How to Prevent Aggressive Behavior?

Abusive individuals are often disturbed when they engage in aggressive behavior toward others. Also, they feel upset and irritable and may find it difficult to control their activities, making them unable to distinguish between socially appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Some people may deliberately engage in aggressive behaviors for revenge or to provoke others.

Aggressive Behavior Definition:

In psychology, aggression refers to behaviors that can lead to physical and psychological harm to yourself, others, or things in the environment. Aggression focuses on hurting another person physically or mentally. While we may all feel aggressive when aggression spreads or extremes, it may indicate an underlying mental health condition, substance use disorder, or other medical problems.

Introduction to Aggressive Behavior:

Since aggressive behavior is intended to hurt someone who does not want to be harmed, it must involve an act - just thinking about hurting someone or feeling angry is not enough, and accidentally hurting someone is incompetent.

Aggressive behaviors can be physical, such as hitting, beating, kicking, or stabbing another person. Damaging property is also a form of physical aggression.

Aggressive behaviors can be verbal, including ridicule, insults, and shouting, which are intended to damage another person's relationships. This can include spreading rumors and telling lies about someone else.

While we often think of aggression in its physical forms, psychological aggression can also be very harmful. Intimidating or verbally reprimanding another person, for example, are examples of verbal, mental, and emotional aggression. Cyberbullying is another form of non-physical aggression that can cause serious harm to others.

Types of Aggressive Behavior:

1. Impulsive Aggression:

Impulsive aggression is also known as emotional or reactive aggression and is characterized by strong emotions. Impulsive aggression, mainly when caused by anger, triggers the acute threat response system in the brain, including the amygdala, hypothalamus, and gray around the canal.

This form of aggression is unplanned and often occurs within the moment. If another car cuts you off in traffic and starts yelling and berating the other driver, you have impulsive aggression.

2. Automated Aggression:

It is also known as predatory aggression. Automated aggression is characterized by behaviors aimed at achieving a larger goal. Automated aggression is often carefully planned and usually present as a means to an end.

Harming another person in a robbery is an example of this aggression. The aggressor's goal is to get money, and hurting another individual is the way to achieve that goal.

3. Aggressive Behavior in Adults:

A person is not born with aggressive behavior. Behavior is generated in a person due to a combination of parental educational factors, surrounding social factors, and school and work atmosphere. All these factors show behaviors in adults at some point in their life. Positive ones have their pillars and causes, as well as negative ones. All ultimately return to those factors. Exposure to bullying or injustice at a stage of advanced life will surely produce aggressive behavior in old age.

Aggressive behavior has three factors that differ in their impact and being:

1. Biological Factors of Aggressive Behavior:

These factors are due to sex and gender and are divided into two types, male and female. Studies have shown that males are the ones who behave mostly physically aggressively behaviors. At the same time, females may resort to aggressive behavior less than males, as they use non-physical aggressive behaviors, such as verbal aggressive behaviors or social rejection behaviors.

2. Environmental Factors of Aggressive Behavior:

It is represented in the individual origin environment. The environment in which a person grows up massively influences whether or not they engage in aggressive behaviors. The individual, who was raised to witness many aggressive behaviors in childhood, will often grow up believing these behaviors are socially acceptable.

3. Physical Factors of Aggressive Behavior:

Physical and psychological factors can significantly influence a person's aggressive behavior, such as epilepsy, dementia, psychosis, alcohol or drug abuse, or brain deformities and injuries.

Concept of Aggressive Behavior:

Many experts and psychologists have defined it, and we mention the following definitions:

Masan defined it as “behavior taken by an individual to harm any living organism or to corrupt and destroy non-living organisms.”
Argylli defined it as “conduct that directs the perpetrator to inflict harm on other people or their property, which may be physical or verbal.”
Edmund also defined it as “any physical, material, or moral harm done by one person to another.”

We can summarize the previous definitions in a more precise definition and closer to the accurate description of aggressive behavior, which is as follows: "Any behavior carried out by an individual to harm other individuals or their property, and the attempt of those individuals to avoid such harm, whether physical or verbal."

Characteristics of Aggressive Behavior:

One of the most critical characteristics of aggressive behavior is that it deliberately hurts someone. It depends on the person's style who conducts aggressive behavior and their ability to hurt intentionally. However, in the event of a clash with another person that leads to harm, this is not aggressive behavior.

