Control of Aggression

Implications from Basic Research

Stanton Wheeler, John F. Knutson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138521223
• eBook ISBN: 9781351525961
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Movements in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Although aggressive behavior and its consequences has been a topic of concern for centuries, it is only within the recent past that serious attempts to understand aggression have been made. Within the last decade concern has expanded at a very high rate, perhaps impelled by an increase in aggression or the implication of an increase by frequent media reports of aggressive behavior. This apparent increased concern is matched by an increase in research.

This volume brings together for the first time the diverse research strategies that reflect current major approaches to understanding the psychology of aggression. It deals with both basic laboratory research and the implications of such research for clinical work. Each chapter is designed to provide a databased analysis of aggressive behavior and an explanation of the research tactics used to obtain such data.Included in the book are a review of physiological variables in aggression; an assessment of neonatal variables in a developmental analysis of aggression; an examination of genetics and aggression; research on the Pain-Aggression hypothesis in human and non-human subjects; and an exposition of a social learning model of aggression. Theses analyses are significantly amplified by a moment-by-moment sequential analysis of the behavior of aggressive children, and by an examination of the role of semantic conditioning in the ontogeny of human aggressive repertoires. The final chapter (written by the editor) examines recurring problems in aggression research in general and considers points of consensus among the contributors to the volume.

Control of Aggression will interest clinical psychologists and the full spectrum of other scientists engaged in research on the subject, including behavioral pharmacologists and biologists, geneticists, physiological and social psychologists, and sociologists.

1

The Physiological Inhibition of Hostile Behavior

K. E. Moyer

Kenneth E. Moyer received his bachelor’s degree from Park College and his Ph.D. from Washington University. After completion of the Ph.D., Dr. Moyer joined the faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology. He is currently professor of psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University. In 1954 Professor Moyer served as a consultant on higher education to the government of Norway. He is a fellow of the Division of Psychopharmacology, American Psychological Association, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In addition to his extensive research on the physiological bases of aggression, Professor Moyer s research interests include endocrinology, emotion, and avoidance behavior.

It is appropriate and timely that we further our understanding of methods of aggression control; We live in a society in which violence and aggression are rampant, and, if society as we know it is to survive, methods of aggression control must be found. With reference to the effects of violence in our culture, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1969) concluded after two years of study;

Violence in the United States has risen to alarmingly high levels. Whether one considers assassination, group violence, or individual acts of violence, the decade of the 1960s was considerably more violent than the several decades preceding it and ranks among the most violent in our history. The United States is the clear leader among modern, stable democratic nations in its rates of homicide, assault, rape, and robbery, and it is at least among the highest in incidence of group violence and assassination.

This high level of violence is dangerous to our society. It is disfiguring our society—making fortresses of portions of our cities and dividing our people into armed camps. It is jeopardizing some of our most precious insitutions, among them our schools and universities—poisoning the spirit of trust and cooperation that is essential to their proper functioning. It is corroding the central political processes of our democratic society—substituting force and fear for argument and accomodation. [P.xv]

Six hundred years before the birth of Christ the prophet Ezekial had the same concerns when he wrote, “The land is ful of bloody crimes and the city is full of violence” (Ezek. 7;23). Every sixty-eight seconds between the years of 1820 and 1945 a man has died at the hands of a fellow man as a result of violence ranging from murder to war (Boelkins and Heiser 1970; Richardson 1960).

Thus, it appears that man’s hostility to man and his concern about that behavior is as old as man himself. Aggressive behavior is not new; what is new is the dramatic increase in man’s destructive capacity. On the international scene, as we have often been told, man has the ability to translate hostile impulses into the instant obliteration of all mankind, all other life on the planet, and perhaps the very planet itself. At the level of the local tavern, the temporary loss of hostility control caused by alcohol can result in death because of the ready availability of the lethal handgun. Only a technologically advanced civilization could provide its politicians with a hydrogen bomb and every second home with a gun (Newton and Zimring 1970).

There seems to be little doubt that the trend in violent crime in the United States is on the way up and is accelerating. After a serious consideration of the many possible sources of error in predictions based on crime statistics, Graham (1969, p. 385) comes to the following conclusion: “Most experts now believe that this rapid surge in crime, with its new heavy component of crimes of violence, will continue and perhaps will accelerate, at least for the next ten years.”

Aggression and the Population Increase

Projections beyond the next ten years must be tentative, at best, but there appears to be good reason to believe that interpersonal aggression is going to increase before it decreases. A “population explosion” now seems inevitable. According to Ehrlich (1968, p. 11), one of the more visible population biologists, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash program embarked upon now.”

It is obvious that the population growth rate of approximately 2 percent per year cannot continue indefinitely. At that rate, the world population will double by the beginning of the next century. Several authors have calculated the absurd consequences of a theoretical continuation of such a birth rate (Augenstein 1969; Ehrlich 1968; Taylor 1968). In five hundred to six hundred years, each individual would have 1 square yard of the surface of the earth to call his own, and in six thousand years, the mass of people would exceed that of the known universe.

The population problem will, of course, be solved. In time, the death rate will begin to exceed the birth rate. How soon that will happen will depend on many factors. However, if we can place any faith in the pessimistic prognosis of Ehrlich (1968), it is unlikely that any or all of the possible projected solutions are going to be sufficiently effective to prevent a massive population increase within the life span of the reader of this volume. It also appears highly likely that an aggression explosion will accompany the population explosion.

