Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: Is aggression a learned behavior?
Some scholars believe that behaviors like aggression may be partially learned by watching and imitating people's behavior, while other researchers have concluded that the media may have some small effects on aggression. There is also research questioning this view. For instance, a long-term outcome study of youth found no long-term relationship between playing violent video games and youth violence or bullying. One study suggested there is a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression than has been found with television violence on aggression. This effect is positively associated with type of game violence and negatively associated to time spent playing the games. The author concluded that insufficient evidence exists to link video game violence with aggression. However, another study suggested links to aggressive behavior.
The frustration-aggression hypothesis emerged in 1939 through the form of a monograph published by the Yale University Institute of Human Relations. The Yale psychologists behind the monograph were John Dollard, Leonard Doob, Neal Miller, O. H Mowrer, and Robert Sears. The book is based on many studies conducted by the group that touched a variety of disciplines including psychology, anthropology and sociology. Marxism, psychoanalysis and behaviorism were used by the Yale group throughout their research. Their work, "Frustration and Aggression (1939)", was soon having repercussions on the explanation of aggressive behavior theories. Their theory applied to human beings, but also to animals. The book created controversy on the subject which led to more than 7 articles critiquing the new theory. The "Psychological Review" and the "Reading in Social Psychology" are two of the papers that published articles on the subject. Many social scientists disclaimed the rather strict definition of frustration reactions as well as how the frustration concept is defined in itself. By 1941, the Yale group modified their theory following the multiple critics and studies published by other psychologists. From there, many pioneers in the social science world modified and brought their knowledge to the original theory.
The frustration–aggression theory has been studied since 1939, and there have been modifications. Dill and Anderson conducted a study investigating whether hostile aggression differs in justified vs. unjustified frustration conditions—compared to the control condition which would not induce frustration. The study task required participants to learn and make an origami bird. The experimental procedure comprised an instruction phase and a folding phase. During the instruction phase, a participant paired with a confederate was shown how to fold a bird only one time. The folding phase was timed and each subject was required to make the bird alone as quickly and as accurately as possible. In all conditions, the experimenter started presenting the instructions in a deliberately fast manner. The conditions differed on how the experimenter responded to the confederate's request to slow down. In the non-frustration control condition, the experimenter apologized and slowed down. In the unjustified frustration condition, the experimenter revealed his desire to leave as quickly as possible due to personal reasons. In the justified frustration condition, the experimenter revealed a need to clear the room as fast as possible due to the supervisor demand. The subjects were then given questionnaires on their levels of aggression as well as questionnaires about the competence of the research staff. They were told that these questionnaires would determine whether the research staff would receive financial aid, or verbal reprimands and a reduction in financial awards. The questions presented on the questionnaire were designed to reflect the research staff's competence and likability. Dill and Anderson found that participants in the unjustified frustration condition rated the research staff as less able and less likable, knowing this would affect their financial situation as graduate students. The justified frustration group rated the staff as less likable and less competent than the control group, but higher on both rating scales than the unjustified condition participants. The authors concluded that unjustified frustration leads to greater level of aggression, compared to justified frustration, which, in turn, results in higher levels of aggression compared to the non-frustration situations.
However, Dollard is likely best known within the psychological community as a member of the distinguished group of young researchers (among whom was Neal E. Miller) at Yale University in the 1930s who, inspired initially by Clark L. Hull, sought to combine learning theory and psychoanalysis. The groups' first major publication was "Frustration and Aggression", and has become a classic which is still widely cited in introductory texts. It outlined a view, now referred to as the frustration-aggression hypothesis, which formed the basis for later developments such as Leonard Berkowitz's "Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis" (1962) and the animal research on frustration and aggression in the 1960s and 1970s, which caused a controversy between the researchers and animal rights groups. Miller sums up Dollard's contributions to the group as such: "If trying to bring together contributions from sociology, anthropology, psychology, and psychotherapy no longer seems so novel, it is because Dollard and other pioneers had the courage and tenacity to break through traditional barriers".
