A STUDY OF ACQUISITION OF AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR AS A RESULT OF REINFORCEMENT

During recent years in the studies of aggression attention has been focused chiefly on modeling effects. This approach was first introduced by Bandura, A. and Huston, A. in 1961.<BR>The writer regarded imitation as the cue of acquisition of aggressive behavior and attempted to replicate Bandura's experiment on the basis of his hypothesis that “subjects exposed to aggressive models would reproduce aggressive acts resembling those of their models”. Fifty children, 25 boys and 25 girls, whose ages ranged from 56 to 77 month, with a mean age of 70 mouths, participated as Ss.<BR>The results indicated that the group of children who observed the aggressive models displayed a greater number of aggressive behavior in comparison to the nonaggressive model group or the control group. With regard to the influence of the sex difference of models on the imitation of aggression, it was assumed that both boys and girls would imitate the behavior of male models especially in respect of the imitation of physical aggression. However, we gained the results indicated that boys imitated the behavior of male models and girls imitated the behavior of male models and girls imitated that of female models. In short, children tended to imitate the same sex models regardless of the behavior of models. Moreover, physical aggression was much more expressed in boys than in girls whether it had been acquired through imitation or not. This shows that boys are more aggressive than girls. These findings give support to the results by Bandura, A., Ross, S. A. in 1961 except the point of sex differences of models which exert influence on aggressive behavior.<BR>In addition, the writer studied relationships between parental attitude toward child-rearing assessed from questionnaires and aggressive acts in children. A significant correlation was obtained between them, i. e., the boys whose parents used “physically punitive methods of dicipline” showed strong aggressive behavior, and in the case of girls the aggressive behavior was more likely to occur when their parents did not compel them to behave with girlish manners.<BR>The results stated above suggest that in an experimental setting the presence of aggressive models exerts influence on the subsequent behavior of subjects. It will also be one of the important influences on the subjects that the parents of the children who observed the models and displayed aggressive behavior themselves are providing models of aggression through daily child-rearing, or that they are per- missive for aggressive behavior of their children. The evidence that the aggressive behavior is readily acpuired through the observation of models has led the writer to conclude that it is necessary to investigate as to what point in the behavior of models the subjects are most interested and estimate their aggressive behavior.