Nietzsche: To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more

The Role of Positive Affect in Aggression. David Chester. Current Directions in Psychological Science, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721417700457

Abstract: Aggressive behavior hurts us all and is studied across psychology’s subdisciplines. Classical theories discuss the causes of aggression in the context of negative affect (e.g., frustration, pain). However, more recent research implicates positive affect as an important correlate and cause of aggression. Such aggressive pleasure likely evolved from ancient predatory tendencies that later yielded reproductive benefits, holds across reactive and proactive forms of aggression, and is used strategically as an item in many people’s emotion-regulation toolkit. Findings from psychological and neural sciences have converged to detail aggression’s hedonically pleasant qualities and the motivational and biological mechanisms through which they occur. This new approach generates novel hypotheses and might lead to effective interventions that mollify mankind’s aggressive tendencies.

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty human, all-too-human principle. . . . Without cruelty there is no festival.
                —Friedrich Nietzsche, (1887-1913)

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Aggressive acts such as sticking pins in a voodoo doll are associated with higher scores on positive affect measures (Chester & DeWall, 2017a; Chester, DeWall, & Enjaian, 2017). [Mathematical] analyses of various affect measures collected while participants aggressed in the laboratory revealed that a pleasure factor (e.g., “I felt delighted/pleasant/rewarded”) explained most of the variance in affect (Chester, 2017). [...] Approximately half of the variance in aggression is due to genetic factors (Moffitt, 2005). [...] Mice exhibit a so-called conditioned preference for experimental settings in which they aggressed against a conspecific (Martínez, Guillén-Salazar, Salvador, & Simón, 1995). This suggests that aggression is intrinsically reinforcing. Further, mice exert effort in order to aggress against a submissive conspecific, as they would with conventional reinforcers (e.g., food; Legrand, 2013). Chemically blunting activity in the mouse brain’s reward circuit subsequently reduced aggressive behavior (Couppis & Kennedy, 2008). These murine models of aggression are limited for many reasons, one of the most critical being that mice are not predators and thus their aggressive behaviors do not share the same evolutionary basis as humans. Despite these limitations, the innate reinforcement that aggression provides suggests a strong underlying neural basis. [...] Electrical brain recording studies showed that anger and aggressive responses to insult were associated with a neural signature of approach motivations, which are often indicative of positive affect (Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009). Functional MRI techniques have demonstrated that retaliatory aggression is associated with greater activation in the brain’s reward circuitry (e.g., ventral striatum: Chester & DeWall, 2016, 2017b; Fig. 1).Thus, the brain’s reward circuit appears to strongly promote aggressive behavior. Taken together, there is a considerable and growing body of empirical evidence that positive affect playsa magnifying role in reactive aggressive behavior. [...] Proactive forms of aggression are less common and thus less well-researched. However, there is plentiful evidence that individuals seek out aggressive activities (e.g., hunting, violent video games) for the sake of enjoyment and not due to some prior provocation (Bushman & Whitaker, 2010). [...] Revenge may not be the only form of aggression that is sweet, and this sweetness may be a useful tool for individuals who seek to maintain positive affect.