Aggression is in my mind one of the harder subject in psychology, as there are so many factors involved. In this essay I hope to cover as many as possible. I'm going to examine the definition of aggression and critically examine each of the perspective. I hope by the end of the essay to have discovered if there is one adequate psychological theory to explain aggression or not
The first problems to over come when talking about aggression is how to measure it and definition. One researcher may define aggression from the physical out burst such as pushing and striking, where as another research would define aggression as physical and verbal but not necessarily both at the same time. How much or little should a definition include, is motivation important? What about the target does that change the definition of the aggressive act. To some extent the definition of aggression is determined by the social and cultural back ground of the perceiver
As the problem of definition of aggression has not been resolved how do we operationalise aggression? Well with all these different definition can we generalise from any studies on aggression.
English: Percent of Youth 4-17 ever diagnosed with...
English: Percent of Youth 4-17 ever diagnosed with...
Third Tunnel of AggressionWell for a start all studies use analogue or substitute for the real thing as it is unethical to make people assault each other. Studies generally speak for them selves as long as the study have been carried out with high ecological validity and high internal validity then the study should be easy to generalize from but there is no way of comparing studies of aggression until a standard definition of aggression has been formed.
The biological theories state that aggression is innate an instinct. It is a pattern of response that is genetically predetermined. This means it shows certain instinctual characteristics. There are three main theories that...