Following that study, Albert Bandura tested whether the same was true for models presented through media by constructing an experiment he called "Bobo Doll Behavior: A Study of Aggression". In this experiment Bandura exposed a group of children to a video featuring violent and aggressive actions. After the video he then placed the children in a room with a Bobo doll to see how they behaved with it. Through this experiment, Bandura discovered that children who had watched the violent video subjected the dolls to more aggressive and violent behavior, while children not exposed to the video did not. This experiment displays the social cognitive theory because it depicts how people reenact behaviors they see in the media. In this case, the children in this experiment reenacted the model of violence they directly learned from the video.
The concept of behavioral modeling was most memorably introduced by Albert Bandura in his famous 1961 Bobo Doll Experiment. In this study, 72 children from ages three to five were divided into groups to watch an adult confederate interact with an assortment of toys in the experiment room, including an inflated Bobo doll. For children assigned the non-aggressive condition, the confederate ignored the doll. For children assigned the aggressive condition, the confederate spent the majority of the time physically aggressing the doll and shouting at it.
The International Society for Research on Aggression (abbreviated ISRA) is an international learned society dedicated to scientific research on all aspects of human aggressive behavior. It was established in August 1972 in Tokyo, Japan, by a group of academics who were there to attend the 20th Annual International Congress of Psychology. The Society was co-founded by Saul Rosenzweig and John Paul Scott, who served as its first and second president, respectively. Its official journal is "Aggressive Behavior", which is published by John Wiley & Sons. The current president of the society is Mike Potegal.
Notable past presidents of the ISRA include:
Albert Bandura, a social learning theorist suggested the forces of memory and emotions worked in conjunction with environmental influences. Bandura was known mostly for his "Bobo doll experiment". During these experiments, Bandura video taped a college student kicking and verbally abusing a bobo doll. He then showed this video to a class of kindergarten children who were getting ready to go out to play. When they entered the play room, they saw bobo dolls, and some hammers. The people observing these children at play saw a group of children beating the doll. He called this study and his findings observational learning, or modeling.
The Bobo doll experiment (or experiments) is the collective name for the experiments performed by Albert Bandura during 1961 and 1963 when he studied children's behavior after they watched a human adult model act aggressively towards a Bobo doll, a doll-like toy with a rounded bottom and low center of mass that rocks back to an upright position after it has been knocked down. There are different variations of the experiment. The most notable experiment measured the children's behavior after seeing the human model get rewarded, get punished, or experience no consequence for physically abusing the Bobo doll. The experiments are empirical methods to test Bandura's social learning theory. The social learning theory claims that people learn largely by observing, imitating, and modeling. It demonstrates that people learn not only by being rewarded or punished (behaviorism), but they can also learn from watching somebody else being rewarded or punished (observational learning). These experiments are important because they resulted in many more studies concerning the effects of observational learning. The new data from the studies has practical implications, for example by providing evidence of how children can be influenced by watching violent media.
Contrasted to other carnivorous mammals known to attack humans for food, the frequency with which wolves have been recorded to kill people is rather low, indicating that, though potentially dangerous, wolves are among the least threatening for their size and predatory potential, except for the dog which poses lethal hazards for reasons other than predation. In the rare cases in which man-eating wolf attacks occur, the majority of victims are children. Habituation is a known factor contributing to some man-eating wolf attacks which results from living close to human habitations, causing wolves to lose their fear of humans and consequently approach too closely, much like urban coyotes. Habituation can also happen when people intentionally encourage wolves to approach them, usually by offering them food, or unintentionally, when people do not sufficiently intimidate them. This is corroborated by accounts demonstrating that wolves in protected areas are more likely to show boldness toward humans than ones in areas where they are actively hunted.Attacks on humans by dingoes are rare, with only two recorded fatalities in Australia. Dingoes are normally shy of humans and avoid encounters with them. The most famous record of a dingo attack was the disappearance of nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain. Her parents reported that they both saw a dingo taking Azaria out of their tent when she and her family were out on a camping trip to Uluru.
