Nationalism and Violence in Two Post-Soviet Republics: Azerbaijan and Moldova

David D. Laitin, Political Science, University of Chicago

Research Grant, 1997, 1998

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The goal of my HFG grant was to account for variation in the degree of violence in the critical moment of state breakdown in the former Soviet Union. At this moment, as in the case of many imperial breakdowns, the level of ethnic violence increased markedly compared to the era of Soviet hegemony. My previous research examining ethnic identification in four republics (Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan) was inadequate to account for variations in violence, since all of them were peaceful. The HFG grant allowed me to replicate the research techniques used in my earlier studies to include two cases where there was significant secessionist violence in the new republics (Moldova and Azerbaijan). Two theories were tested to account for the variation in cases. The oft-cited theory of Donald Horowitz emphasizes psychological mechanisms affecting self-esteem; the greater the challenge to ethnic self-esteem, the more likely the violence. An alternative theory by James Fearon and Pieter van Houten, based on Rogers Brubaker’s “triadic configuration,” is also tested. This theory relies on a commitment logic, and hypothesizes secessionist violence where minority groups get clear signals of support, should they try to secede, from a national homeland.

These findings are important because they tell us that the quality of ethnic relations is less important than previously thought in accounting for violence; and that interventions by neighboring states (or rump groups within them) are often the culprits for civil war violence.

The newly collected data did not support the predictions that would follow from Horowitz’s theory. Ethnic relations in Moldova and Azerbaijan were no more challenging to self-esteem than in the peaceful republics. The commitment theory, however, was consistent with the data and the historical record. In Moldova a rump-Soviet army unit and in Azerbaijan a strong militia from Armenia gave unqualified support to secessionists, thereby emboldening them. Meanwhile, Russia gave only mixed signals to the Russian minorities in the four peaceful republics. These findings are important because they tell us that the quality of ethnic relations is less important than previously thought in accounting for violence; and that interventions by neighboring states (or rump groups within them) are often the culprits for civil war violence. The research findings were published in Comparative Political Studies (Laitin 2001) as “Secessionist Rebellion in the Former Soviet Union.” The research materials were also the basis for a doctoral dissertation by Alena Guboglo at Moscow State University.

A Military History of East Africa in the Nineteenth Century

John Lamphear, History, University of Texas

Research Grant, 2002, 2001

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The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation made possible archival research in the U.K., France, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zanzibar, and field research in Uganda, to collect data for the first macrocosmic history of traditional organized violence in East Africa, as well as the analysis and organization of that data in anticipation of writing the manuscript itself. The goal has been to explore the historical evolution of the military systems of a wide range of East African societies from about the 1770s to the 1890s, and, in the process, to propose a major modification of the prevailing notion of a “pacified” African past, as well as to suggest historical continuity between precolonial conflict and contemporary “ragged warfare.”

The findings so far certainly support the contention that, far from being inherently limited, traditional warfare in the region was as common and lethal as in any other part of the world. Nevertheless, much of the conflict took the form of what I am now terming “raiding war” (in some ways roughly equivalent to what used to be termed “primitive war”), as opposed to what I call “campaigning war,” i.e., the “conventional” warfare—involving standing armies, protracted campaigns, and set-piece battles—far more familiar to Western experience and scholarship.

The findings so far certainly support the contention that, far from being inherently limited, traditional warfare in the region was as common and lethal as in any other part of the world.

The data gathered far surpassed expectations in terms of its sheer quantity. Moreover, it is revealing a much more complex and nuanced picture of precolonial East African military history than anticipated. There are, for example, a surprising number of discernible instances of societies making a transition from raiding war to campaigning war during the nineteenth century. Some of these transformations clearly involved external factors, such as imported weaponry (and a special emerging subtheme is the impact of the early East African firearms trade), long-distance commerce, and imperialism. Nonetheless, internal factors, such as modifications to age-class structures and the centralization of politico-religious leadership, were plainly crucial as well.

