AGGRESSION (CONTINUEâ€¦â€¦):The Cognitive-Neo-associationist Model

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

Lesson 35

AGGRESSION (CONTINUE......)

Aims

To introduce psychological aspects of antisocial (aggressive) behavior

Objectives

Describe cathartic hypothesis of aggression

Describe the Cognitive-Neo-associationist Model of aggression

Discuss situational factors involved in aggressive behaviors

Describe learning theory of aggression

Implications of cathartic hypothesis and aggression

· It is often believed that catharsis reduces aggression. However, the research literature indicates that

once verbal aggression begins, it is difficult to keep it within manageable bounds.

People who are given the opportunity to aggress directly against someone who has frustrated them

often become more aggressive. In contrast, households that engage in little or no verbal aggression

rarely ever experience physical violence (less than half of 1 percent; Buss, 1966; Gecn, 1968).

Despite the lack of research support for catharsis, the popular media and many mental health

professionals continue to advocate its use.

Sociologist Murray Straus's research indicates that this sort of escalation of aggression is a

common pattern in domestic violence.

Family conflicts often begin with verbal quarreling, which then escalates to screaming and yelling,

and finally to physical aggression (Straus & Gelles, 1990).

The Cognitive-Neo-associationist Model

Realizing that the association between frustration and aggression had been overstated, Leonard Berkowitz

(1969, 1989) developed a new theory. He asserted that frustration is just one of many factors that can

stimulate negative affect. Besides frustration, other aversive factors such as pain, extreme temperatures, and

encountering disliked people can also cause negative affect. All negative events are associated in a network

in memory. Leonard Berkowitz explains how hostile aggression is often triggered by circumstances that

arouse negative feelings:

Cognitive-associative networks:

o Negative affect is encoded into memory and becomes cognitively associated with specific

types of negative thoughts, emotions, physiological responses, and reflexive behaviors.

Initial "fight" or "flight" tendencies:

o Whether we react to negative affect with "fight" or "flight" depends on our:

genetic predispositions

prior conditioning and learning

attention to aspects of the situation that facilitate or inhibit aggression

o An aversive event initially activates not one but two different networks:

impulsive aggression-related tendencies

impulsive escape-related tendencies

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

Unthinking" aggressive responses:

o Negative affects and reflexive actions evoked in the cognitive-associative networks at this

stage are primitive, or rudimentary

Higher order cognitive intervention:

o Cognitive control mechanisms become active when we are self-aware and attend to what

we are thinking

Situational factors

· Heat hypothesis

· Triggers of aggression

Discussion: Anger, Catharsis and Neo-

association Theory

Aversive event

The text discusses the argument against the

catharsis hypothesis (the idea, derived from Freud,

Negative affect

that indirectly expressing feelings of hostility will

Lower order cognition

reduce subsequent aggression).

A recent

experiment also provides a nice illustrative

argument against the catharsis hypothesis and ties

into ideas about mental control discussed earlier in

Impulsive aggression

Impulsive escape

the text. Bushman (2002) draws on Berkowitz's

Related tendencies

tendencies

(1993) "cognitive neo-association theory" of

aggression for his prediction. Cognitive neo-

Rudimentary fear

Rudimentary anger

association theory suggests that aggressive

thoughts are linked together in an associative

Higher order cognitive intervention: through awareness and self

network in memory, so that thinking about one

Regulation, aggression- and fear-related tendencies may be

modified

aggressive act should prime other aggressive

thoughts and predispose aggressive actions. To

test the contrasting predictions offered by the

Anger

Fear

catharsis hypothesis and cognitive neo-association

theory, Bushman angered his participants (300 men and 300 women) by having them write a one paragraph

essay on their position on abortion and having it ostensibly evaluated by another participant. The "other

participant's" feedback rated the essay negatively (about 9 on a 10 to +10 scale) and included the

handwritten comment, "This is one of the worst essays I've read!" Subsequent to this, participants were

assigned to one of three conditions: a rumination condition, in which they punched a punching bag while

thinking about their opponent; a distraction condition, in which they punched a punching bag while

thinking about the benefits of physical fitness; and a control condition, in which they did not punch a

punching bag. The dependent variables were participants' rated mood and their aggression on a reaction-

time task in which participants competed with the "other subject" to press a button which would blast the

slower person with noise; participants could set the decibel level of the punishing blast. Results indicated

that the rumination group was significantly angrier than either of the other groups, and was also highest in

their level of aggression. The distraction group, who punched the bag while thinking about fitness, was

less angry but was not significantly less aggressive than the rumination group. These results directly

contradict the predictions of catharsis theory and are in line with the predictions of cognitive neo-

association theory.

Situational Factors: "Heat hypothesis"

· Laboratory experiments demonstrate that hot temperatures increase hostile thoughts and feelings

Archival studies suggest that the urban riots that erupted in many American cites in the 1960s were

most likely to occur on hot days and then to diminish in intensity as the weather cooled (Carlsmith

& Anderson, 1979).