The dimensions of behavioral aggression are as follows:

Physical aggression.
Verbal aggression.
Direct aggression.
Indirect Aggression.

Boss classification of the dimensions of aggressive behavior:

The victim's desire to avoid this abuse, as, of course, no ordinary person may want to be harmed, but they will do everything in their power to evade this aggression directed at them. This avoidance may lead to the achievement of the aggressor's goal of victimization.
Some cases are not considered aggression and may be self-harm, such as someone arriving in a state of extreme anger with which they hurt themselves without feeling, and this is not aggression. Therefore, self-harm is often due to depression, which has multiple causes, which proves that self-harm is not a form of behavioral aggression.
The purpose of aggression is as follows:
- Hostile aggression: It results from the intense anger that a person may be exposed to, and the outcome of this anger is to hurt the person who led them to this stage of anger, where the goal of the angry person becomes to inflict pain and torture on the other party.
- Target aggression: It aims to reach a specific goal and not to harm the other person in particular, as happens in wars, where the main goal is to occupy a certain place. Hence, the distinction between hostile aggression and target aggression is somewhat challenging, as hostile aggression may turn into target aggression.
Aggressive behavior and social norms, where many attacks violate standards and values of societies like murder, rape, beatings, and gang attacks are against the society's values.

On the other hand, some acts of aggression support society's standards, such as implementing the law through the trial of the guilty. It is not aggression as long as it supports the community. Also, the father's punishment for his son is not aggression, as it is for the sake of education and improving behavior for the better. Moreover, when a policeman shoots and kills terrorists and criminals, this is not considered aggression because it is a protection of society.

Legally sanctioned aggression:

It is aggression represented in responding to aggressive acts that are not imposed by society and do not affect moral standards, such as the security man of the shops when the place is robbed or when the security man shoots the aggressor.

Aggressive Behavior Causes:

Violence and aggressive behavior do not come from a vacuum, but many causes and factors are behind them. The following are the most important causes of aggressive behavior:

1. Anger:

Anger is one of the most critical factors that may cause aggressive behavior, and there are also causes of anger, such as frustration or attack and invasion.

2. Frustration:

Frustration occurs when a person bumps into something, such as working to reach something. Still, it did not happen, so they become frustrated, or when something stands between the person and what they want to act. This disability may be internal, such as feeling incompetent or anxious, hindering them from achieving their goals.

3. Attack:

An individual attacking another individual in a situation, such as a person verbally attacking the other during an argument or a sudden action causing anger in the other.

4. Invasion:

It is a phenomenon resulting from the person realizing that the other person's attack or frustration directed towards them is intentional and systematic.

Factors Affecting Aggressive Behavior:

First: Personal factors

Personal factors are as follows:

1. Neurological and chemical causes:

For example, drinking alcohol, as many practical indications confirm the link between drinking alcohol and aggressive behavior, such as the rates of the percentage of quarrels in places authorized to drink alcohol.

2. Intolerant tendencies:

There are negative and positive fanatic tendencies. When talking about the negative ones, we find that they may amount to severe violence, including genocide of a specific group in society or extrajudicial execution.

second: Social Factors

1. Social norms:

These are the norms of society when an act of aggression occurs between community members, such as a quarrel between one person and another. This results in violence, but it lies within the framework of the accepted standards of society. However, it is not acceptable to quarrel between a male and a female or a young person and an old or physically healthy individual and another disabled. This is against the standards of society.

2. Socialization:

There is a close relationship between aggressive behavior and upbringing. Aggressive behavior is negatively related to the style of rational tolerance and positively related to the king of strictness and inconsistency in treatment. In other words, aggressive behavior and strictness have a direct relationship, while aggressive behavior and tolerance have an inverse relationship.

3. Poor conditions in society:

such as the absence of social justice. It is one of the wrong conditions, as well as the loss of actual values of work and the absence of power and concentration in the hands of one person or a small group, and the non-attendance of freedom of expression for members of society.

Third: Other Causing Factors of Aggressive Behavior

1. Watching violence in the media:

Psychologist Albert Pandora explained that people watching others do violence may qualify them to do the same violent behavior, whether the scene is adults or children.

2. Unpleasant stimuli harm the individual's general health:

and these natural stimuli lead to aggressive behavior, high temperatures, air pollution, noise, and congestion. These stimuli represent psychological pressures.