Overreacting: Why we respond to social threats in the same way as physical ones

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 30th Sep 2024

Most aggressive and potentially violent incidents are the result of bad social interactions. These can be with strangers, but they can also involve friends and family members; sometimes these incidents can see us become angry faster and more quickly because we a) feel safe responding to people we know in this way i.e., we don’t expect them to punch us, whilst with a stranger we have no idea how they might respond to our angry outburst, and b) these are the individuals who we feel should be supportive, non-critical and non-challenging/non-threatening to us etc. There is also an inherent danger...Click To Read More

Anger & Frustration Theories of Violence

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 23rd Sep 2024

Over the course of a couple of recent articles, I looked at how Social Learning Theory and Freud’s Instinct Aggression Theory attempted to explain aggressive and violent behaviors. These were two of the first theories on aggression/violence that were covered on my degree/undergraduate program. The third approach/set of theories I was exposed to involved how anger and frustration could lead to aggression and violence. This was something that was the focus of several studies in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Dollard et al., initially proposed that all frustration inevitably led to aggression whether that occurred in the moment or was delayed...Click To Read More

Is Crime Through the Roof?

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 16th Sep 2024

It’s a common argument that is often made by the political right, whether in the UK, US or Europe, that crime is always getting worse. In the 1980’s both Reagan in the US, and Thatcher in the UK claimed that their parties were the parties of “law and order”. Whilst the 1980’s in both the US and the UK saw a period of high crime, since the mid-1990’s the crime rate in both countries has been falling steadily, with an occasional “blip” (especially around the COVID & Immediate Post-COVID time), but nothing that would be seen as significant or that...Click To Read More

Moments of Madness

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 9th Sep 2024

We have all had moments of madness. Times when we have acted recklessly without a thought to the consequences of our actions etc. Most of the time there are no consequences i.e., we get away with it; the disregard for rationality doesn’t punish us. However, sometimes it does. A reaction that we have in the moment comes back to haunt us. There is unfortunately a long litany of “one punch killers”, who never intended to cause the death of another and yet this was the result of their actions. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t those who had a killer’s...Click To Read More

Freud’s Instinct Theory of Aggression

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 2nd Sep 2024

In last week’s article I looked at aggression and violence being explained by social learning theory; that aggression and violence is learnt through observation, and that it doesn’t even have to be experienced – but can be learnt by simply witnessing an aggressive/violent incident. In this article I want to look at the Instinct Theory of Aggression that was put forward by Sigmund Freud. As a teenager I tried to “learn” Freud from his books. I remember scouring second-hand bookstores looking for cheap copies of his writings that I could afford – most secondhand book shops at the time would...Click To Read More