Citation

Vasquez EA, Denson TF, Pedersen WC, Stenstrom DM, Miller N. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 2005; 41(1): 61-67.

Affiliation

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-106, USA; Department of Psychology, California State University, Long Beach, USA (evasquez@usc.edu)

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jesp.2004.05.007

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Many instances of aggression result in excessive retaliation in response to a seemingly trivial triggering event. The triggered displaced aggression paradigm (TDA; Miller, Pedersen, Earleywine, and Pollock, 2003) provides an experimental vehicle for exploring such occurrences. Participants were either provoked or not and were subsequently exposed to a neutral, mild, or moderately strong triggering event from a second bogus participant. Consistent with TDA theory ( Miller et al., 2003), disjunctively escalated aggressive behavior occurred only among previously provoked participants when responding to the mild triggering event, but not the moderately strong or neutral trigger. Independent of provocation, the neutral triggering event elicited very low levels of aggression, whereas the moderately strong trigger elicited moderate levels of aggression. Implications for instances of real world aggression are discussed.