Aggression I

Question 1

What is aggression according to Baron & Richardson, 1994?

Answer 1

Aggression is any form of behaviour intended to harm or injure another living being who is motivated to avoid such treatment

Question 2

What are the three defining features of aggression?

Answer 2

1. Aggressor must intend to harm or injure another person (have the motivation to hurt)
2. Aggressor must have awareness of adverse effects of the behaviour:
   - E.g. if someone is drink-driving and hits someone
3. Target of the aggression must want to avoid the harm: not performed at the target’s request

Question 3

What’s the difference between violence and aggression?

Answer 3

• Violence is carried out with intention or threat of causing serious physical harm
• Aggression doesn’t necessarily pose a physical threat

Question 4

Give some examples of human aggression

Answer 4

• Shouting
• Gossiping
• Terrorism
• Child abuse
• Domestic violence
• Football hooliganism

Question 5

What is hostile aggression?

Answer 5

• Aggressive behaviour motivated by the desire to express anger and hostile feelings
• Motive: harm the target

Question 6

What is instrumental aggression and give examples

Answer 6

• Aggressive behaviour performed to reach a particular goal, as a means to an end
• Motive: reach a goal, harm as side effect
• E.g. if a child runs into the road and nearly gets hit by a car and the mother slaps the child to teach them to not do that again – harm to the child is a side-product
• Kidnapping, terrorism

Question 7

Why are there limited ways in which we can measure aggression?

Answer 7

It would be unethical to set up an experiment in which participants are (1) put into a very high state of aggression and (2) are allowed to inflict genuine harm on another person

Question 8

What are the two different methods to measure aggression?

Answer 8

• Experiments that use ‘trivial’, non-serious acts of harm

- Archival data

Question 9

How does the experiment with trivial harm work when investigating whether violent video games lead to more aggressive behaviour?

Answer 9

• Imagine you wanted to investigate whether violent video games lead to more aggressive behaviour
• Randomly assign Ps to two levels of game: non-violent or violent
• After playing for 30 minutes give participant the chance to ‘harm’ another participant (in an ethical way) using safe but aversive stimuli
• Get both the players to play a reaction time game and then tell the winner they have to punish the loser (game rigged so violent game Ps win half the time and non-violent half the time). By playing an aversive noise in the ears of the loser and then the winner is able to choose the level and duration of noise
• Found that people that people who played violent video games are more likely to punish the loser in a more violent way

Question 10

What can be used to measure aggression?

Answer 10

• Electric shocks (mild vs moderate vs sever)
• Ice bucket
• Unpleasantly spicy hot sauce (amount of chilli sauce poured into the drink taken as a measure of aggression)
• Quiet obnoxious noise vs loud obnoxious noise
• Willingness to inflict nastier experiences than necessary -> is taken as a measure of aggression

Question 11

What could said to be a problem with using ‘trivial harm’ to measure aggression and how can you argue against this?

Answer 11

Problem: lack of realism (may be lack of ecological validity) BUT all these measures have been validated. People who are most aggressive outside the lab score most highly on lab measures indicating good construct validity

Question 12

How can you use archival records to measure aggression and what is the problem with it?

Answer 12

• Crime statistics: can calculate the incidence of particular types of crimes
• Incidence of particular forms of aggression:
   Intimate partner violence (usually spikes at Christmas)
   Child sexual abuse
   Murder
   Grievous bodily harm
   Hate crimes
• Once we have this data, can run some interesting correlations/ explore patterns in the data
• Problem: set up by external, non-researchers so we don’t always have the type of data we want

Question 13

What is the behavioural genetics theory of aggression?

Answer 13

That certain genes lead to aggression

Question 14

What is Lagerspetz (1979) experiment to show behavioural genetics?

Answer 14

took normal mice and bred the most aggressive mice together and the least aggressive ones together. 26 generations later she had one set of ‘fierce’ mice and one set of ‘placid’ mice

Question 15

What are adoption studies?

Answer 15

compare how aggressive a person who has been adopted is with the aggression levels of their adopted parents (e.g. environment) and their biological parent (e.g. genetics)

Question 16

What are twin studies?