This effect also occurs for such aggressive behaviors as murder, assault, rape, and spousal abuse

(Anderson & Anderson, 1984,1996);

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

Pakistan: general observation that people are impatient and irritable during hot summer days.

Practical implications

· Frequency of hostile outbursts could be reduced in temperature-controlled environments

Second, the heat hypothesis has obvious implications for global warming

By the middle of the twenty-first century, we can expect global temperatures to increase by two to

eight degrees, which means there will be many more hot days in the summer months (U.S. House

of Representatives, 1994).

Craig Anderson (2001) estimates that such temperature increases could increase annual serious and

deadly assaults by more than 24,000 incidents in the US

Situational Factors: Aggressive cues as "triggers" of aggression

· Berkowitz believes that the presence of aggression-associated cues in the environment can' act as

triggers for hostile outbursts by making aggressive thoughts more accessible.

An aggression-associated cue is anything that is associated with either violence or unpleasantness,

such as guns, knives, and clubs.

The most obvious aggressive cues are weapons, while less obvious cues are negative attitudes and

unpleasant physical characteristics.

Numerous studies indicate that the presence of aggression-associated cues does indeed trigger

aggression

Michael Carlson and his coworkers (1990):

· Cues enhance aggressiveness in already angry

· A handgun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a friend or family than the intruders

· Study in Pakistan (Suhail & Khalid, 2006): use of gun (46.1%) followed by knife (28%)

· "Not only the finger pulls the trigger, but the trigger may also be pulling the trigger" (Berkowitz,

1968, p. 22)

· Handguns are increasingly being marketed as tools of self-defense for women. Crime statistics

indicate that for every one instance that a woman uses a handgun to kill a stranger in self-defense,

239 women are murdered with handguns. Often, the handguns used in these murders came from the

woman's own household.

· Weapons effect depends on the meaning people attach to guns.

· They found that although both hunting rifles and assault weapons served as cues to aggression for

people with no prior hunting experience, only assault weapons served as cues for hunters (Bruce

Bartholow and his colleagues, 2005)

Social learning theory (Bandura, 1979)

· Albert Bandura, one of the leading proponents of social learning theory, contends that people

learn when to aggress, how to aggress, and against whom to aggress.

· Social behavior is primarily learned by observing and imitating the actions of others, and

secondarily by being directly rewarded and punished for our own actions

· Based on operant conditioning principle

· Occurs through both direct and indirect means

The rewards of aggression

· An aggressive act receiving rewards is more likely to occur in the future

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

The rewards could be material, such as candy or money, or they could be social, such as praise or

increased status and self-esteem

When behavior, like aggression, is repeatedly not rewarded, or is even punished, this will generally

lead to a reduction in the frequency of the behavior. Psychologists call this weakening and eventual

termination of behavior extinction. Extinction of aggressive actions is exactly what parents are

aiming at when they give children "time-outs" following harmful outbursts.

An Inconsistent pattern of reward withdrawal can do more harm than good. In one study

demonstrating this principle, young children were rewarded for hitting a doll (Cowan & Walters,

1963). Half were rewarded every time they acted aggressively, but the others were rewarded only

periodically. In both instances, the rewards increased the children's aggressive behavior. However,

when the experimenters stopped the rewards, the children who had been only periodically

reinforced continued to hit the doll longer than those whose aggressiveness had been continuously

reinforced (Cowan & Walters, 1963).

Observational learning (Bandura, Ross & Ross, 1961)

The photographs illustrated below show the snapshots of Bandura's experiments:

Although learning does occur through direct reinforcement, we most often learn by watching and

imitating others without being directly rewarded

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

Children in the experimental condition room were likely to hit and punch the Bobo doll like the

adult, and even sometimes screaming the same phrases that the adult did

Children are most likely to pay attention to and model the behavior of those:

o with whom they have a nurturing relationship, and

o who also have social control over them. Parents are prime candidates as role models, but

behavior can also be observed and modeled from television, books, and other mass media

sources

Bandura (1965) showed that children still learned the aggressive behavior even if it was punished;

they just didn't express it.

Modeling aggression

Figure 1: Modeling aggression as a

function

reinforcement

and

punishment

In the following figure, it has been

demonstrated that modelling of physical

behaviour is significantly more as

compared to verbal aggression. This leads

to conclusion that parents and significant

others should thus try to control their

aggressive outbursts in front of children.

Reinforced

Punished

No model

Reading

· Franzoi, S. (2003). Social

Psychology. Boston: McGraw-

Hill. Chapter 13.

Other Readings

· Lord, C.G. (1997). Social

Psychology. Orlando: Harcourt

Brace and Company. Chapter 8.

· David G. Myers, D. G. (2002).

Social Psychology (7th ed.). New

York: McGraw-Hill.

· Taylor, S.E. (2006). Social

Psychology (12th ed.). New York:

Prentice Hall.

Figure 2: Modelling of physical and verbal aggression

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