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Want to Limit Aggression? Practice Self-Control
ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2012) — Feeling angry and annoyed with others is a daily part of life, but most people don’t act on these impulses. What keeps us from punching line-cutters or murdering conniving co-workers? Self-control. A new review article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines the psychological research and finds that it’s possible to deplete self-control – or to strengthen it by practice.
Criminologists and sociologists have long believed that people commit violent crimes when an opportunity arises and they’re low on self-control. “It’s an impulsive kind of thing,” says Thomas F. Denson, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales. He cowrote the new article with C. Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky and Eli J. Finkel at Northwestern University. For the last 10 years or so, psychologists have joined this research, using new ways of manipulating self-control in experiments; they have found that, indeed, self-control and aggression are tightly linked.
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On the other hand, it’s also possible to practice self-control the same way you would practice the piano. In Denson’s experiments, he has people try to use their non-dominant hand for two weeks. So, if they’re right-handed, they’re told to use their left hand “for pretty much anything that’s safe to do,” he says. “Using the mouse, stirring your coffee, opening doors. This requires people to practice self-control because their habitual tendency is to use their dominant hands.” After two weeks, people who have practiced self-control control their aggression better. In one experiment, they’re mildly insulted by another student and have the option of retaliating with a blast of white noise – but people who have practiced self-control respond less aggressively.
What will they discover next?“I think, for me, the most interesting findings that have come out of this is that if you give aggressive people the opportunity to improve their self-control, they’re less aggressive,” Denson says. It’s not that aggressive people don’t want to control themselves;???] they just aren’t very good at it. In fact, if you put aggressive people in a brain scanner and monitor their brain activity while insulting them, the parts of the brain involved in self-control are actually more active than in less aggressive people. So it might be possible to teach people who struggle with anger or violence problems to control themselves more easily.
IOW, this study reveals that the main reason aggressive people cannot control themselves is not based on an excessive motivational drive toward aggression, but rather on their lack of cognitive skills in knowing how to control their aggressive drive. Therefore, learning and practicing these skills can transform their level of aggressive behavior by giving them more cognitive control. It sounds like an interesting application of the modern cognitive learning theories. Thanks for the article.