Review of Developmental Origins of Aggression.

Abstract

RICHARD E. TREMBLAY, WILLIAM W. HARTUP, and JOHN ARCHER (Eds.) Developmental Origins of Aggression New York: Guilford Publications, 2005, 488 pages (ISBN 1-59385-110-3, US$60.00 Hardcover) Violence has become a hot topic. Omnipresent in the daily media, the subject of numerous national initiatives and investigations, we like our animal kin seem preoccupied with the subject. Despite this, however, and in the face of a rapidly progressing research literature, there is a paucity of good review material on the subject. It has been 30 years (de Wit & Hartup, 1974) since such an has been published. Edited by (including chapters by) three of the field's most productive investigators, this book fills a much-needed gap. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the state of knowledge on the developmental origins of aggressive behavior (p. xiii). Framed by introductory and concluding chapters (subtitled Where do we stand today? and Where are we going?, respectively), the volume is composed of two parts. Chapters 2-10 describe different types of and carefully detail the developmental change in that occurs with age. Chapters 11-20 examine proximal and distal determinants of aggression. Much has happened in the intervening 30 years since the previous overview. Research has shifted from studies of small samples of school-aged to large sample, longitudinal studies of across the lifespan, from infancy to early adulthood. Theoretical and empirical focus has shifted from the aggressive act (including events and situations) to the development of aggressive individuals assessed using the tools of recent technological advances (e.g., molecular genetics, blood and saliva sampling of hormones and neuromodulators, brain imaging). Correlational methods have been replaced with an increasingly sophisticated array of statistical techniques. Together these provide the materials for the telling of a very different story about the development of from that based primarily upon the social learning paradigm that dominated the final decades of the previous century. The dichotomy that pitted 18th century Rousseau (defending the thesis that humans are fundamentally good) against the century earlier Hobbes (viewing the wicked as that had not grown up) had in the 1970s tilted in favour of the empiricist view that individuals were blank slates to be written upon for either good or ill by societal influence. Synonymous with Bandura's (1973) social learning theory, iconic is the image of a child punching a Bobo doll in imitation of a recently viewed model. Most of the research on the development of human in the last few decades of the 20th century was... attempting to find how schoolchildren learn to aggress from their environment (Tremblay & Cote, p. 453). Addressing the question of the origins of aggression, Chapters 1-10 investigate during the first three years of life, concluding that children appear not to be learning to use physical as they grow older; rather they appear to be learning not to use physical aggression (p. xiii, italics in the original). Based on several longitudinal studies examining intra-individual change, first appears towards the end of the first year of life and peaks in humans between 2 and 3 years of age. Children first bite, hit, push, and kick... then gradually, they may come to choose more indirect, social oriented forms of aggression (Gendreau & Archer, p. 25). Phylogenetic and ontogenetic sophistication indicates a general developmental principal of diversification and sophistication in the expression and inhibition of aggression. Emerging at so early a point in human development there is little time in which to learn aggressive behaviour. This is no regression to Hobbes' position, however. From an evolutionary perspective, is adaptive and has a function. …