Question: Why do people engage in aggressive behaviour (some, as we know, rather more than others)?
Answer: Because they enjoy it.
There’s a bit of a flutter on the internet (see here and here) about research coming out of Vanderbilt University. Studying mice, Maria Couppis and Craig Kennedy have found that aggression can be as emotionally rewarding as food or sex.
The neurotransmitter dopamine has been implicated in nearly every experience we consider rewarding, such as love, drugs, eating, and sex. Indeed, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway is referred to as the reward system of the brain. Dopamine is necessary for reinforcement, e.g. the ex-smoker’s craving brought about by the whiff of cigarette smoke.
Now a direct connection has been drawn between dopamine and aggression. In the experiement the male home mouse continually pushed a button to let in an intruder mouse which it then aggressed. When treated with a dopamine antagonist (blocking the activity of the dopamine) the home mouse decreased its button-pushing. (For a discussion of the experiment see here.)
(Incidentally, it is important not to conflate aggression and violence. Aggression is dominating behaviour. For the mice aggressive behavior included tail rattle, an aggressive sideways stance, boxing and biting – two non-violent and two non-violent behaviours.)
“We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said. “This shows for the first time that aggression, on its own, is motivating, and that the well-known positive reinforcer dopamine plays a critical role.”
Not that surprising?
I suspect that lovefraud/blog readers who have been on the receiving end of aggression won’t be surprised by these findings. Says Dr. Bliss at Maggies’ farm, “I cannot speak about mice, but every psychiatrist – and every person – knows that this is a fact for human beings.”
Any comments?
A query I have is runs something like this. Many commentators on this blog speak of increased assertiveness, anger, determination, etc. which has enabled them to get through relationships with psychopaths, to gain self-respect, and to make new lives. Would you say that you have learned to better access aggression? And if so, is there pleasure in it?
A discussion of the enjoyment of aggression is in my upcoming book, Driven to Do Evil. Although to some, violence is enjoyable, that is not the issue for sociopaths. The over focus on the enjoyment of aggression/violence has prevented us from having a complete understanding of sociopathy. What about the sociopaths who are not violent, what to they enjoy? The answer is dominance and power. Violence and aggression are the most primative least sophisticated means of achieving power.
Why do sociopaths lie? In order to get the power they want. In this respect lying is an act of aggression, though most people do not see lying in this way.
Understanding that dominance and power are pleasurable allows us to completely predict and explain the behaviors of sociopaths. Consider this- if a person is very power motivated he/she will behave like a sociopath even if he/she has a modicum of conscience and empathy.
I don’t like shunning someone,I don’t like being suspicious or aggressive. It’s not me.
I feel empowere taking care of myself, spotting controlling, manipulative people before they eviscerate me, BUT I have no desire to control. And it makes me sad, deep down, that someone gets off watching another person twitch in psychological or physical pain.
I have hurt others, but it was never my inetnt. That’s what disturbs me most about psychopaths, they’re out to toture. Mine used to look at me in hopes of tears, I saw it on their face. But once one undrstands pain is their pay-off, so much makes sense.
liane – Thanks for the clarification. In my efforts to keep things short I omitted to distinguish between aggression (dominating behaviour) and violence. I’ve now inserted an short paragraph making that point. Thanks again.
holywatersalt – So you’ve not experienced the pleasures of aggression that the research talks about.
I wonder if that means that there’s no relationship between empowerment and aggression. (As I write this I notice the word ‘power’ in empowerment.)
I was an assertive, independent , ambitious, driven, adventurous, financially successful, career-oriented individual pre-Psychopath experience. I had large amounts of self-esteem but I do not feel that I had a lot of self-respect at the time.
Friends described me as reliable, responsible, loyal, dependable. Funny they never seemed to picked up on any of my power motivations (present at the peak of my high profile career) perhaps because it was restricted to the career environment and it was more of an enjoyment of the status I had achieved than some kind of aggressive campaign to seize power.
Hard work, long hours and efficient skills, ability to tolerate complete chaos got me there as opposed to back-stabbing, manipulation, underhanded tactics.
Attempting to keep myself from getting a “fat head” or an overblown ego was very challenging at that time. The “rise to the top” happened overnight-no time to adjust.
I was young, part of a “special” group within the company, which was afforded an outrageous level of perks, name your price salaries, sky’s the limit expense accounts, unrestricted purchasing power, little to no oversight or accountability-anything went. This was only the norm for that particular group-other groups were not given the luxury.
I could see in myself and many of my co-workers and business connections varying degrees of heightened narcissistic traits and lower levels of could constitute aggressiveness.
