User:Matthew M/Week 5 - Aggression

Week 5 - 19/08/08 – Aggression
This topic was particularly interesting to me and so far has stood out the most. With people I know, I have always thought questions as to why they seem to get so angry so easily towards other people when out, and at times even display signs of hostile aggression when not necessary. Aggression itself means the intent to harm another person when that person themselves in motivated to avoid that harm. However the behaviour which is classified as aggressive may vary depending upon cultures. Generally actions considered as antisocial behaviour in society can be either one which damages relationships, or against the norms of the culture. There are various beliefs about ‘aggressions’ some which believe that aggression is something which is classified as a learned behaviour where other believe that it is something that we are born with. Freud was one which believed that people are born with an innate instinct to make them behave in an aggressive manner, whereas on the other hand, the social learning theory seems to suggest that it is not an innate instinct but it is something we learn through the course of our lives. There seem to be different reasoning behind why aggression occurs and one which seemed to stand out to me was the frustration-aggression hypothesis. This hypothesis believes that people, when they are frustrated will always lead to them becoming aggressive and on the same line that when people are aggressive, there must always be some source of frustration involved. Even so according to the textbook studies have shown that frustration is no the whole cause of aggression. It was proposed that all states of negative effect can have an influence on aggression, factors such as the person being in an aversive emotional state or merely anger. An interesting thing which I found out was the correlation between age and aggression. Although younger children don’t seem to commit as many violent crimes as older people information in the textbook found that aggressive human beings are generally younger children. A study found that with interactions amongst children at a day-care setting 25% seemed to involve some form of physical aggression. Even adults or violent criminals don’t tend to resort to violence with 25% of their interactions!!!! Another interesting fact was that although media tends to show violence from men to women in relationships it is actually women which attack their relationship partner more often however, they don’t tend to cause as much harm. A chemical factor also seems to have a great influence on aggression and that is if increased levels of testosterone are involved along with alcohol there seems to be higher levels of aggressions, however if serotonin is decreased in the body along with an increase in vitamins it will help to reduce aggression. Luckily although it seems that mankind is doomed for a violent end, the cultures within society are what help people to restrain from violence and aggression.