
      • "If it's broken, it's yours, and if it's fixed, it's mine."
      • "If I turn from playing with the pieces, it's mine again."
      • "And if there's any doubt, it's mine."

Aggression in Elementary School

  • Usually hostile, arising from the desire to hurt or protect self-esteem.
  • Children physically aggressive tend to also engage in relational aggression.
  • Retaliatory aggression: Hostile aggression based on feeling unfairly harmed or intentionally attacked.
    • May reflect growing perspective-taking skills.
    • Older children can discern intentions and see through denials.
    • Growth in normative beliefs about retaliation (defending oneself/honor).

Pair Enemies

  • Pairs of children mutually hostile and aggressive.
  • Rare in preschoolers (under 2%).
  • More common in elementary school (over 30%).
  • Enemies often avoid each other but can be drawn into cycles of aggression and retaliation.
  • Having enemies is stressful, similar to being bullied.
  • Aggression forms:
    • Boys: More physical aggression.
    • Both: More relational/social aggression.
  • Often arise between groups with different interests/backgrounds.

Aggression in Adolescence

  • Frequency of aggression decreases for most teenagers after middle adolescence.
  • Antisocial behaviors (stealing, lying, cheating) occur and characterize some children with behavioral problems.
  • Violent crime peaks around 17 (29% of males, 12% of females report committing a serious violent offense).
  • Male adolescents/adults engage in more violent crime than females.
  • Perception of adolescence as a period of "storm and stress" is driven by a minority engaging in highly visible aggression/violence.
  • Considerable consistency in aggression across childhood/adolescence.
  • Aggressive children at age 8 tend to have more criminal convictions and serious criminal behavior at age 30.

Early Onset Problems

  • Associated with family risk factors: single mother at birth, stressed/unavailable mother, parental antisocial tendencies, low maternal education, poverty, child neglect/abuse.
  • Moderate or high but desisting aggressors: Troublesome behavior reduces over time.
    • Become less aggressive if engaged in school and with effective parental monitoring.

Temperament and Aggression

  • Children with aggression problems often exhibit difficult temperament from an early age.
  • Infants/toddlers expressing negative emotion and demanding attention tend to have higher levels of problem behaviors.
  • Preschoolers lacking control, impulsivity, high activity, irritability, and distractibility are also at risk.

Attributional Bias

  • Aggressive children interpret the world through an aggressive lens.
  • More likely to attribute hostile motives in ambiguous situations.
  • Goals are more likely to be hostile and involve intimidation.
  • Fewer options for reactions, and those options involve aggression.
  • Evaluate aggressive responses more favorably and feel more confident in their ability to perform them, expecting positive outcomes.
  • Prone to engage in aggression and generate aggressive responses to provocation and evaluate those responses as morally acceptable.
  • Children prone to instrumental aggression anticipate positive social consequences.

Causes of Aggression

  • Genetic makeup, family socialization, peer influence, and cultural factors.
  • Twin studies suggest antisocial behavior runs in families and is partly genetic.
  • Genetic, neurological, and hormonal characteristics may put a child at risk.

Socioeconomic Status

  • Children from low-income families tend to be more antisocial/aggressive.
  • Escaping poverty reduces aggression; remaining or moving into poverty increases it.
  • Stressors experienced by children in poor families (family stress, illness, domestic violence, divorce, legal problems, neighborhood violence).
  • Low socioeconomic status tends to be associated with living in a single parent family or being an unplanned child of a teenage parent.

Culture of Honor

  • Example: Children in the Southern United States react to insults differently.
  • Endorse greater levels of violence when insulted or perceiving threats to home/property.
  • Show high levels of anger responses (greater testosterone and cortisol levels) to threats.
  • Acts of violence in response to insulted threats to home or property are viewed as more acceptable.
  • Adherence to this culture takes place by middle childhood.
  • Learned through child-rearing practices that legitimize violence in response to perceived insults.
  • Attitudes produced by different cultures may cause group differences in how ambiguous circumstances are interpreted and what the thresholds are for considering an act as aggressive.

Peer Influence

  • Aggressive children socialize with other aggressive children.
  • Moderately aggressive boys become more delinquent over time if their friends are aggressive.
  • Expression of genetic tendencies towards aggression is stronger for individuals who have aggressive friends.
  • Boys exposed to peers involved in overt antisocial behaviors were more likely to engage in such acts themselves.
  • Susceptibility to peer pressure for antisocial behavior increases in elementary school years and peaks about eighth or ninth grade, declining thereafter.
  • Mexican American immigrant youth who are less acculturated and therefore more tied to traditional values appear to be less susceptible to peer pressure and antisocial behavior than are Mexican American children who are more acculturated.

Gangs

  • Estimated 27,000 gangs in the United States with 750,000 active members.
  • Mostly in metropolitan areas, but increasing in suburban/rural areas.
  • Composed of young people of similar ethnic/racial background.
  • Membership is about 90% male, but the proportion of female members seems to be increasing.
  • Average age: 17-18 years, some as young as 12.
  • More likely to join if from neighborhoods with high rates of resident turnover.
  • Activities range from graffiti and fighting to robbery and murder.
  • Drug use and selling are common.
  • Gang members commit a disproportionate amount of serious violence.
  • Much of this involves conflict within and between gangs.
  • Gang members are far more likely to be killed and victimized.
  • Violence is used to gain/preserve status and increase group solidarity.
  • Illegal gang activities may be the primary means of obtaining money for those without legitimate employment opportunities.

Socialization in the Home

  • Harsh physical punishment can lead to aggression problems.
  • Abusive punishment is associated with the development of antisocial behaviors.
  • Children high in antisocial behavior or low and self regulation tend to elicit harsh parenting. In turn, harsh parenting increases children's problem behavior.
  • There is probably a circle relation between children's behavior and their parents' punitive discipline.

Patterson's Model of Family Process

  • Demographics (e.g., poverty, single-parent homes) are significant stressors that undermine effective parenting, but INEFFFECTIVE parenting is the direct culprit.
  • Ineffective parenting directly causes aggressive/antisocial behavior to develop.
  • Parents of aggressive children are emotionaly detached, often depressed.
  • They make vague threats without consistently taking action.
  • Children learn that parents cannot control them and that threats are rarely carried out, so they control the parents.
  • Effectiveness of managing aggression and noncompliance plays a critical role.
  • Ineffective parental responses to acting-up behaviors can inadvertently escalate and reinforce the childs negative behaviors, because parents give in.
  • This dynamic contributes to increased frequency and intensity of aggressive behavior.
  • Patterson calls these "escape contingencies."