European Journal of Personality

The central question concerns the relationship between aspects of behaviour and physiological reactions. Measures of sympathetic‐adrenal activity in terms of adrenaline excretion in a normal and a stressful situation as well as teacher ratings of behaviour were analysed for a representative group of 86 boys aged 13. Adrenaline excretion was in both situations significantly negatively related to ratings of aggressiveness, motor restlessness, and concentration difficulties and also to the sum of the latter two, used as an indicator of hyperactive behaviour. The association between hyperactive behaviour and adrenaline excretion persisted in the stressful situation when aggressiveness was controlled, whereas there was no significant relationship between aggressiveness and adrenaline output when hyperactive behaviour was controlled. Furthermore, hyperactive boys differed significantly from non‐hyperactive boys in displaying lower adrenaline excretion in both situations. The results are discussed in terms of low sympathetic‐adrenal reactivity to external demands as a risk factor and as a possible indicator of vulnerability for social and/or pervasive conduct disturbances.

Aggression, as a variable of psychological study, has the hallmarks of a deeply ingrained personality trait. It is related to genetic and physiological factors; it emerges early in life but is influenced and shaped by a chilďs life experiences; it is consistently associated with gender and is stable or predictable over time and across situations. However, it does not follow that aggression must be viewed as a drive. On the contrary, in this article we argue that aggression is best represented internally as a collection of specific 'scripts' for social behaviour, emphasizing aggressive responding, and the associative structure relating these scripts to each other, to external cues, and to outcome expectancies. The construction and maintenance of these scripts obey well‐understood principles of human information processing. Once established, these networks of scripts may be extremely resistant to change. The result is a set of cognitive structures that promote consistent forms of instrumental and hostile aggression over time and across situations.

A developmental model of antisocial behaviour is presented in this paper. Arguments and evidence are presented for the position that although many factors such as parent criminality, social and economic disadvantage, child temperament, and marital discord systematically affect the development of antisocial child behaviour, their influence is mediated by the extent to which they disrupt day‐to‐day parenting practices. Particularly, it is argued that irritable, ineffective discipline and poor parental monitoring are the most proximal determinants of the early development and maintenance of antisocial behaviour. The implications of this model for prevention and intervention in child conduct problems are discussed, using examples of promising clinical work that focuses on direct parent training.

A number of studies are reported which sustain the importance of individual differences in the study of aggression. Irritability, emotional susceptibility, dissipatio—nrumination, tolerance toward violence, and proneness to guilt feelings provide a better understanding of the various forms of aggression. Prosocial behaviour, emotional instability, and physical and verbal aggression proved to be important indicators to children's more general adjustment. To go beyond the traditional paradigm of research on aggression a structural and interactive—interpersonal analysis of aggression is recommended. Aggression as a unitary phenomenon is called into question. Instead, it is stated that the various facets of aggression find an explanation and acquire meaning within the context of global personality development and functioning.

Both theoretical considerations and methodological constraints explain why the experimental study of animal aggression does not often put much emphasis on individual differences and hardly uses the concept of ‘personality’. And yet, if neurobiologists consider those brain mechanisms that underlie the interpretation of a given situation and the anticipation of a method to cope with it, they are led to investigate mechanisms that underlie a number of behaviour dimensions which the psychologist would refer to as ‘personality’. The actual object considered in either case does not essentially differ. This is exemplified more concretely by examining the kind of factors—and the brain mechanisms involved in their very existence or in their processing—that contribute to determine the probability that in the face of a given situation, a given individual will adopt aggressive behaviour as the coping strategy.