Elsevier

Hormones and Behavior

Volume 44, Issue 3, September 2003, Pages 171-177
Hormones and Behavior

Regular article
What can animal aggression research tell us about human aggression?

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0018-506X(03)00133-8Get rights and content

Abstract

Research on endocrinological correlates of aggression in laboratory animals is implicitly motivated by an expectation that the results of such studies may be applicable to human aggression as well. Research with a focus on the stimulus antecedents of aggression, its response characteristics, and its outcomes suggests a number of detailed correspondences between offensive aggression in laboratory rodents and human angry aggression. These include resource (including status and territory) competition as motives that are particularly elicited by conspecific challenge situations and, when the aggression is successful, outcomes of reduction of challenge and enhancement of resource control and status. Although the response characteristics of human aggression have been dramatically altered by human verbal, technological, and social advancements, there is some evidence for targeting of blows, similar to a well-established pattern for offensive aggression in many nonhuman mammals. Finally, for people as well as for nonhuman mammals, fear of defeat or punishment is a major factor inhibiting the expression of offensive aggression. While defensive aggression has been very little researched in people, it may represent a different phenomenon than angry aggression, again providing a parallel to the offense–defense distinction of laboratory rodent studies.

Section snippets

A multifaceted approach to anger

Analysis of human aggression also involves some attention to the allied concept of “anger.” Russell and Fehr (1994, p. 202) have suggested that “…the concept of anger is. …a script in which prototypical antecedents, feelings, expressions, behaviors, physiological changes, and consequences are laid out in a causal and temporal sequence…” This approach is very similar to what we are advocating for aggression, in that it includes consideration of a number of aspects of anger (stimulus, organismic,

Stimuli that elicit anger and aggression

Perhaps the most systematic empirical evidence on the stimuli that elicit anger and aggression in people comes from Averill (1982). This well-known study represents a particularly well-rounded consideration of instigations, factors, or motives leading to anger, and often to aggression as well (p. 193), in a community sample of presumably normal people. First, the 160 focal anger-instigating incidents that Averill investigated overwhelmingly involved actions of another individual or group that

Rights challenge as a motive for anger and aggression: stimulation by “provocation”

Averill's aggression motives can be compared with the conditions devised for the specific purpose of eliciting aggression; the “provocations” used in an array of laboratory studies of human aggression. Typically, these studies involve games or exercises in which the subject receives some type of provocation, such as high levels of shock received, monies subtracted in a game, or insulting remarks, all ostensibly reflecting the actions of another individual. The subject is then provided an

Anger/aggression-eliciting stimuli: relationships between humans and nonhumans

Averill's material on anger instigations from a community sample, and the various provocations used in laboratory research in human aggression, provide some common themes that potentially link with animal research. Analyses of offensive aggression suggest that it is the behavioral component of a dedicated biobehavioral system that has evolved because it is adaptive in the context of responding to resource challenge (Blanchard and Blanchard, 1984). For most mammalian species, agonistic or

Organismic factors

As with other mammals (Suomi, 2002), the marked individual differences in human aggression may reflect physiological factors, experiential history, or the interaction of the two. Hyperaggressive individuals are a particular focus of interest, and it is notable that motivations toward aggression based on the need to control or impress others appear to be characteristic of many or most highly aggressive criminals or psychopaths (reviewed in Bond et al., 1997). For example, Toch (1980) described

Response variables

This is a particular focus of difficulty in relating animal and human aggression and one where Beach's admonition not to rely on formal characteristics of behavior may be particularly important. First, there is the enormous range of human behavioral phenomena to which the term aggression has been applied; ranging to upward of 250 definitions in one treatment (Harre and Lamb, 1983). The difficulty is not only that most of these have no equivalents in nonhuman behavior, but also that it is hard

Effects or outcomes of aggression

Laboratory animal research on aggression suggests that offensive aggression is the behavioral component of a dedicated biobehavioral system that has evolved because it is adaptive in the context of responding to resource challenge (e.g., Blanchard et al., 1999). For most mammalian species, aggressive behavior appears to determine access to resources through an intermediate step, the construction of relationships of individuals that establishes their relative priority of access in advance,

Offensive aggression: a summary

These—briefly sketched—considerations suggest a potentially close correspondence between the emotions and motives involved in offensive aggression in nonhuman animals and what is sometimes called angry aggression in people. Offensive aggression is not the only behavioral phenomenon that has been labeled aggression in our species (see Blanchard et al., 1999, for some others), but, other views notwithstanding (Albert et al., 1993) it appears to be the one that best corresponds to a wide range of

… and a note about defensive aggression

The material discussed in this special issue has concentrated primarily on offensive aggression, a phenomenon well described in animals that, we suggest, corresponds to angry aggression in individual people. The dichotomy between offensive and defensive aggression implies the existence of a second aggression motive, again potentially characteristic of people. Toch (1980) has suggested that some (rather uncommon) highly violent individuals are “self-defenders,” who display intense fear of others

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and by NSF IBN97-28543.

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