Temperature and aggression

Creating Your Own Hostile Environment: A Laboratory Examination of Trait Aggressiveness and the Violence Escalation Cycle

A dyadic interactive aggression paradigm tested hypotheses from the General Aggression Model about how trait aggressiveness can create behaviorally hostile social environments. Pairs of college student participants competed in a modified reaction time task in which they repeatedly delivered and received each other's punishments. The trait aggressiveness of both participants influenced the punishment intensities (aggression level) set by each member of the dyad on later trials. Furthermore, there was a pattern of escalation from early to later trials. These trait aggressiveness effects (both self and partner) on later aggressive behavior were largely mediated by partner aggression levels during early trials. Results also suggested two aggressive motives—hostile and instrumental—resulted from high partner aggression during early trials and these motives partially mediated the effects of trait aggressiveness and of early trial aggression on later aggressive behavior.

Human aggression

Research on human aggression has progressed to a point at which a unifying framework is needed. Major domain-limited theories of aggression include cognitive neoassociation, social learning, social interaction, script, and excitation transfer theories. Using the general aggression model (GAM), this review posits cognition, affect, and arousal to mediate the effects of situational and personological variables on aggression. The review also organizes recent theories of the development and persistence of aggressive personality. Personality is conceptualized as a set of stable knowledge structures that individuals use to interpret events in their social world and to guide their behavior. In addition to organizing what is already known about human aggression, this review, using the GAM framework, also serves the heuristic function of suggesting what research is needed to fill in theoretical gaps and can be used to create and test interventions for reducing aggression.