Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093, USA I.
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In this article, the multifaceted theoretical underpinnings of V. J. Konečni’s Anger Aggression Bidirectional-Causation (AABC) model of interpersonal aggression are described, along with a large body of supporting data, mostly from laboratory experiments. The AABC model’s utility in the clarification of several complex issues of long standing in various scholarly domains is discussed, such as: Catharsis and the “cathartic effect”; adaptationist accounts of revenge; and intrafamilial dyadic violence.
Keywords: Anger; Aggression; Revenge; Anger-Aggression Bidirectional-Causation Model; AABC Model; Catharsis; Cathartic effect; Dyadic violence
The author’s laboratory research on human-aggression phenomena began in 1971, when he was a doctoral student at the University of Toronto (in collaboration with Professor A. N. Doob), and continued, with him, first, as Assistant Professor, and then as Associate Professor with tenure, at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in the period 1973-1978. In this entire period of nine years, at two prestigious universities in two countries, there was never a complaint of any kind by a research participant to the Institutional Review Board (IRB) about their experiences and the treatment they received in the author’s laboratory. It is important to realize that close to a thousand research participants, male and female, were involved, and some fifty (male and female) research assistants. The author developed lengthy and elaborate “debriefing and full-explanation with equipment-demonstration” procedures that were religiously followed by the well-trained research assistants. Not one complaint was ever filed by a participant with either a department chair or IRB.
However, by about 1979, a multifaceted new climate regarding the conduct of research with human participants began to prevail,5,34 especially concerning the use of “deception” procedures. This shut down research programs, North-America-wide, that used realistic (but totally humane) procedures to study the essence of human aggression, and opened the door for the “as-if” and “story-scenario” approaches that are inherently weak, unrealistic, and unable to induce genuine and powerful emotional states, such as “ego-thwarted” anger. This, in turn, led to the “culturally desirable,” anti-cathartic-effect, bland “findings” that have very little to do with what goes on in the real world of relationships, families, and streets.
The Anger-Aggression Bidirectional-Causation model’s utility in the clarification of several complex issues of long standing in various scholarly domains has been demonstrated, especially: Catharsis and the “cathartic effect”; adaptationist accounts of revenge; and intrafamilial dyadic violence. This model of anger-induced interpersonal aggression and its consequences places the link between anger and aggression in a broad emotional and motivational context, and facilitates the integration of a large body of data. Moreover, and significantly, the formulation of the cathartic effect within the AABC framework helps explain (Section XI) its deleterious long-term consequences in dyadic relationships and as a crucial aspect of cold-blooded revenge.
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