My choice to leave that industry was a direct result of my dissatisfaction with how my personality and world views had been affected- I craved balance and I wanted to be like everyone else.
For me, any aggressiveness I may have exhibited as a result of that situation, left me feeling uncomfortable and “not really myself.”
Post P experience, I barely had enough energy to get out. He had completely drained me financially over a 4.5 yr period of time while I was sick with a lengthy illness which was almost fatal. I had been so severely tortured and battered for such an extended period of time-I no longer valued my life, I simply existed.
There was nothing from within myself fueling any kind of notion/desire to escape -it was the concern, anger, and determination of others who feared that I would end up dead, that got me out (the P had become increasingly violent).
I wonder then, if this was not some sort of transference at work-they felt for me what I could not which in turn provoked my escape (empowerment?).
It has been 3 years since I got out and in that time I have not felt/experienced anger or any sense of empowerment. Assertiveness-maybe, I won’t back down if challenged, I express my opinions easily even in conflict-but no power drive exists in me. Determination certainly exists to a degree.
I have little doubt that had the abuse been perpetrated during a time when I had not been so physically ill-I most likely would have been able to draw on some sort of reserve of strength of my own.
-Stunned
stunned – You mention “some sort of transference at work”. There is something to this, I think. Also your friends ‘lent’ you some of their strengths.
I’ve noticed this phenomenon in the clinical situation where, say, a very depressed person can ‘borrow’ some of the hope of the therapist.
Of course, like anything, it can be a very bad thing too. It’s almost as if the psychopath drained a certain kind of energy out of you (this makes sense – they must have it all – any power in the other is a challenge).
Narcissists/psychopaths are also known as psychophagic- meaning they are soul eaters. I believe this- just physically – even at the best of times- the psycho drained me of all energy.
Dr. Steve-
There’s much peace and control in pacifism. I am not a shrinking violet, but I find aggression particularly repugnant, I always have. I differentiate that from drive and assertiveness, to me aggression is an attack.
DrSteve,
You said: “It’s almost as if the psychopath drained a certain kind of energy out of you (this makes sense – they must have it all – any power in the other is a challenge).
I wouldn’t have agreed with this a year ago. But then a year ago I didn’t even realize my husband was a psychopath. But now I do and I can see what you say is true.
Back when I was starting to figure things out, my husband arranged a meeting between himself, me, and the woman he was having an affair with–and was planning on dumping me for once his parents had come out for a visit.
He arranged this meeting because he was trying to “prove” to me that he never had sex with her and he figured he could do that by, in front of me, making some sincere-sounding (aren’t they all?) bogus apology in which he would apologize for “leading her on” and flirting (but no sex of course) because “a lot of people got hurt.”
He gave me several hours advance notice of this meeting, so I used the time–I was at my mom’s house–to write pages of questions for her and then when we met I engineered things so we ended up in her car. After DH did his fake apology thing, I asked him to get out of the car and let me talk to “K” privately for a while. What could he say? He had to get out. To refuse would have made him look guilty.
So he got out and I proceeded to talk to K for almost 2 hours. Very interesting. And enlightening. One thing I did was tell her every crappy thing he had said about her (that wasn’t planned; I was genuinely surprised she was attractive, and, well, I guess I was being a little aggressive myself). She was pissed and wouldn’t even look at him when she drove away.
Later, I told him I “sandbagged” them. He said he was the one who engineered things to work out that way. He *knew* I was going to do that.
Now I understand why he said that. It’s because, as you say, he must have all the power in the relationship. Sometimes he’s willing to make it look like I have some power, but even then, he has, or I should say *had* an ulterior motive, it was something he let me do, to manipulate me, to keep me happy, to keep me his unwitting slave.
I wonder if non-sociopathic aggression is primarily self-defensive. I think it is for me. It’s using enough force–verbal, emotional, even physical if necessary–to protect myself and those I care for. Any pleasure I gain is not in the aggressive act itself, but more a satisfaction in standing up for myself and others who are threatened by the behavior of the sociopath. It feels good to feel strong.
Our cultural ideal is for women to be sweet and nice. Sweet and nice are good things, but inappropriate and self-defeating when it comes to dealing with sociopaths. I think sweet and nice stimulate their predatory instincts. It’s like they smell blood. I think they think: here’s a good target. They see someone to use for their own evil ends.
Once in a while I get pressure from others–women mostly–to be more saintly in response to my husband. I know I need to work towards forgiveness–for my own sake; but I’m not ready for that yet, and in the meantime, I think I can best protect myself and work towards healing by being willing to be aggressive in dealing with him. To be willing to be perceived as a bitch.