Chapter 1: Defining & Measuring Aggression

Question 1

Define aggression.

Answer 1

Behaviour that violates social norms of appropriate conduct and that is intended to hurt another person physically or psychologically (who does not want to be hurt)

• needs to be intentional and aggressor has the anticipation that it will inflict harm in some way
  ex. hurting someone’s feeling, damaging a reputation, withholding care or important information

Characterized by:

• motivation and not by consequences; making shooting a gun towards a person and missing them still an act of aggression
• an understanding that the act can cause harm; making accidental acts not forms of aggression
• acts towards individuals who did not consent to receive the harm; making a surgery or dentist operation not a form of aggression

Question 2

How does Buss define aggression and why is it an inadequate definition?

Answer 2

“A response that delivers noxious stimuli to another organism”
It does not define human aggression appropriately, it’s too broad and too narrow at the same time
- Broad: includes many forms of behaviour that should be categorised as aggression, such as accidental infliction of harm
- Narrow: excludes all non-behavioural processes, such as thoughts and feelings, and behaviours that are intended to cause harm but failed

Question 3

What are the five forms of aggression viewed in class?

Answer 3

1. Response modality
2. Goal direction
3. Immediacy
4. Response quality
5. Legitimacy
   - motives are often mixed, aggression can fall into more than one category at a time

Question 4

What is the response modality in relation to aggression?

Answer 4

Physical, postural, verbal, relational aggression

• aimed at damaging another’s reputation or relationships
• shouting or swearing at someone (verbal)
• hitting or shooting someone (physical)
• making threatening gestures (postural)
• giving someone “the silent treatment” (relational)

Question 5

What is goal direction in relation to aggression?

Answer 5

Hostile vs. instrumental

• Hostile: “hot”, arises from anger, goals is to inflict direct harm
  ex. road rage, bar fight
• Instrumental: “cool”, calculated; harm incidental to a broader goal
  ex. taking a hostage to secure a ransom

Question 6

What is immediacy in relation to aggression?

Answer 6

Direct vs. indirect

• Direct: victim present, face-to-face confrontation
  ex. punching someone in the face
• Indirect: victim absent, behind the victims back
  ex. spreading rumours about someone behind their back

Question 7

What is response quality in relation to aggression?

Answer 7

Action vs. failure to act

• making another person engage in unwanted sexual acts (action)
• withholding important information from a colleague at work (failure to act)

Question 8

What is legitimacy in relation to aggression?

Answer 8

Some types of aggression vary in their legitimacy by culture

ex. corporal punishment, capital punishment, a revolution
- these issues of legitimacy along with norm violations are relevant when analysing dynamics of intergroup encounters, but they are problematic to accommodate as critical features in a basic definition of aggression

Question 9

Define violence.

Answer 9

Behaviours carried out with the intention of causing serious harm that involve the use or threat of physical force. Not all instances of aggression involve violence, but all acts of violence are aggressive.

Question 10

What are the four ways to measure aggression in a study?

Answer 10

1. Observing behaviours in natural contexts
2. Observing behaviours in the lab
3. Collecting reports of aggressive behaviour, thoughts, and feelings
4. Using official records

Question 11

What are the two forms of observing behaviours in natural contexts? What is the limitation and the asset?

Answer 11

1. Naturalistic observation
2. Field experiments

• limitation: extraneous variables, no random assignment
• asset: avoids measuring reactivity and social desirability; people’s tendency to change their usual patterns of behaviour because they are aware that they are under observation

Question 12

What is naturalistic observation and describe two studies done using this measure.

Answer 12

Researchers observes and records behaviour as it unfolds naturally without manipulating the situation in any way

Ostrov & Keating (2004) observed children in a playgroup and recorded frequency counts of physical, verbal, and relational aggression

Graham and Wells (2001) studied 12 bars in Ontario and recorded the amount of aggressive behaviours, they found that:

• 77.8% of incidents involved men
• 3.4% involved women only
• 33% involved severe physical aggression (kicking, punching, brawling)

Question 13

What are field experiments and describe two studies done using this measure.

Answer 13

The experimenter manipulates one or more independent variables but the participants are unaware they are being observed

Baron (1976) tested frustration by getting a confederate to not move their car at a green light, aggression was measured through latency and duration of horn honking. Those who did not they were a part of a study honked faster and longer when the confederate took longer to move their car.

