Describe two distinct purposes and three distinct forms of aggression
What will be an ideal response?
Beginning in late infancy, all children display aggression at times. As interactions with siblings and peers increase, so do aggressive outbursts. By the second year, aggressive acts with two distinct purposes emerge. Initially, the most common is proactive (or instrumental) aggression, in which children act to fulfill a need or desire—obtain an object, privilege, space, or social reward, such as adult or peer attention—and unemotionally attack a person to achieve their goal. The other type, reactive (or hostile) aggression, is an angry, defensive response to provocation or a blocked goal and is meant to hurt another person.
Proactive and reactive aggression come in three forms:
• Physical aggression harms others through physical injury—pushing, hitting, kicking, or punching others or destroying another's property.
• Verbal aggression harms others through threats of physical aggression, name-calling, or hostile teasing.
• Relational aggression damages another's peer relationships through social exclusion, malicious gossip, or friendship manipulation.
In early childhood, verbal aggression gradually replaces physical aggression. And proactive aggression declines as preschoolers' improved capacity to delay gratification enables them to avoid grabbing others' possessions. But reactive aggression in verbal and relational forms tends to rise over early and middle childhood. Older children are better able to recognize malicious intentions and, as a result, more often respond in hostile ways.
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In 1908, Hermann Ebbinghaus wrote that "Psychology has a long past, but only a short history." Which statement best captures the idea that Ebbinghaus was expressing?
a. Psychologists, like philosophers, have difficulty learning from their mistakes. b. Questions about human nature have existed for a long time, but only recently have the methods necessary to answer them been developed. c. The field of psychology has existed for a long time, but only recently have scholars recorded the accomplishments of the profession. d. Although psychologists have been doing laboratory research for hundreds of years, little of substance has been discovered about human nature.
In the 1920s, Walter Cannon outlined the first scientific description of the way animals and humans respond to danger. He called this dual stress response the
a. general adaptation syndrome. b. fight-or-flight response. c. tend-and-befriend response. d. posttraumatic stress disorder.