Studies of Individual Differences in Aggression

This chapter is intended to provide a review of the most salient results of more than a decade of research devoted to the examination of individual differences in relation to the expression of aggression. When this research program began and the vast amount of previous experimental work on aggression was reviewed, what impressed us more than the variety of approaches taken by various investigators was the apparently contradictory results obtained from studies that were substantially based on the same theories and utilized similar procedures. Given the similarity of operational definitions, paradigms, and methods used among these studies, it seemed unlikely that the contradictions among studies were due to conceptual problems; these may become a factor when different theoretical positions or different disciplines are compared.