Effects of violent movies and trait hostility on hostile feelings and aggressive thoughts

The General Affective Aggression Model [Anderson CA, Deuser WE, DeNeve KM (1995): Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21:434–448; Anderson CA, Anderson KB, Deuser WE (1996): Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22:366–376] suggests that violent movies may increase aggression by increasing hostile feelings and the accessibility of aggressive thoughts. It also suggests that trait hostility may similarly influence affect and cognition. Experiment 1 explored the effects of viewing violent movie clips on affect and cognition. Participants who viewed a violent movie clip later reported higher levels of state hostility than did those who viewed a nonviolent clip. Experiment 2 added trait hostility to the design as a potentially important individual difference variable. The state hostility results of Experiment 1 were replicated. In addition, the relative accessibility of aggressive thoughts was increased by the violent clip, but only for low irritable participants. Discussion focused on the relevance to aggressive behavior. Aggr. Behav. 23:161–178, 1997. © 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Problem-solving strategies in aggressive and nonaggressive children

Problem-solving strategies in hypothetical social situations were studied in 103 aggressive and 79 nonaggressive children. Subjects solved six aggression-provoking situations from children's ordinary lives. Causal thinking, alternative thinking, and prognosticating consequences were evaluated. Cognitions of aggressive children differed from those of nonaggressive children. The greatest differences were found not in high aggressiveness but in aggressive childrens' inability to detect constructive alternatives to aggressive behavior. A child's aggressiveness was a more important determinant than was sex. These findings combined with the finding that strategies can be learned offer an approach to primary prevention.     

Attributional biases in aggressive children and their mothers

To investigate if mothers and their aggressive children share the tendency to infer hostile motives from others' behavior in ambiguous social situations, 100 pairs of mothers and their clinic-referred or comparison children (50 boys and 50 girls) were asked to interpret hypothetical situations involving both overtly and relationally provocative scenarios. Results replicated previous findings of studies on social information processing of aggressive children and extended the findings to mothers of aggressive children. Findings were generally consistent with the hypothesis that mothers of aggressive children tend to view others' ambiguous actions as hostile, increasing the probability of responding with aggression and, in effect, modeling a hostile attributional bias for their children. Examinations of mothers' and their children's attributional and behavioral intentions suggested that mothers' and daughters' attributions and behavioral intentions were significantly correlated, whereas mothers' and sons' were not. Gender effects with regard to provocation type are also discussed.     

Moral judgments of aggressive and nonaggressive children

Moral judgments were studied in 103 aggressive and 79 nonaggressive 10-year-old Finnish children. Their aggressiveness was evaluated by means of peer ratings. Moral judgments were assessed by presenting them with stories from their daily lives that contained moral conflicts. The results showed that the children did not adopt a constant level of moral reasoning; instead, judgments were situation specific. Furthermore, the moral cognitions of aggressive children did not differ from those of their nonaggressive peers, although sex-related differences tended to be significant: Boys adopted absolute moral standards, whereas girls' judgments were more relative.     

Emotional competence and aggressive behavior in school-age children

Examined emotional competence in 87 children, aged 7–10 years, who varied with respect to reports of aggressive behavior to determine whether individual differences in emotional competence characterize children with higher levels of aggressive behavior. Emotional competence was assessed during a 1-hr lab visit that included (a) an observational period consisting of a modified disappointment paradigm, (b) assessment of cognitive and language abilities, and (c) 2 structured emotion interviews. Children with higher levels of aggressive behavior exhibited more intense and frequent expressions of anger, both as reported by mothers and as observed during the disappointment paradigm. Less sophisticated ability to identify the causes of emotion also characterized children with higher levels of aggressive behavior. Gender moderated the relation between aggressive behavior and type of emotion identified such that reports of happiness (in response to receiving a disappointing prize) were associated with lower levels of reported aggressive behavior for boys. The value of assessing children's emotional competence in the context of an emotionally arousing situation is suggested by these findings.     

Women, sex, hostility, power, and suspicion: Sexually aggressive men’s cognitive associations

A sequential priming paradigm examined four theories of sexually aggressive men’s cognitive associations between women and sex, women and hostility, women and power, and women and suspicion. Men with varying histories of sexually aggressive behavior viewed female images as primes (along with male image primes and baseline primes) before rendering lexical decisions about target words associated with sex, hostility, power, and suspicion. Men with a history of committing more sexually aggressive behaviors showed stronger associations in memory between women and sex and between women and hostility. Further, more sexually aggressive men also revealed greater chronicity for sex-related concepts in general, based on free recall reports. Implications of the mental representations of women underlying men’s sexually aggressive behaviors are discussed.     

Psychomotor reactions of aggressive and non-aggressive extrovert children

Abstract.— The subjects comprised two, matched, extremely aggressive (experimental ExG and control) groups of twelve 8–year-old boys, and one criterion group of extrovert, well-controlled boys. The ExG was submitted to a treatment of eight lesson? with the aim of making an individual realize non-aggressive, constructive ways of coping with situations. Video-tape recording was used. The results showed that (1) aggressively extrovert children were more impulsive and utilized more space than the constructively extrovert, (2) psychomotor characteristics were more stable over situations than aggressive and constructive coping strategies, and (3) no changes in the psychomotor characteristics of the ExG, attributable to the experimentally induced increase of constructive behaviour and decrease of aggression, could be found. The results were more in favour of the disposition interpretation of expressive movements than of the communication theory of psychomotor expression.     

Family enhancement of cognitive style in anxious and aggressive children

Previous research has shown that anxious adults provide more threat interpretations of ambiguous stimuli than other clinic and nonclinic persons. We were interested in investigating if the same bias occurs in anxious children and how family processes impact on these children's interpretations of ambiguity. Anxious, oppositional, and nonclinical children and their parents were asked separately to interpret and provide plans of action to ambiguous scenarios. Afterwards, Each family was asked to discuss two of these situations as a family and for the child to provide a final response. The results showed that anxious and oppositional children were both more likely to interpret ambiguous scenarios in a threatening manner. However, the two clinic groups differed in that the anxious children predominantly chose avoidant solutions whereas the oppositional children chose aggressive solutions. After family discussions, both the anxious children's avoidant plans of action and the oppositional children's aggressive plans increased. Thus, this study provides the first evidence of family enhancement of avoidant and aggressive responses in children. These results support a model of anxiety that emphasizes the development of an anxious cognitive style in the context of anxiety-supporting family processes.This research was supported by grants from The National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, The University of Queensland, and The Myer Foundation of Australia. The authors would like to thank the families, all the anxiety project staff, and Candi Peterson for her helpful feedback in the draft of this paper.     

The effects of sexual and/or aggressive film exposure on helping, hostility, and attitudes about the sexes

After viewing an aggressive, sexually aggressive, erotic heterosexual, or control film, 129 females and 135 males expressed their willingness to help and hostility toward the male or female experimenter. Males extended the least help to the experimenter following the aggressive film and expressed more positive affect than females. Erotophilic males expressed slightly less hostility toward a female than a male experimenter. Erotophiles expressed more positive attitudes toward women and toward men after viewing either the rape film shown by a male experimenter or the erotic film shown by a female experimenter, compared to erotophobes. Among erotophobes, these two experimental conditions generally produced the most negative effects on general attitudes about the sexes. Affective responses to sex variations in dominant status and to aggressivity were employed to provide explanations for these results.