One of the most difficult aspects of the work to date has been systematically to establish the actual correlation between precolonial warfare and contemporary violence. While certainly empirical evidence shows clear continuity, there obviously also have been extreme distortions of earlier practices, making it hard to suggest specific ways that strategies for the restoration of peace in areas such as northern Uganda and Rwanda might best utilize lessons from the earlier historical experience.

A chapter, “Sub-Saharan African Warfare,” in Jeremy Black (ed.), War in the Modern World since 1815 (Warfare and History) (London: Routledge, 2003), was directly based on my Guggenheim-supported research. In addition, a conference paper on the military background to the Maji Maji Rebellion, and three articles for journals that are nearing completion likewise draw on that research. Finally, much of the data is being incorporated into my teaching; important components of a graduate seminar in East African history offered last semester, for instance, were directly inspired by the work the Guggenheim Foundation has supported.

Determinants of Infant Abuse and Neglect In Group-Living Macaques

Dario Maestripieri, Psychology, Emory University

Research Grant, 1997, 1998

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Infant abuse and neglect is not a phenomenon unique to the human species.

In monkeys and apes, some mothers occasionally display violent behavior towards their infants and a few others abandon their infants shortly after birth. In macaque monkeys, infant abuse generally occurs in the first two to three months of infant life. Abusive mothers typically drag their infants on the ground or push, hit, or throw them around. Abusive mothers typically alternate short bouts of abuse with long periods of appropriate care-giving behavior. The consequences of abuse may range from infant distress to serious injury and death.

This project had three main goals: 1) to investigate the occurrence of infant abuse and neglect in two large populations of macaques living at the Field Station of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Georgia over a period of thirty to thirty-five years; 2) to observe and study the behavior of macaque mothers who physically abuse their infants; and 3) to investigate possible physiological differences between macaque mothers who abuse their infants and nonabusive mothers.

Information for the first study was obtained from the Animal Records of the Yerkes Primate Center. Data were available for about four hundred pigtail macaques and over three thousand rhesus macaques over a period of five to seven generations.

Behavioral observations of abusive mothers in rhesus and pigtail macaques revealed that these individuals do not show any gross behavioral abnormalities in their social interactions with other group members.

Data analyses showed that in these two populations, 5–10 percent of all infants born every year are physically abused by their mothers and 1–3 percent of them are abandoned shortly after birth. Infant abuse, but not neglect, was concentrated in some families and among closely related individuals such as mothers and daughters, or sisters. Thus, abuse appears to be transmitted across generations along the maternal line, and macaque females that are abused as infants are likely to become abusive mothers themselves. Neglectful mothers were young females who abandoned only one of their offspring, typically the first, whereas most abusive mothers repeated abuse with successive offspring. Moreover, abusive mothers were very consistent in their rates and physical patterns of abuse over time and across infants.

Behavioral observations of abusive mothers in rhesus and pigtail macaques revealed that these individuals do not show any gross behavioral abnormalities in their social interactions with other group members. However, they can be differentiated from other mothers for their controlling parenting styles, as they score higher than controls on measures of maternal protectiveness and rejection. For example, they both restrict their infants’ movements and reject their attempts to make contact more frequently than nonabusive mothers. In pigtail macaques, abuse was often preceded by stressful social events such as aggression within the group or infant kidnapping. Since abusive mothers are not more likely to find themselves in such stressful situations than other mothers, this suggests that abusive mothers are individuals that are particularly vulnerable to stress or with problems in emotion regulation.

The third study found that rhesus macaque abusive mothers did not differ from controls in their profiles of estrogen and progesterone during late pregnancy and early lactation. Since these hormones are involved in the regulation of maternal responsiveness, it does not appear that abusive behavior is the result of a deficit in maternal motivation. Some differences between abusive and nonabusive mothers, however, were found in the activity of physiological systems that regulate responses to stress. This is consistent with the hypothesis that abusive mothers have problems with emotion regulation and raises the possibility that these alterations in responsiveness to stress may be the result of an early trauma, i.e. abuse experienced during infancy.

Bibliography

1. Maestripieri, D. Wallen, K. & Carroll, K. A. Infant abuse runs in families of group-living pigtail macaques. Child Abuse & Neglect, 21: 465-471, 1997.

