Social representations of aggression: Crossing the sex barrier

Controversy over Moscovici's concept of social representations has focused upon the extent to which they can be viewed as enduring cognitive structures characterizing social groups and whether individual members are ‘prisoners’ of their social representations, unable to duplicate the social representations of other social groups. Previous research has established a consistent gender difference in orientation toward aggression with men viewing it as an instrumental act of coercion and women as a temporary loss of self-control. These two social representations, originally recovered from spontaneous conversation, have been measured with a psychometric instrument called Expagg. To examine the mutability of these representations, men and women in the present study were asked to complete the questionnaire either spontaneously or as they believed a member of the opposite sex might respond. Under conditions of same-sex responding the usual significant sex difference appeared. When asked to respond as a member of the opposite sex, men accurately mirrored women's higher expressive total score on the questionnaire but psychometric analysis revealed that there was no similarity in terms of item–total correlations. Women grossly overestimated the degree of men's instrumentality but item–total total correlations revealed a considerable degree of similarity with men's structure. The male representation whether natural or assumed showed higher internal consistency than did the female mode. The results are discussed in terms of differential modes of access to gender-linked representations and the cultural dominance of a masculine and instrumental representation of aggression.     

Distress and aggression during dating conflict: A test of the coercion hypothesis

Research with clinically depressed and maritally discordant couples suggests that women's distressed behaviors function to suppress their partners' subsequent aggressive responses. We applied this coercion hypothesis to a nonclinical sample of dating couples (N = 288). We further examined whether these effects were gender‐specific, and whether distressed and aggressive behaviors differ within physically violent versus nonviolent relationships. Women but not men reported engaging in elevated rates of distress in response to partner aggression during past dating conflicts. However, both women and men expected distressed behavior to suppress partner aggression during future conflicts. Expectations about the functional effects of distressed behavior did not differ for participants with physically violent partners versus nonviolent partners. However, participants in violent relationships reported enacting more distressed behaviors and had greater expectations for partner verbal aggression during future conflicts than did participants in nonviolent relationships. Future research may identify the early onset of dysfunctional interaction patterns in couples and concomitant psychological distress.     

Physiological Desensitization and Judgments About Female Victims of Violence

Earlier published studies have indicated that exposure to filmed violence against women leads to decreased perceptions of violence, systematic reductions in emotional reactions, reduction in self-reported physiological arousal to the violence in the films, and a tendency for subjects exposed to the violence to judge a victim of a sexual assault presented in a more realistic context more harshly. The present study was designed to measure physiological desensitizatian (heart rate) and to investigate the relationships between this measure and other cognitive, affective, and attitudinal components of the desensitization process. Subjects were either exposed to a two-hour videotape portraying violence against women or to exciting, nonviolent material (i.e., auto races, nonviolent sex). Following this, all subjects were exposed to two brief clips of violence perpetrated by a man against a women. During these clips, all subjects’ heart rates were monitored. Afterwards mood reactions and perceptions of the perpetrators and victims depicted in the dependent measure clips were measured. The results indicated that heart rates for subjects exposed to the violent videotape were lower during the final 90 seconds of each violent dependent measure film clip than controls. Although the violence-viewing subjects experienced no change in moods, control subjects experienced significant increases in hostility, anxiety, and depression during the dependent measure clips. Subjects in the violence-viewing condition attributed less injury to the victims but greater responsibility to the perpetrators in the dependent measure clips, compared to control subjects. There was no apparent relationship between physiological desensitization and later victim/perpetrator judgments.