Rage and revenge: Highly aggressive boys' explanations for their responses to ambiguous provocation

Abstract

Children adapt their behaviour to their social environment through adequate social information processing (SIP). According to the SIP model, social information processing is goal oriented. Yet the subjective experience of reactively and severely aggressive children seems to be that their behaviour is impelled by uncontrollable rage, with no other goal in mind than venting anger and spite. To test whether reactive and proactive aggression by severely aggressive boys were related with experiences of goal directedness, 52 highly aggressive and 30 normal comparison boys were asked to explain their responses to hypothetical provocations by peers. Both highly aggressive and normal comparison boys primarily explained generation and selection of aggressive responses to provocation situations by feeling impelled to act by strong emotions, not with reference to outcome goals. Reactive aggression was specifically related with such emotion explanations for aggression. Moreover, highly aggressive boys more frequently advocated aggression by referring to emotions and referring to a moral rule that taking revenge is imperative, regardless of its consequences. Highly aggressive boys expected their responses to have more negative relational outcomes than comparison boys.

Keywords:

• Aggressive behaviour
• Social cognition
• Social information processing