Rehm, Steinleitner, and Lilli (1987) got a group of fifth grade students to all wear identical T-shirts to soccer practice, being told that it would be easier for a new teacher to tell them apart from the opposing team. The other team wore their own clothes. They found that the team wearing identical T-shirts acted more violently than those wearing their own clothes. Suggesting that anonymity increases aggressive behaviour.

Question 14

What are the five paradigms viewed in class measured through observing behaviours in a lab?

Answer 14

1. Teacher-learner paradigm
2. Essay evaluation paradigm
3. Competitive reaction time paradigm
4. The hot sauce paradigm
5. Voodoo doll paradigm

Question 15

What is the teacher-learner paradigm and discuss a study.

Answer 15

Uses the set-up of an alleged learning experiment in which one person adopts the role of a teacher and presents a word association learning task to another person, the learner. In the second round, only the first word of each pair is presented, and the learner has to be correctly remember the second word of the pair. Errors are punished by an averse stimuli.
The experiment is rigged so the participant is always the teacher, and confederate always the learner.
The participant’s choice of punishment intensity represents the measure of aggressive behaviour.
ex. Elaine study, obedience study by Milgram

limitation: participant may want to help learner succeed at the task, this would be prosocial rather than aggressive

Question 16

What is the essay evaluation paradigm and discuss a study.

Answer 16

Participants are given negative feedback (such as shocks, verbal, written feedback) by confederate about an essay they’ve written, they’ll receive up to ten shocks, based on bad the confederate deemed their essay to be. Then they are then given a chance to retaliate against confederate.
Usually find that provocation leads to aggression, the more shocks the participant received, the more shocks they gave.

Donnerstein & Berkowitz (1981) studied male participants angered by a female confederate after viewing one of three films;
- aggressive erotic film including rape
- purely erotic film (no violence)
- neutral film
D.V: able to give any intensity of “shock” to the female confederate that angered them
Results: Males who watched violent porn gave shocks twice as high than the other two other groups did; men who were exposed to violence were less sympathetic to women’s suffering
When they switched the confederate to being a male, all shocks in all categories were mild

Question 17

What is the competitive reaction time (CRT) paradigm and discuss a study.

Answer 17

Participants believe they are competing with another participant to push a button faster than the other; rigged for participant to win and lose some.
Before each trial, the participants have to set the intensity of the aversive stimulus delivered to their opponent in case they win, which represents the measure of aggressive behaviour.
D.V: will participants set higher duration/intensity of shock to confederate after losing some and receiving shocks themselves
Results found that they would set it higher when confederate set the participants shock higher
- this paradigm is believed to be one of the best indicators of aggressive behaviour, with more aggressive people setting the aversive stimulus higher than non-aggressive individuals

Limitation: there’s an absence of a non-aggressive response option, people can not choose to not give an aversive stimulus at all

Question 18

What is the hot sauce paradigm and discuss a study.

Answer 18

Participants were given the opportunity to make a confederate eat hot sauce, when knowing confederate does not like hot sauce.
Participants allocate more hot sauce to a target person who rejected them as a potential partner in the experiment than to a target who chosen them as a partner.
They allocated more hot sauce when they were in a group rather than when they acted individually, and gave more hot sauce to each target when targets were in a group rather than encountered as individuals.

Barlett et al (2009) found that participants gave more hot sauce after playing a violent game than those who played a non-violent video game.

Question 19

What is the voodoo doll paradigm and discuss a study.

Answer 19

Bushman et al. (2014) tested link between glucose levels and aggression

• Studied 107 married couples tested sugar levels twice a day for 21 days, participants were given a voodoo doll representing their spouse and allowed to given 51 pins per day
• Lower glucose levels (hunger) associated with more pins used

Question 20

What are the critiques of observing aggressive behaviours in the lab?

Answer 20

• Do these studies represent the underlying theoretical construct of aggression (construct validity)?
• Can they explain aggressive behaviour occurring in the “real world” (external validity)?

Construct validity: the different approaches are susceptible to alternative interpretations of what is taken to be aggressive behaviour
ex. in CRT people may just be being competitive rather than aggressive

External validity: most people studied are college students; most studies are more fast paced than real life, ex. playing a violent video game and then doing the experiment which tests aggression directly after

Question 21

What are the different forms of reports collected to measure aggressive behaviour?

Answer 21

1. Self-reports
2. Parent or teacher reports
3. Peer nominations
4. Measures of aggressive affect: anger and hostility
5. Measure of aggressive cognitions: the Implicit Association test (IAT)
6. Projective techniques

Question 22

What are self reports? What is the limitation with this form of report?

