Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 2: Biobehavioral Influences (1994)
Chapter: TYPES OF AGGRESSIVE AND VIOLENT BEHAVIOR
TYPES OF AGGRESSIVE AND VIOLENT BEHAVIOR
In the psychiatric clinic, violent and aggressive behaviors are not very well defined, although these behavior patterns may be symptoms of many disorders (e.g., Eichelman, 1986). According to the terminology and criteria of the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IIIR) (American Psychiatric Association, 1987), these may include conduct disorder in adolescents, isolated or intermittent explosive disorder in adults, parent-child problem in certain cases of child abuse, dementia, schizophrenia, alcohol and substance abuse, depression, mania, antisocial personality disorder, mental retardation, and attention-deficit disorder.
Several neurological diseases feature in their symptomatology violent or pathological aggressive behavior; most noteworthy are aggressive and violent outbursts in some patients with Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome, Down's syndrome, Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, epilepsy, and limbic as well as hypothalamic tumors (see Mirsky and Siegel, in this volume).
Ethological, experimental-psychological, and neurophysiologic concepts and methods have contributed to the development of preclinical models of aggressive behavior that have been investigated for their neurochemical and neuropharmacologic bases (e.g., Miczek, 1987). Several schemes have been proposed to categorize the different types of animal aggression in terms of
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the experimental manipulations, either pervasive (e.g., isolated housing) or discrete (e.g., exposure to pain stimuli, omission of scheduled reinforcement, brain stimulation, brain lesion);
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the type of behavioral phenomena (e.g., affective defense, killing); or
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the potential function (e.g., territorial defense, maternal aggression, dominance-related aggression).
Table 1* summarizes the major experimental models of animal aggression in laboratory research by differentiating those that are based on (A) aversive environmental manipulations, (B) brain manipulations, and (C) ethological situations. Killing (D) highlights
