Week 10 - antisocial behaviour

Question 1

What is Antisocial behaviour?

Answer 1

Behaviour that either damages interpersonal relationships or is culturally undesirable

Question 2

What is Aggression and Violence?

Answer 2

AGGRESSION: an intentional behaviour to harm someone who does not want to be harmed
VIOLENCE: Agression, with the goal of extreme physical harm

Question 3

What are different varieties of aggression?

Answer 3

• Social vs antisocial aggression (instrumental vs. hostile)
• Passive vs. active aggression
• Psychological vs. physical aggression
• Interpersonal vs. intergroup aggression

Question 4

What are the individual differences in aggressive tendencies?

Answer 4

• Personality
• Cognitive style
• Gender

Question 5

Personality and Aggression

Narcissistic personality usually correlates with aggression.

Answer 5

Individuals who are more prone to violence tend to:
- think they are better than other people
- Have grandiose or inflated opinions of their worth
- Challenges to inflated self-worth are viewed as provocation -> aggression (physical or verbal, including gas-lighting)?

Question 6

Cognitive styles

What is hostile distribution bias regarding aggression?

Answer 6

• More likely among children with less developed theory of the mind, worse motion understanding, and lower IQ
• Predicts aggressive responses
• Mediated by: anger rumination, and impulsive reactions to negative emotions

Question 7

In all known societies, men just over age of puberty commit most violent crimes. WHY?

Answer 7

• Socialization
• Hormones
• Disinhibition

Question 8

Why are humans aggressive?

Answer 8

• Instinct theory
• Evolutionary theory
• Learning theory

Question 9

what is INSTICT THEORY (Freud)

Answer 9

• Human motivational forces are based on instict
• sex - life giving instinct - eros
• aggression - death instinct - thanatos
• Introduced notion of displacement

Question 10

What is evolutionary theory (Buss and Shackleford 1997)

Answer 10

• Aggresssion serves 7 adaptive functions
• Accounts for gender differences in violent aggression in specific contexts

Question 11

What is learning theory of aggression?

Answer 11

Aggression is a learned behaviour: Modeling
- Bandura and colleagues (1961, 1963)
- Children watched adult interact with ‘Bobo’ doll; adult shows aggressive or non-aggressive behaviour towards Bobo
- Child then interacts with Bobo, how do they behave

Question 12

what is the role nature AND nurture in aggression

Answer 12

Predisposition to behave aggressively (nature), triggered by specific situational factors (nurture)

Question 13

Interval

What triggers aggression

Answer 13

Frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard, 1939)
- Frustration = negative emotion resulting from having one’s goals blocked
- Frustration is necessary AND sufficient to produce aggression

BUT
- intstrumental agression
- non-aggressive responses to provocation

Question 14

Interval triggers

Mood and emotion regarding aggression:

Answer 14

• Anger does not directly or inevitably cause aggression
• If one believes aggression will dissipate anger, will behave more aggressively

Question 15

Internal trigger

What is physiological arousal

Answer 15

Excitation transfer (Zillman et al., 1979)
Arousal/Exercise prior to provocation, what effect on aggressive response.