The Role of Positive Affect in Aggression

Abstract

Aggressive behavior hurts us all and is studied across psychology's subdisciplines. Classical theories discuss the causes of aggression in the context of negative affect (e.g., frustration, pain). However, more recent research implicates positive affect as an important correlate and cause of aggression. Such aggressive pleasure likely evolved from ancient predatory tendencies that later yielded reproductive benefits, holds across reactive and proactive forms of aggression, and is used strategically as an item in many people's emotion-regulation toolkit. Findings from psychological and neural sciences have converged to detail aggression's hedonically pleasant qualities and the motivational and biological mechanisms through which they occur. This new approach generates novel hypotheses and might lead to effective interventions that mollify mankind's aggressive tendencies.

Neural correlates of intertemporal choice in aggressive behavior

“…Conventionally, aggression has been studied in a static temporal framework in which decisions about whether to be aggressive or not are dealt with purely in the "here and now." Recent work demonstrating the core feature of reward in aggressive behavior implies that aggression is rewarding behavior that would greatly benefit from an intertemporal framework (Chester, 2017). To study this potential intertemporal nature of aggression, we modified a well-validated aggression paradigm to allow participants to decide between inflicting a smaller amount of aggression immediately or a considerably larger amount of aggression after a delay.…”

“…Aggression is hedonically-rewarding (Chester, 2017). Individuals often seek out the pleasure of aggression to maintain effective homeostasis .…”

Personality Correlates of Revenge-Seeking: Multidimensional Links to Physical Aggression, Impulsivity, and Aggressive Pleasure

“…Each item refers to behaviors (e.g., "express my anger"; "strike out at whatever angers me") that participants rate along a five-point scale, which indicates the degree to which they would like to perform the given behavior to try and feel better when they are angry or furious. The AMII possesses excellent levels of both internal reliability within each subscale and test-retest reliability Bushman & Whitaker, 2010;, 2017.…”

“…Indeed, we found that revenge-seeking was associated with tendencies toward neuroticism and anger. However, an increasing focus is being paid to positive affect and its ability to promote retaliatory aggression (Chester, 2017;, 2017. Supporting this view, revenge-seeking was repeatedly associated with sadistic tendencies, which are characterized by the pleasure of harming others.…”

Internet trolling and everyday sadism: Parallel effects on pain perception and moral judgment

“…To date, some of the most compelling evidence for everyday sadism involves pleasure-driven aggression evoked in the lab Chester, 2017;Chester & DeWall, 2017a, 2017b. Chronic appetitive aggression may be contrasted with instrumentally motivated aggression (Jones & Paulhus, 2010) and masochistic self-harm (Lämmle, Oedl, & Ziegler, 2014), which are linked to other personality tendencies.…”