2. Maestripieri, D. Parenting styles of abusive mothers in group-living rhesus macaques. Animal Behaviour, 55: 1-11, 1998.

3. Maestripieri, D. & Carroll. K. A. Risk factors for infant abuse and neglect in rhesus monkeys. Psychological Science, 9: 143-145, 1998.

4. Maestripieri, D. Megna, N.L. Hormones and behavior in abusive and nonabusive rhesus macaque mothers. 2: Mother-infant interactions. Physiology & Behavior, 71: 43-49, 2000.

Latino Violence in the United States: A Five-City Study

Ramiro Martinez, Criminology, University of Delaware

Research Grant, 1999

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The HFG grant supported the first book-length attempt to answer questions on Latino homicide with hard evidence and empirical research that helps us better understand the impact of the latest wave of Latino immigration. My focus is on Latinos and Latino homicide in five cities—Chicago, El Paso, Houston, Miami, and San Diego—which have faced extensive and sustained waves of immigration, and in the case of El Paso and San Diego, some of the longest history of Latino settlement in the United States. This process, in turn, should impact Latinos more than any other ethnic group and have a corresponding influence on homicide. But the alleged immigration/crime link has had relatively little direct influence on Latinos. Latino homicide rates have not changed in a uniform manner. Instead, they have been characterized by exceptional variation across urban areas since 1980: some rose, others fell or even remained stable, but most remained lower than expected.

More specifically, my primary objectives were: 1) to describe and explain the extent of urban Latino homicide and relate the patterns that emerge to other ethnic group patterns; 2) to explore similarities and differences within the Latino population; and 3) to determine the influences and circumstances that shape the nature of Latino homicides in urban communities. With the population growth of Latinos—soon to be the largest ethnic minority group in the U.S.—writers and researchers have promoted a discussion about urban violence that rests on beliefs, guesses, and opinions about the latest threat to the national social fabric. This book challenges the perceived nature of Latino criminality and the assumption that Latinos, especially young Latino males, are a criminally inclined or a highly victimized ethnic group, by filling the gaps in contemporary analyses of Latino violence.

Latino homicide rates have not changed in a uniform manner. Instead, they have been characterized by exceptional variation across urban areas since 1980: some rose, others fell or even remained stable, but most remained lower than expected.

In closing, by focusing on Latinos and homicide in these five cities, the conclusions presented in this book demonstrated that Latinos are not usually engaged in high levels of violent crime and that immigration can be a positive influence on communities that suppresses crime. Until now, this group has largely gone ignored and this notion has rarely been explored. But the incorporation of Latinos into criminological research will inevitably intensify, and when it does, my hope is that this book will provide a foundation on which others can build studies that effectively capture meaningful group differences, as well as a rationale for moving beyond Black and White comparisons. Since the United States increasingly resembles its multiethnic cities, and since Latino-majority communities are proliferating, the time has come to ask more questions about Latinos and crime.

Bibliography

1. Martinez, Ramiro Jr. Latino Homicide: Immigration, Violence, and Community. New York City and London: Routledge Press. Taylor & Francis Group.

2. Martinez, Ramiro Jr., Amie L. Nielsen and Matthew T. Lee. Reconsidering the Marielito Legacy: Race/Ethnicity, Nativity and Homicide Motives. (Social Science Quarterly, June 2003.)

State Practices, National Identity and Anti-Immigrantism in Western Democracies

Roxanne Lynn Doty, Political Science, Arizona State University

Research Grant, 1997

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This study critically examines the various practices of anti-immigrantism in three Western democracies—the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—within the context of globalization. The study draws upon the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who apply a psychodynamic conceptualization of capitalism, and by association, the Westphalian state, as a “desiring machine.” The concept of desire is used to examine the ways in which these three countries have responded to immigration from third-world countries. Desire can be seen to be working in the tensions between the centrifugal and centripetal tendencies of modern statecraft; between the drive to control the populace from the center and the individualistic liberal ideals that underpin democratic theory and institution building in the West. The study demonstrates how these two tendencies are apparent in contemporary anti-immigrantism and the “new racism,” or “neoracism,” that underpins it. The study concludes that immigration is an exemplary site of the manifestation of the desire for order and security in a world where these things are perceived to be under threat. In doing so, it questions conventional conceptualizations of the state and offers a definition of the state as desire.