Answer 22

Participants asked to provide reports of their own aggressive behaviour.
Self-reports can be used to measure aggressive behaviour in different domains, such as sexual aggression, aggressive driving, or school bullying

Buss & Perry Aggression Questionnaire (AQ) measures the habitual tendency to engage in physical and verbal aggression.
- subscales: physical & verbal aggression, anger, hostility
Men score higher on physical and verbal aggression, and hostility; men and women score equal on anger

Limitation: social desirability, respondents are aware that they are being asked to report behaviour that makes them appear in a negative light; there may be an under-reporting of aggressive behaviour

Question 23

What are parent/teacher reports?

Answer 23

Parents and teachers have first-hand knowledge of children’s aggressive behaviour, and can provide behavioural ratings that can be converged with the person’s self-reports.
ex. the Preschool Social Behaviour scale (PSBS-T)

Question 24

What are peer nominations?

Answer 24

Peers see aggression that parents and teachers do not see. Instead of rating classmates on aggression, they are asked to nominate (ex. select from a group) who they believe fit certain behavioural descriptors.
ex. “Who, from this list, attacks others without reason?”
Using longitudinal studies, it’s often found that children maintain the same nominations through time (a child nominated for being most aggressive at age 8 will still be nominated as most aggression at age 14 and 19)

Question 25

What is the measure of aggressive affect: anger and hostility and how has it been used in studies.

Answer 25

Standardised scales have been developed to capture individual differences in the disposition to experience affective states that are relevant to aggressive behaviour; such as anger and hostility
ex. Aggression Questionaire

Question 26

What is the measure of aggressive cognitions: the Implicit Association test (IAT) and how has it been used in studies.

Answer 26

A reaction-time test that measures how strongly people associate concepts of aggression
- It based on the assumption that the strength of the association between a target category (self vs. others) and an attribute category (aggressive vs. non-aggressive) can be inferred from the speed with which participants can recognise particular combinations of the target and the attribute category.
Task is to pair words together (ex. aggression-related words with “me” or “I”, non-aggression words with “them” or “you”, and vice-versa)
Participants who respond faster when aggression related words are related to “me” tend to have aggression closely related to their self-concept.

Asset: less susceptible to social desirability limitation

Question 27

What are projective techniques? What is it’s weakness?

Answer 27

Participants are presented with ambiguous stimulus material and asked to generate a response
Picture Frustration Test (Rosenzweig, 1945); consists of cartoon drawings, each depicting a situation that involves some mild to moderate form of everyday frustration. The participants then states how they believe the person being frustrated would react.

Interaggression: aggression directed towards the self
Extraggression: aggression directed at the social environment

Weakness: social desirability, unknown if people would actually respond in the way they described; takes long to code answers

Question 28

How are official records used to measure aggression? What is the limitation?

Answer 28

Crime statistics can be used by aggression researchers who want to study criminal forms of aggression.

• Murders have steadily declined since the 1970s
• Anderson et al. found that the incidence rates of serious and deadly assault were higher in years with a higher average temperature, whereas robbery figures remained unaffected by temperature

Limitations: frequency but not reasoning, only takes into account reported acts of aggression; “dark figures” (unreported crimes) presumed to be high for non-homicidal crimes

Question 29

How is aggression a social construct?

Answer 29

Aggression is a social construct because what is considered aggression is determined on the basis of shared values and normative beliefs that vary between societies and over time
ex. corporal punishment

Question 30

Define antisocial behaviour.

Answer 30

Antisocial behaviour denotes behaviour that violates social norms of appropriate conduct; it is broader than agression and includes behaviours that are not intended to harm other people
ex. vandalism, lying

Question 31

Define coercion.

Answer 31

Coercion is an action taken with the intention of imposing harm on another person or forcing compliance
ex. threats, punishments, bodily force

Question 32

What are the six potential functions of violent behaviour?

Answer 32

1. Change of, or escape from, aversive situations
2. Positive reinforcement (ex. attainment of a particular goal)
3. Release of negative affective arousal
4. Resolution of conflict
5. Gaining of respect
6. Attack on a culturally defined “enemy” (ex. a member of a devalued out-group)

Question 33

What is structural violence?

Answer 33

Structural violence denotes societal conditions that entail harmful consequences for certain social groups; leads to inequality and injustice

Question 34

How do experiments make unethical experiments testing aggression ethical?

Answer 34

The resort to paradigms where participants show behaviour intended to harm another person without actually allowing real harm to be inflicted on anyone.