Unless drastic preventive measures are taken, extreme crowding will provide the environmental conditions that breed violence (see Moyer 1972): Significant increases in population size will foster aggressive behavior by magnifying mans deprivation and frustration levels, decreasing his personal space, increasing his information overload, increasing social disorganization, increasing the absolute number of violence-prone individuals, and, finally, by increasing the absolute number of young males (the group that overwhelmingly commits the greatest amount of violent crime). As the population pressures grow, the caldron of violence, hostility, and aggressive behavior will seethe and boil with increasing fury. Thus, man’s survival depends on more effective methods of hostility control

Models of Aggressive Behavior

The assumptions made about the underlying causes of hostility determine, in large measure, the kinds of control techniques considered. One prevalent theory of aggression takes the position that there are no internal impulses to aggressive behavior and that all hostile tendencies are learned. When the proponents of this position consider methods of control, they concern themselves exclusively with the manipulation of the external environment. Scott (1962) and Hinde (1967), for example, made no mention of the possibility of aggression control through changes in the individual’s internal environment. Other theorists, such as the ethologists as represented by Lorenz (1966) and the psychoanalytic school as recently represented by Storr (1968), emphasize the concept of internal impulses to aggressive behavior. However, these impulses are conceived in terms of “aggressive energy,” which is closely linked with the energy of ambition, love, and other positive attributes. The recommendations of these schools for aggression control are therefore confined to suggestions for the redirection of this aggressive energy, and the possibility of the reduction of hostile tendencies per se are not seriously considered. They suggest, in fact, that the elimination of aggressive tendencies would be a disasterous step, resulting in diminution of many of man’s most positive attributes—such as artistic creativity, scientific endeavors, and even love: “Thus, in-tra-specific aggression can certainly exist without its counterpart, love, but conversely there is no love without aggression” (Lorenz 1966, p. 217).

Here, a different model of aggressive behavior will be presented briefly: an interaction model that deals with both the external provocations and the internal impulses to hostile behavior. The implications of this model for the control of aggression will then be considered; and it will be seen that this different way of looking at the problem implies different solutions and that these different solutions are fraught with both benefits and dangers.

Kinds of Aggression

Several years ago I postulated a number of different kinds of aggressive behavior and attempted to classify them on the basis of the types of stimuli that would elicit a hostile response (Moyer 1968). Definition of the kinds of aggression on that basis alone now appears too restrictive: The kinds of aggression vary on a number of different dimensions, and all of them must be considered in the definition of each kind (see Moyer 1972). The types of stimulation that will elicit attack are usually different for each kind of aggressive behavior. Thus, aggression may be considered as stimulus bound. In many classes of aggression the stimulus situation to which the animal reacts with hostility is remarkably specific. For example, a male mouse will attack another male, but will generally not attack a female or a juvenile (Scott and Fredericson 1951). A rat will attack a strange member of the same species, but will seldom react aggressively to a member of its own group (Barnett 1963; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1961). The mouse-killing laboratory rat will seldom attack a rat pup and can be readily handled by the experimenter.

There are also obvious differences in response patterns shown by animals in different aggression-inducing situations. Predatory aggression in the cat involves little if any emotional display. The attack is careful, silent, and deadly. In irritable or fear-induced aggression, however, the animal may explode in a flurry of scratching and biting (Hutchinson and Renfrew 1966; Roberts and Kiess 1964; Wasman and Flynn 1962). Male deer confront one another with lowered head and the locking of antlers. Attacks by predators, however, are met by striking out with the front hooves (Tinbergen 1953).

Sex is another dimension on which the kinds of aggression may vary. In most species certain types of aggressive behavior are restricted to a particular sex. For example, intraspecific fighting in many animal species is, in general, restricted to the male, but aggressive behavior in defense of the young is primarily a female characteristic (King 1963).

The neurological and endocrine bases of each of the different kinds of aggression may overlap, but can be differentiated. In the now classic study of Egger and Flynn (1963), it was shown that electrical stimulation of the lateral hypothalamus of the cat resulted in a typical predatory attack on a rat, while the experimenter was ignored. However, if the cat was stimulated in the medial hypothalamus, the animal ignored the rat in its cage and manifested well-organized aggressive responses toward the experimenter. Recently, Chi and Flynn 1971) have shown that the neural systems underlying these two different kinds of directed attack are different. Although there is much more to be learned, differential physiological bases for several kinds of aggression have been summarized (Moyer 1968).

The evidence indicates that it may be useful to classify aggressive behaviors as follows; predatory, intermale, fear induced, maternal, sex related, irritable, and instrumental. Instrumental aggression differs from the others in that it is a learned response that occurs in a given situation because it has been reinforced in the past. Thus, instrumental aggression does not have a specific physiological basis other than in the sense that learning has a physiological basis.

It is unlikely that the classification system suggested above is the most useful one that can be devised, and it should be modified as research provides more insight into the mechanisms of hostility. It is clear, however, that there are different kinds of aggression, and an understanding of that concept is important to any efforts directed at the control of hostile behavior. As indicated below, some control measures are effective in some instances of aggre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Physiological Inhibition of Hostile Behavior
• 2 Developmental Factors in Aggression
• 3 Genetics and Mouse Aggression
• 4 An Experimental Analysis of Nonhuman and Human Aggression
• 5 Words and Symbols as Stimuli to Aggressive Responses
• 6 Stimulus Control for Classes of Noxious Behaviors
• 7 Social Learning Theory of Aggression
• 8 Aggression as Manipulatable Behavior
• Author Index
• Subject Index