Desire can be seen to be working in the tensions between the centrifugal and centripetal tendencies of modern statecraft; between the drive to control the populace from the center and the individualistic liberal ideals that underpin democratic theory and institution building in the West.

An Exploration of the Marked Decline of Women’s Involvement in Crime: 1700–1900

Malcolm M. Feeley, Law, University of California, Berkeley

Research Grant, 1998, 2000

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A number of years ago while working on another project, I discovered that in several locations in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Europe, women constituted 60 percent or more of those charged with serious crimes. These are figures several times higher than contemporary levels, and wholly at odds with conventional criminological understanding, which holds that serious criminal activity is overwhelmingly male behavior. Once I found that virtually no one had explored this phenomenon, I developed plans for a systematic study to see how widespread this pattern was, to see if it applied to violent as well as nonviolent (serious) crimes, and to explore its causes and consequences.

The proportions of men and women charged with crime, including serious crime, have varied widely across time and space.

With support from the foundation, I have been able to explore this issue systematically. I have gathered a vast body of data from records on charging, prosecution and sentencing, and drawn on a vast amount of secondary materials from archives and libraries in England, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, and elsewhere to explore shifts in criminal prosecutions of men and women from roughly 1650 to 1850. I continue to analyze these data, but am able to offer several tentative findings. The proportion of those charged with serious crimes who were women declined markedly in a great many locations in Northern Europe during this period. This pattern holds for both violent and nonviolent offenses, though is much stronger for nonviolent offenses (e.g., theft). However, this pattern also holds for petty nonviolent offenses. These patterns are strongest in a handful of commercial or international shipping centers that had expanded rapidly, and whose economies depended heavily on casual laborers, often young, single immigrants. It is not so pronounced in locations in more traditional societies.

Two general factors appear to account for the high levels of women caught up in the criminal process. First, as to more serious criminal offenses, these commercial and industrial centers attracted a disproportionate number of young single women, many of whom got into trouble with the law. As the cities adapted to the new conditions, this problem appears to have declined. Second, in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, a variety of less-serious public nuisance offenses, such as scolding, gossiping, slander, immodest dressing, and the like, came to be decriminalized. Women constituted the vast majority of such offenders, and so with decriminalization came a decline in the numbers of women offenders. Together these two factors, I believe, account for much of the dramatic decline in the proportion of women charged with crimes during this period. It may be that these changes are simply the consequence of general demographic and cultural shifts not directly related to issues of gender. However my research suggests that they are also due in some considerable part to a marked shift in the forms and methods of patriarchy at the outset of the industrial revolution, a shift that led to the decline of public controls of women and an expansion of a variety of informal, private controls. Whatever the case, this study challenges the conventional wisdom that crime, including violent crime, is and always and everywhere has been overwhelmingly male behavior. It reveals that the proportions of men and women charged with crime, including serious crime, have varied widely across time and space.

Remembering Violence and the Transvaluation of the Public Sphere

Allen Feldman, Anthropology, National Development and Research Institutes

Research Grant, 1997-2000

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My South African research brings the two poles of structural violence and transacted violence into greater proximity through the very tissue of historical memory. In the debates that have surrounded the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), there has been much comment about the Commission’s focus on “exceptional,” “extreme,” and “gross” acts of human rights violation to the extent that the inquiry risks normalizing and backgrounding the everyday structural violence of apartheid’s socioeconomic institutions in South Africa. From certain perspectives, the emphasis on “gross human rights violations” is seen as an artificial separation of the political dimensions of the apartheid regime from its economic character and everyday structural underpinnings. However, once analyzed from the perspective of both the commodification of the body and critical race theory, such acts come into focus as present-day expressions of a depth archeology. At different stages in the history of the colonial and postcolonial political economy, transacted violence and structural violence served as symbolic lubricant for each other. Egregious labor discipline as act, threat, and spectacle facilitated the ideological and structural reproduction of the colonial economy. Structural nostalgia for this class and racial hierarchy haunted the reenactments of repressive violence from 1964 to 1992 as a form of historical desire, magic, and fantasy that was materialized in disfigurement and pain and that rechanneled and consumed the recalcitrant Black body as a renewed productive fuel for state power.