Human behaviour genetics is a subfield of the field of behaviour genetics that studies the role of genetic and environmental influences on human behaviour. Classically, human behavioural geneticists have studied the inheritance of behavioural traits. The field was originally focused on testing whether genetic influences were important in human behavior (e.g., do genes influence human behavior). It has evolved to address more complex questions such as: how important are genetic and/or environmental influences on various human behavioral traits; to what extent do the same genetic and/or environmental influences impact the overlap between human behavioral traits; how do genetic and/or environmental influences on behavior change across development; and what environmental factors moderate the importance of genetic effects on human behavior (gene-environment interaction). The field is interdisciplinary, and draws from genetics, psychology, and statistics. Most recently, the field has moved into the area of statistical genetics, with many behavioral geneticists also involved in efforts to identify the specific genes involved in human behavior, and to understand how the effects associated with these genes changes across time, and in conjunction with the environment.
Spontaneous recovery is associated with the learning process called classical conditioning, in which an organism learns to associate a neutral stimulus with a stimulus which produces an unconditioned response, such that the previously neutral stimulus comes to produce its own response, which is usually similar to that produced by the unconditioned stimulus. Although aspects of classical conditioning had been noted by previous scholars, the first experimental analysis of the process was done by Ivan Pavlov, a nineteenth-century physiologist came across the associative effects of conditioning while conducting research on canine digestion.
Statistical learning is the ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment. Although statistical learning is now thought to be a generalized learning mechanism, the phenomenon was first identified in human infant language acquisition.
For example, newly dominant male lions often kill cubs in the pride that they did not sire. This behavior is adaptive because killing the cubs eliminates competition for their own offspring and causes the nursing females to come into heat faster, thus allowing more of his genes to enter into the population. Sociobiologists would view this instinctual cub-killing behavior as being inherited through the genes of successfully reproducing male lions, whereas non-killing behavior may have died out as those lions were less successful in reproducing.
The results reported in "Contributions from Research on Anger and Cognitive Dissonance to Understanding the Motivational Functions of Asymmetrical Frontal Brain Activity" (2004) indicate that the occurrence of cognitive dissonance is associated with neural activity in the left frontal cortex, a brain structure also associated with the emotion of anger; moreover, functionally, anger motivates neural activity in the left frontal cortex. Applying a directional model of Approach motivation, the study "Anger and the Behavioural Approach System" (2003) indicated that the relation between cognitive dissonance and anger is supported by neural activity in the left frontal cortex that occurs when a person takes control of the social situation causing the cognitive dissonance. Conversely, if the person cannot control or cannot change the psychologically stressful situation, he or she is without a motivation to change the circumstance, then there arise other, negative emotions to manage the cognitive dissonance, such as socially inappropriate behavior.
Combat Hunter Training teaches how to track the emplacer by combined hunter and tracker skills and with determining group dynamics - as an example - using the "street smarts" developed by law enforcement who work in the cities.
Comparative psychology refers to the scientific study of the behavior and mental processes of non-human animals, especially as these relate to the phylogenetic history, adaptive significance, and development of behavior. Research in this area explores the behavior of many species, from insects to primates. It is closely related to other disciplines that study animal behavior such as ethology. Research in comparative psychology sometimes appears to shed light on human behavior, but some attempts to connect the two have been quite controversial, for example the Sociobiology of E.O. Wilson. Animal models are often used to study neural processes related to human behavior, e.g. in cognitive neuroscience.
It has been postulated that domestic cats can learn to manipulate their owners through vocalizations that are similar to the cries of human babies. Some cats learn to add a purr to the vocalization, which makes it less harmonious and more dissonant to humans, and therefore harder to ignore. Individual cats learn to make these vocalizations through trial-and-error; when a particular vocalization elicits a positive response from a human, the probability increases that the cat will use that vocalization in the future.
The fear of wolves has been pervasive in many societies, though humans are not part of the wolf's natural prey. How wolves react to humans depends largely on their prior experience with people: wolves lacking any negative experience of humans, or which are food-conditioned, may show little fear of people. Although wolves may react aggressively under provocation, such attacks are mostly limited to quick bites on extremities, and the attacks are not pressed. Predatory attacks (attacks by wolves treating humans as food) may be preceded by a long period of habituation, in which wolves gradually lose their fear of humans. The victims are repeatedly bitten on the head and face, and are then dragged off and consumed, unless the wolves are driven off. Such attacks typically occur only locally, and do not stop until the wolves involved are eliminated. Predatory attacks can occur at any time of the year, with a peak in the June–August period, when the chances of people entering forested areas (for livestock grazing or berry and mushroom picking) increase, though cases of non-rabid wolf attacks in winter have been recorded in Belarus, Kirov and Irkutsk oblasts, Karelia and Ukraine. Also, wolves with pups experience greater food stresses during this period.
