Development of Aggression - Essay Example

An information processing model for the development of aggression Many theories have been presented to account for the development of aggression during early development, and the purpose of the research article in question was to explore an information processing model for how this develops at a young age. Huesmann (1988) proposed that there are two main ways in which a child will learn aggressive behaviour. The first is enactive learning, which comes from the child itself and develops over time with minimal environmental influence.

The other is observational learning, which a child develops through interactions or viewing aggressive acts committed by others. A combination of these factors in the right way will cause a child to become more likely to exhibit aggressive behaviours, and this will likely remain stable in later life. The article centers around the idea of scripts, which are described as being conditioned emotional stimuli from the child’s memory. The child will then retrieve these from memory upon entering into a situation in which they have a script for – the sight of something which was previously associated with aggression, such as a bully.

These can also come from entering into a social situation which occurs directly after an emotional state, such as going home after seeing the bully, because emotional states last for a period of time. Aggression may occur when the child is not cognitively able to associate the correct script with the correct situation, or cannot evaluate these to see whether they are appropriate or relevant. It is differences between children’s cognitive abilities to do this, their approach to social norms and their reinforcement histories which allow for differences in levels of aggression and aggressive behaviours.

Overall, the most surprising element of this research is that the child is reliant on so many different elements to provide aggressive behaviors. On the surface, it seems as though aggression is a split-second emotion that occurs at random. This research provides an explanation for why aggression in children (and adults) may come from seemingly unrelated things, and this is why some aggressive behaviors may seem irrelevant. It is also surprising that observing violence can lead a child to internalize scripts so that these may then be associated with situations concerning the child and that these too can lead to inappropriate behaviors.

Again, it may seem as though aggression cannot be related to simply seeing an aggressive or violent behavior acted out by another, as emotions are such a personal thing. Finally, it also seems surprising that people have fairly steady levels of aggression throughout life and that these may (if the research is correct) stem from scripts during development. There are many ways of applying these findings to personal experience. Firstly, it will allow people to explain why some children are more aggressive than others.

Understanding why an event has occurred can lead to a proper resolution based on the true causes. It may also lead some people to avoid using aggressive and violent behaviors in front of children so that they do not observationally learn them. Personally, I think that this would be a justified approach to take to acting around children, as from personal experience it does seem to be that those who are often around violent people go on to lead more aggressive lives. It is also interesting that these behaviors are a result of cumulative effects, so that the previous assumption that many make that violent children play too many violent video games is incorrect, as it is not due to one factor alone, as in personal experience this does not seem to be true.