![]() Other examples are the jealous lover who strikes out in rage or the sports fans at my university who, after our basketball team won the national NCAA championship, lit fires and destroyed cars around the stadium. When Sarah yells at her boyfriend, this is probably emotional aggression-it is impulsive and carried out in the heat of the moment. Emotional aggression is the result of the extreme negative emotions we’re experiencing at the time that we aggress and is not really intended to create any positive outcomes. Emotional or impulsive aggression refers to aggression that occurs with only a small amount of forethought or intent and that is determined primarily by impulsive emotions. The type or level of intent that underlies an aggressive behavior creates the distinction between two fundamental types of aggression, which are caused by very different psychological processes. Slapping someone really hard across the face might be violent, but calling people names would only be aggressive. All violent acts are aggressive, but only acts that are intended to cause extreme physical damage, such as murder, assault, rape, and robbery, are violent. Social psychologists use the term violence to refer to aggression that has extreme physical harm, such as injury or death, as its goal. Within the legal system, juries and judges are frequently asked to determine whether harm was done intentionally. Although the player whose arm is broken in a football game may attribute hostile intent, the other player may claim that the injury was not intended. government perceives the development of a nuclear weapon by North Korea as aggressive because the government believes that the weapon is intended to harm others, but North Korea may see the program as promoting self-defense. A dentist might intentionally give a patient a painful injection of a painkiller, but the goal is to prevent further pain during the procedure.īecause our definition requires us to determine the intent of the perpetrator, there is going to be some interpretation of these intents and there may well be disagreement among the parties involved. (We should say this behavior is “assertive” rather than aggressive.) And not all intentional behaviors that hurt others are aggressive behaviors. A salesperson who attempts to make a sale through repeated phone calls is not aggressive because he is not intending any harm. For instance, a football linebacker who accidentally breaks the arm of another player or a driver who accidentally hits a pedestrian would not by our definition be displaying aggression because although harm was done, there was no intent to harm. You can see that this definition rules out some behaviors that we might normally think are aggressive. Because it involves the perception of intent, what looks like aggression from one point of view may not look that way from another, and the same harmful behavior may or may not be aggressive depending on its intent. Social psychologists define aggression as behavior that is intended to harm another individual who does not wish to be harmed (Baron & Richardson, 1994). Doing so forces us to make use of the processes of causal attribution to help us determine the reasons for the behavior of others. Because aggression is so difficult to define, social psychologists (as well as many other people, including lawyers) judges and politicians, have spent a great deal of time trying to determine what should and should not be considered aggression. But other harmful acts, such as the injuries that sports players receive during a rough game or the killing of enemy soldiers in a war might not be viewed by everyone as aggression. ![]() We say that people are aggressive if they yell at or hit each other, if they cut off other cars in traffic, or even when they smash their fists on the table in frustration. Differentiate emotional from instrumental aggression.Īggression is a word that we use every day to characterize the behavior of others and perhaps even of ourselves.Define aggression and violence as social psychologists do.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |