Aggression and Violent Behavior

The article I read was called "Aggression and Violent Behavior" by Lavina Pinto, Eric Sullivan, Alan Rosenbaum, Nicole Wyngarden, John Umhau, Mark Miller, and Casey Taft. It is available at www.sciencedirect.com.

The main argument of this paper is to explain how biological factors can cause a person to abuse his/her partner. This type of abuse is known as intimate partner violence (IPV). The article reviews these different factors: head injury and neuropsychological factors, psychophysiological factors, neurochemical, metabolic, and endocrine factors, and genetic factors.

The authors back up their argument by citing evidence from other journal articles. They provided evidence that head injuries are seen more in abusers than the rest of the population, but clarified that that does not mean that abusers are more likely to have suffered from head injuries. Abusers also have a lower intellectual ability than non-abusers, indicating frontal lobe dysfunction, which is not necessarily caused by head injuries.

Physiological reactivity is a change in the body caused by a stimulus. The studies shown in the article could not give evidence to support a link between physiological reactivity and IPV. The authors of the article said that this is because physiological reactivity is best measured over long periods of time using different tests, and the studies they cited were done at one time point with only one type of test.

Another study involving twins showed that both environment and genetics can cause IPV.

The authors used argument by example.

While the authors were trying to prove that different biological factors can cause a person to engage in IPV, they understood that environmental factors can also play a role.

This article made me think of the nature versus nurture debate. The authors seemed to lean to the nature side. I think both genetics and environment affect how people act. I think the authors did a good job providing information from many different studies and were able to back up their argument well.

Based on this article, I could construct the argument that biological factors beyond our control are responsible for people abusing their significant others.