Answer 16

Compare the behaviour of identical and fraternal twins

Question 17

What did Rhee and Waldman (2002) find in their meta-analytic review of twin and adoption studies?

Answer 17

genes explain 41% of the variance but the environment explains 59%

Question 18

What is the role of testosterone and five examples to back this up?

Answer 18

• Testosterone appears to be linked to violence (men have much higher levels of testosterone than women):
   99% convicted rapists male
   95% of murderers are male
   92% of people arrested for burglary are male
• Archer, Buring and Wu (1998): highly aggressive men have higher levels of testosterone than non-aggressive men
• Testosterone levels do tend to be higher amongst prisoners convicted of both planned and unprovoked violent crimes

Question 19

What was Klinesmith, Kasser and McAndrew’s (2006) weapons effect experiment?

Answer 19

measured male participants’ testosterone levels (by taking a saliva swab).

• Then randomly assigned participants to one of two conditions:
  1. Participant asked to ‘handle’ a toy gun for 15 minutes
  2. Participants asked to handle a child’s toy board game for 15 minutes
• Men were told to make a drink for another participant and to add as much hot sauce as they wanted. Their testosterone levels were measured again
• Found: men who handled the gun added significantly more hot sauce to the water (13.61g) than did those who interacted with the children’s toy (4.23g)
• Men who handled the gun had significantly higher levels of testosterone than they had at the start of the experiment (62.05 pg/ml more testosterone)
• So just being exposed to an aggressive cue (e.g. a gun) can increase testosterone and make people more aggressive. Finding that people behave in a more aggressive way when cued by a violent cue is called the weapons effect

Question 20

What are the three main parts of the frustration-aggression hypothesis? (Freud and others)

Answer 20

1. frustration leads to aggression. All aggression comes from frustration
2. Frustration is the blockage of a goal-directed activity
3. Aggression is driven by a goal to overcome/ neutralise the feeling of frustration. This is called ‘catharsis’

Question 21

What was Bushman (2002) experiment about whether aggression leads to catharsis?

Answer 21

• Participants asked to write an essay and the essay is then graded by another student in a different room (actually non-existent) (see Bushman, 2002)
• Short time later, experimenter brings back essay with comments ostensibly made by the other participant
• All participants received bad evaluations consisting of negative ratings on organisation, originality, writing style, clarity of expression, persuasiveness of arguments and overall quality
• Handwritten note ‘this is one of the worst essays I have ever read’
• Some of the participants allowed to ‘vent’ anger: hit pillows or a punching bag or shout. Another group told to sit quietly. The ‘venting’ group actually increased anger levels and subsequent aggressive behaviour (Bushman, 2002)
• Research shows that doing nothing (sitting quietly) is actually more effective in reducing anger than ‘venting’ (Busman, 2002)
• So little evidence of catharsis

Question 22

What is Schacter and Singer’s two-factor theory of emotion?

Answer 22

• Emotion based on (1) physiological arousal and (2) cognitive label
• People may have the same sensations before an exam and before bungee jumping but label these sensations as different emotions
• So according to Schachter’s (1964) theory of emotion, our emotional state depends upon attributing physiological arousal to our cognitions

Question 23

What is the excitation transfer theory of aggression (Zilmann, 1978) and give an example

Answer 23

• When physiological arousal from a neutral activity is still present when a person encounters an anger-eliciting situation, the earlier arousal (excitation) is transferred onto the anger-related arousal and falsely attributed as anger. -> leads to an increased likelihood that the individual will behave aggressively.
• E.g. near miss in traffic -> heightened arousal -> residual arousal at airport -> frustration at delay at gate -> if you have conscious awareness that the arousal you have is due to the near miss in the car then aggression is not increased / if you have forgotten about the near miss you will attribute arousal to delay at gate and aggression is increased.

Question 24

What was Zilman and Bryant’s experiment (1974) to test the excitation-transfer theory?

Answer 24

• Participants had to perform either a physically non-arousing task (threading disks on a wire) or an arousing task (pedalling a bicycle for 1 min)
• 2 min later: provocation in form of aversive noise
• 6 min later: opportunity to administer aversive noise blasts to person who had provoked them
• Ps who were more aroused administered a loud noise more often than Ps who were not aroused.