What is Aggression?
Excerpt from Challenging Behavior in Young
Children: Understanding, Preventing, and Responding Effectively
by
B. Kaiser, J.S. Rasminsky, 2007 edition, p. 13-17.
Updated
on Jul 20, 2010
Retrieved
February 8, 2014, from http://www.education.com/reference/article/what-aggression/?page=3
Psychologists
often define aggression as behavior that is aimed at harming or injuring others
(Coie and Dodge, 1998). Challenging behavior isn’t always aggressive—sometimes
it is disruptive or antisocial or annoying. But aggressive behavior is always
challenging.
It
can assume many forms. It can be direct (like hitting, pushing, biting,
pinching, kicking, spitting, or hair-pulling) or indirect (like bullying,
teasing, ignoring or defying rules or instructions, spreading rumors, excluding
others, name-calling, or destroying objects). Indirect aggressive behavior (“You’re
not my friend”) is also called relational aggression because it endangers the
relationship between the two people (Crick and Grotpeter, 1995).
Because
the question goes straight to the heart of who we are as human beings,
philosophers have been arguing about the nature of aggression since the time of
the Greeks. Some, like Seneca and the Stoics in ancient times and Thomas Hobbes
in the seventeenth century, assert that aggression and anger are uncontrollable
biological instincts that must be restrained by external force. Others, like
the English philosopher John Locke, believe that a child comes into the world
as a blank slate—tabula rasa—and experience makes him who he is (Dodge, 1991).
Both
views still exist today. The frustration-aggression theory holds that when
people are frustrated—when they can’t reach their goals—they become angry and
hostile and act aggressively (Dodge, 1991; Reiss and Roth, 1993). Social
learning theory takes the Lockean perspective, and it has dominated thinking on
the subject of aggression for the last three decades. Based on principles of
conditioning and reinforcement, it says that people learn aggressive behavior
from the environment and use it to achieve their goals. Of course, these
distinctions are difficult to make in practice. When you get right down to it,
it’s impossible to attribute all aggression to frustration, and the way you
respond to frustration probably depends on what you’ve learned (Pepler and
Slaby, 1994).
The
father of social learning theory is Stanford University psychologist Albert
Bandura, who contends that children learn aggressive behavior primarily by
observing it. Children are great imitators, and they copy the models around
them—family, teachers, peers, neighbors, television. At the same time, they
observe and experience the rewards, punishments, and emotional states
associated with aggressive behavior. When they see that a behavior is
reinforced, they’re likely to try it for themselves; when they experience the
reinforcement directly, they’re likely to repeat it. That is, when Zack hits
Ben and gets the red fire engine, he will almost certainly try hitting the next
time he wants something.
Social
learning theory has spawned several sister theories that place more emphasis on
cognition. According to the cognitive script model, proposed by L. Rowell
Huesmann and Leonard D. Eron, children learn scripts for aggressive
behavior—when to expect it, what to do, what it will feel like, what its
results will be—and store them in their memory banks. The more they rehearse
these scripts through observation, fantasy, and behavior, the more readily they
spring to mind and govern behavior when the occasion arises (Coie and Dodge,
1998; Pepler and Slaby, 1994; Reiss and Roth, 1993).
Vanderbilt
University psychologist Kenneth A. Dodge has proposed a social information
processing model for aggressive behavior. In every single social interaction,
there is lots of information to be instantly processed and turned into a
response. The social cues coming in must be properly encoded and interpreted,
and the possible responses need to be thought of, evaluated, and enacted.
Children with very challenging behavior often lack one or more of the skills
required to process this information properly. Even as preschoolers, they tend
to see the world with a jaundiced eye. When another child bumps into them, for
example, they think he did it on purpose, attributing hostile intent in
situations most children would regard as neutral. They don’t look around for
new facts that might help solve a problem, don’t think of many alternative
solutions, don’t anticipate what will happen if they respond aggressively, and
end up choosing passive or aggressive solutions that don’t work (Dodge, 1980;
Dodge and Frame, 1982).
Like
the philosophers, Dodge makes a distinction between two kinds of aggression.
Children use proactive aggression (also called instrumental aggression) as a
tool to achieve a goal, such as obtaining a desired object (the red fire
engine) or dominating a peer (Alexa scratches Melanie to remind her that she is
the boss of the game). Proactive aggression is more common among very young
children because they don’t yet have the words to ask for the ball, the seat
next to David, or the teacher’s attention. They aren’t angry or emotional; they’re
just using the means at their disposal to get what they want and to make
themselves understood. Interestingly, young children who engage in the use of
proactive aggression don’t necessarily earn the rejection of their peers. In
fact, they often show leadership qualities. But by the time they reach the
primary grades, the other children are no longer willing to tolerate this
behavior and will reject a child who uses it (Dodge, 1991).
Reactive
aggression (also known as hostile or affective aggression) appears in the heat
of the moment in reaction to some frustration or perceived provocation. Angry,
volatile, and not at all controlled, it is often aimed at hurting someone. The
children who use it are invariably disliked. Dodge and his colleagues have found
that children who are prone to reactive aggression make errors in social
information processing—they attribute hostile intent to others in ambiguous or
neutral situations (Dodge and Frame, 1982).
Other
psychologists have also noticed distinctive thought patterns. For example,
children who use aggressive behavior believe that aggression is perfectly
acceptable. In their minds, it can enhance a reputation and raise self-esteem,
and it doesn’t even hurt the guy on the receiving end of it. Morever, children with
challenging behavior believe that aggression pays off, and in their experience
it often does (Slaby, 1997). In one study, preschoolers who used aggression got
what they wanted three-quarters of the time, and because they were so
successful, they were more likely to try this method again (Maccoby, 1980).
Television and life in the inner city tend to perpetuate such beliefs.
Children
who behave aggressively may also lag behind in moral understanding. They are
more liable to view aggressive responses as morally acceptable, and they may be
unable to see things from another person’s perspective. They may insist on
having their own way, blame others when things go wrong, and continue to attack
even when the other child is in pain (Coie and Dodge, 1998; Perry, Perry, and
Kennedy, 1992). They may also overestimate their own competence (Asher,
Parkhurst, Hymel, and Williams, 1990). In a recent study, children rated as
aggressive by their teachers rated themselves as perfect on a test of
self-esteem (Hughes, Cavell, and Grossman, 1997)!
Preschoolers
with aggressive behavior who are also rejected by their peers experience more
stress. When researchers tested the children’s stress hormones, those with
aggressive behavior had much higher levels than other children in the classroom
(Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000).
Aggression
is not the same as conflict, which occurs when people have opposing goals or
interests. Conflict can be resolved in many ways—by negotiating, taking turns,
persuading, and so on—and skill in conflict resolution is important in helping
children learn to be assertive about their own needs, regulate their negative
feelings, and understand others (Cords and Killen, 1998; Katz, Kramer, and
Gottman, 1992). Aggressive behavior is just one tactic for dealing with
conflict—in fact, some researchers consider it a mismanagement of conflict
(Perry et al., 1992; Shantz and Hartup, 1992). But most conflicts don’t involve
aggression. One study found that physical aggression takes place in only 17
percent of the conflicts among 24-month-olds (Ross and Conant, 1992).
Aggressive
behavior is more likely to occur when the environment considers it normal and
acceptable and when children have encoded it in their repertoire of responses
(Guerra, 1997a). When the environment devalues aggressive behavior and children
have competent, effective, nonaggressive responses in their repertoire, they
have a far better chance of solving their problems amicably.
