The Appetitive Aggression Scale - development of an instrument for the assessment of human’s attraction to violence

Abstract

Background: Several instruments, notably Buss and Perry’s Aggression Questionnaire, have been developed for the assessment of aggressive behavior. However, in these instruments, the focus has been on reactive rather than instrumental forms of aggression, even though men in particular may find aggressive behavior attractive. A questionnaire or structured interview for the systematic assessment of the attraction to violence is not yet available. Objective: We, therefore, developed a freely available short form for the assessment of a person’s attraction to violent and planned forms of aggression based on reports of former combatants on the attraction to violence and the characteristics of instrumental aggression described in the literature. Method: The Appetitive Aggression Scale (AAS) was administered to nine samples drawn from different populations, with a total of 1,632 former combatants and participants from war-affected regions (1,193 male and 439 female respondents). Results: From the initial set of 31 items, a selection of 15 items was extracted to improve the scale’s psychometric properties and assess the construct of appetitive aggression validly with respect to content. Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient of 0.85 was appropriate. All items loaded significantly on a single factor accounting for 32% of the total variance. Further analysis revealed that the scale measures a specific construct that can be distinguished from other concepts of human aggression. Conclusions: With the AAS, we present an easily administrable tool for the assessment of the attraction to violence.

Keywords: aggression; assessment; cruelty; questionnaire

(Published: 24 November 2011)

Citation: European Journal of Psychotraumatology 2011, 2: 8430 - DOI: 10.3402/ejpt.v2i0.8430

Read also the Methodological paper The thrill of being violent as an antidote to posttraumatic stress disorder in Rwandese genocide perpetrators

For the abstract, full text in other languages or an interview with the authors, please see Supplementary files in the column to the right (under Reading Tools).