Expectancy theory (or expectancy theory of motivation) proposes an individual will behave or act in a certain way because they are motivated to select a specific behavior over others due to what they expect the result of that selected behavior will be. In essence, the motivation of the behavior selection is determined by the desirability of the outcome. However, at the core of the theory is the cognitive process of how an individual processes the different motivational elements. This is done before making the ultimate choice. The outcome is not the sole determining factor in making the decision of how to behave.
Cognitive dissonance, a theory originally developed by Festinger (1957), is the idea that people experience a sense of guilt or uneasiness when two linked cognitions are inconsistent, such as when there are two conflicting attitudes about a topic, or inconsistencies between one's attitude and behavior on a certain topic. The basic idea of the Cognitive Dissonance Theory relating to attitude change, is that people are motivated to reduce dissonance which can be achieved through changing their attitudes and beliefs. Cooper & Fazio's (1984) have also added that cognitive dissonance does not arise from any simple cognitive inconsistency, but rather results from freely chosen behavior that may bring about negative consequences. These negative consequences may be threats to the consistency, stability, predictability, competence, moral goodness of the self-concept, or violation of general self-integrity.
His research with Walters led to his first book, "Adolescent Aggression" in 1959, and to a subsequent book, "Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis" in 1973. During a period dominated by behaviorism in the mold of B.F. Skinner, Bandura believed the sole behavioral modifiers of reward and punishment in classical and operant conditioning were inadequate as a framework, and that many human behaviors were learned from other humans. Bandura began to analyze means of treating unduly aggressive children by identifying sources of violence in their lives. Initial research in the area had begun in the 1940s under Neal Miller and John Dollard; his continued work in this line eventually culminated in the Bobo doll experiment, and in 1977's hugely influential treatise, "Social Learning Theory". Many of his innovations came from his focus on empirical investigation and reproducible investigation, which were alien to a field of psychology dominated by the theories of Freud.
Humans share aspects of aggression with non-human animals, and have specific aspects and complexity related to factors such as genetics, early development, social learning and flexibility, culture and morals.
Konrad Lorenz stated in his 1963 classic, "On Aggression," that human behavior is shaped by four main, survival-seeking animal drives. Taken together, these drives—hunger, fear, reproduction, and aggression—achieve natural selection. E. O. Wilson elaborated in "On Human Nature" that aggression is, typically, a means of gaining control over resources. Aggression is, thus, aggravated during times when high population densities generate resource shortages. According to Richard Leakey and his colleagues, aggression in humans has also increased by becoming more interested in ownership and by defending his or her property. However, UNESCO adopted the Seville Statement of Violence in 1989 that refuted claims, by evolutionary scientists, that genetics by itself was the sole cause of aggression.
Aggression, in general, is any behavior an individual carries out with the intent to harm another person or group of people. The aggressor must believe that their behavior is harmful to their target, and that the target is motivated to avoid this behavior. A defining feature of aggression is the intent or motivation to harm. For a behavior to be considered an aggressive act, the individual committing the behavior must intend harm. In other words, if they inflict harm on another without that specific intent, it is not considered aggression.
Structured Learning Training is the behavioral components of ART. Many youths with criminal behavior and/or have difficulties controlling their anger lack social skills. Many of the concepts of the social skills component are taken from Albert Bandura's work. There are many different social skills that these youth are thought to lack. The ART intervention focuses on the following social skills that are particular to reducing aggressive behavior:
These social skills are broken down into various steps (both thinking and action steps). The facilitator discusses the day's skill, bringing out relevant examples. Then the facilitator demonstrates a situation to give the youth a picture of how to perform the skill. The youth are asked to point out each of the steps. Then each of the youths is asked to use a relevant situation that they have recently had using the skill. Again, the other youths go through and discuss each of the steps each time.