Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 2: Biobehavioral Influences (1994)
Chapter: Adaptive Versus Maladaptive Violence and Aggression: Animal and Human Models
may function to regulate these responses. However, it is this area of investigation in which our knowledge is most limited. For example, we have little understanding of where the key synapses for monoaminergic regulation of aggressive reactions may be situated; nor do we understand their actions on the attack mechanisms at each of these synapses. Furthermore, with regard to the opioid peptide system, as noted above, we have no knowledge of the nuclear groups whose axons project to such key regions for the expression and modulation of affective defense as the BNST, nucleus accumbens, and PAG. Nor do we fully understand the cellular bases for opioid modulation at each of these synapses. Accordingly, it would appear that the most promising lines of research in the study of the neurobiology of aggression lie in attempting to obtain answers to these critical questions. Certainly, a thorough understanding of the neuropharmacology of aggressive behavior and the substrates at which transmitters act along the limbic-midbrain axis will be required before any attempts at rational pharmacologic intervention strategies for the control of human aggression based on this work can be considered.
HUMAN STUDIES OF AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE
INTRODUCTORY AND DEFINITIONAL STATEMENTS
Adaptive Versus Maladaptive Violence and Aggression: Animal and Human Models
It would be well, in a consideration of the relationship between human violence and brain function, if a clear and defensible distinction could be drawn between adaptive (and socially acceptable) forms of violence and those that are maladaptive and symptomatic of an overt or presumed disorder of the brain. The research on animal models of aggression reviewed in the first section of this paper is related to adaptive aggression or "violence."
It seems inappropriate to refer to predatory attack (quiet biting attack) and affective defense behaviors as violent ("intentional infliction of physical harm") since they are part of the survival mechanisms of the species. This would require us to conclude that the cat is intentionally inflicting physical harm on a mouse when it kills and eats it for food, or to label as "violent" a female cat who may kill or severely injure an intruder in the course of an affective defense of her litter. This seems incorrect. In some sense, the goals or methods of the two (i.e., animal and human)
