Aggression And Adaptation

Aggression and Adaptation raises thought provoking questions about interpersonal functioning within social groups. The reader may find him/herself entertaining thoughts about the nature of goodness as the chapters suggest that aggressive behavior can offer significant avenues for personal growth, goal attainment, and bolstering one's social standing. The volume brings to light alternative points of view to the prevailing orthodoxy that aggression equals pathology. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book features evolutionary, school, feminist, historical, and methodological perspectives. Adaptation is addressed at multiple levels, the first of which is ultimate causation. Four chapters cover the aggression-adaptation link from various evolutionary perspectives. Succeeding chapters focus on: adaptation as psychological adjustment; aggression in the peer system and the contexts in which these systems occur; and the self-other dialectic in societal context, highlighting that aggressive children are often well-embedded in the social network. Intended for researchers in developmental, evolutionary, social, personality, and educational psychology, as well as developmental psychopathologists, this book is also suitable for advanced courses on social-personality development, the psychology of violence, aggression, peer relationships, and human motivation.

Aggression and Adaptation raises thought provoking questions about interpersonal functioning within social groups. The reader may find him/herself entertaining thoughts about the nature of goodness as the chapters suggest that aggressive behavior can offer significant avenues for personal growth, goal attainment, and bolstering one's social standing. The volume brings to light alternative points of view to the prevailing orthodoxy that aggression equals pathology. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book features evolutionary, school, feminist, historical, and methodological perspectives. Adaptation is addressed at multiple levels, the first of which is ultimate causation. Four chapters cover the aggression-adaptation link from various evolutionary perspectives. Succeeding chapters focus on: adaptation as psychological adjustment; aggression in the peer system and the contexts in which these systems occur; and the self-other dialectic in societal context, highlighting that aggressive children are often well-embedded in the social network. Intended for researchers in developmental, evolutionary, social, personality, and educational psychology, as well as developmental psychopathologists, this book is also suitable for advanced courses on social-personality development, the psychology of violence, aggression, peer relationships, and human motivation.

The past 25 years have seen a major paradigm shift in the field of violence prevention, from the assumption that violence is inevitable to the recognition that violence is preventable. Part of this shift has occurred in thinking about why violence occurs, and where intervention points might lie. In exploring the occurrence of violence, researchers have recognized the tendency for violent acts to cluster, to spread from place to place, and to mutate from one type to another. Furthermore, violent acts are often preceded or followed by other violent acts. In the field of public health, such a process has also been seen in the infectious disease model, in which an agent or vector initiates a specific biological pathway leading to symptoms of disease and infectivity. The agent transmits from individual to individual, and levels of the disease in the population above the baseline constitute an epidemic. Although violence does not have a readily observable biological agent as an initiator, it can follow similar epidemiological pathways. On April 30-May 1, 2012, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Forum on Global Violence Prevention convened a workshop to explore the contagious nature of violence. Part of the Forum's mandate is to engage in multisectoral, multidirectional dialogue that explores crosscutting, evidence-based approaches to violence prevention, and the Forum has convened four workshops to this point exploring various elements of violence prevention. The workshops are designed to examine such approaches from multiple perspectives and at multiple levels of society. In particular, the workshop on the contagion of violence focused on exploring the epidemiology of the contagion, describing possible processes and mechanisms by which violence is transmitted, examining how contextual factors mitigate or exacerbate the issue. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary covers the major topics that arose during the 2-day workshop. It is organized by important elements of the infectious disease model so as to present the contagion of violence in a larger context and in a more compelling and comprehensive way.

This book contains chapters by some of the leading figures in the field of evolutionary psychology. The latest data are presented on evolutionary theories in perception, information, various aspects of social behaviour, language, learning and aggression. A common theme running through the printed discussions in this book is the important problem of how we can develop and test rigorous characterizations of evolved mental adaptations.

Between 1939 and 1942, one of America's leading universities recruited 268 of its healthiest and most promising undergraduates to participate in a revolutionary new study of the human life cycle. The originators of the program, which came to be known as the Grant Study, felt that medical research was too heavily weighted in the direction of disease, and their intent was to chart the ways in which a group of promising individuals coped with their lives over the course of many years. Nearly forty years later, George E. Vaillant, director of the Study, took the measure of the Grant Study men. The result was the compelling, provocative classic, Adaptation to Life, which poses fundamental questions about the individual differences in confronting life's stresses. Why do some of us cope so well with the portion life offers us, while others, who have had similar advantages (or disadvantages), cope badly or not at all? Are there ways we can effectively alter those patterns of behavior that make us unhappy, unhealthy, and unwise? George Vaillant discusses these and other questions in terms of a clearly defined scheme of "adaptive mechanisms" that are rated mature, neurotic, immature, or psychotic, and illustrates, with case histories, each method of coping.

This revised edition of The Development of Aggression in Early Childhood presents anew the author's "multi-trends theory of aggression," with the addition of a two-part preface that provides an overview of the multitudinous theories of aggression in psychoanalytic thought and a discussion of the clinical applications-with clinical case examples-of his theory.

Rage, aggression, and the 'will-to-power' are significant human characteristics that have been relatively neglected in psychoanalytic literature. In the past, rage has been viewed as a response to threat or frustration, aggression as an instinctual drive, and the will-to-power as causing destructive and maladaptive behavior. In this volume, the authors probe these dimensions of human experience to show how they serve adaptive needs, assuage anxiety, protect against threat, and foster maturation.