Aggressive behavior: from theory to practice

Abstract

The problem of aggressive behaviour predicting remains important after decades of studying aggression. A large quantity of aggression theories and models do not allow to fully explain the aggressive behaviour emergence. Unified theory of aggressive behaviour proposes to regard aggression as a balance of provoking and limiting factors, which are based on adaptive problems: retention of a sexual partner, co-opting the resources of others, defending against attack, inflicting costs on same-sex rivals, negotiating status and power hierarchies, deterring rivals from future aggression, deterring mates from sexual infidelity. Factors of aggressive behaviour include the level of physiological arousal, negative or positive reinforcement of aggressive behaviour in the past, a state of frustration, aversive stimuli and the dominant emotion. Based on the proposed theory, a aggressive behaviour predicting scale is proposed, which allows to calculate the probability of aggressive behaviour, as well as its dynamics. The aggressive behaviour predicting scale is easy to use, does not take much time and allows to quantify and assess the probability of aggression.