In accessing alternative memory, I was compelled to inject the absent notion of racially fetishized violence into the deliberations of the TRC. For the concept of racialized violence I deploy contains embedded layers of historical and somatic meaning that were filtered out of the TRC’s engagement with state violence due to its juridical-positivist approach to history. In this context, I view racism not as a form of civil rights discrimination, nor as a psychological pathology, but rather as the fetishization of the body of color in the labor objectification/coercion of colonially subjugated populations. I argue that “European” regimes of labor discipline in colonial and postcolonial South Africa deployed the body of color both as an instrumental-economic and magical substance. I show that in South Africa, the performative signifiers of race- and class-based economic domination were eventually, in a time of postcolonial crisis, transposed into the sphere of state political ritual, thereby symbolically ordering counterinsurgency performance and consequently normalizing and legitimating what has been subsequently termed “gross” violations of human rights.

Hence, the cultural memory of “White” economic dominance was mobilized as self-conscious political agency that translated the residual economy of the colonial body into emerging economies of transacted postcolonial political violence. This dynamic of transposition by which the so-called “instrumental” practice of the political economy was refigured as the legitimating semiology of domination in recent state violence points to the magical invocation of the memory of economic domination in the performance culture of political repression.

Racialized and disproportionate violence became juridical blind-spots and historical recesses where alternative historical memories and political experiences could be accessed.

My research strategically deploys racialized somatic fetishism as an alternative analytic to the liberal-rationalist reductions of the TRC concerning politically motivated and thus indemnifiable human rights violations. Nor do I completely reject the norm of human rights promoted by the truth commission, rather I connect the suppressed discussion of racialized violence to the equally evaded human rights norm of “disproportionate violence” originally mandated yet conveniently forgotten by the TRC. The TRC could not reconcile politically rationalized violence with disproportionate excessive violence–its notion of political violence remained resolutely within an enlightenment framework. Amnesty applicants were thus indemnified for political justifications of human rights violations. Steve Biko’s assailants were not denied amnesty for their coercive interrogation methods but for their post-interrogation medical neglect of their prisoner; the latter could not be politically justified but torture could. Racialized violence and disproportionate violence are an excluded locus of a fundamental contradiction within the liberal-rationalist historiography of the TRC; thus the identification and condemnation of excessive violence was subject to structural forgetfulness by the human rights paradigm. Racialized and disproportionate violence became juridical blind-spots and historical recesses where alternative historical memories and political experiences could be accessed.

In part my goal in this project was to examine how the history of certain memory formations mediated the reproduction of certain types of excessive and racialized violence that were given short shrift by the TRC. By treating memory as a utilitarian and unproblematic transparency largely residing in individuals or as a neutral juridical technology, the TRC ignored social memory as a normative institutionalized formation with its own political history. And in doing so the TRC ended up stressing memory’s therapeutic possibilities at the expense of establishing its pathogenic connection to institutional violence and that violence’s inherence in economic racism; a connection that would more explicitly relate the TRC’s project with the historical evisceration of apartheid’s economic and spatial violence. In neglecting the hegemonic contours of institutional memory, the TRC failed to develop a self-reflexive relationship to its own technologies of memory and failed to confront the human rights danger in not recalling the disproportionate character of so-called politically motivated institutional violence. The TRC has left an ambivalent and contradictory moral legacy to the degree that it has ceded to future generations an important archive of political terror and violence experience, witnessed largely from the previously unwritten perspective of Black history and embodiment, and yet failed to adequately confront the institutional procedures that reproduce and bureaucratically routinize such violence–an important prophylaxis for future democratic institution building in South Africa.

I have triangulated racialized victim fetishism by the state apparatus—a form of state sorcery—with the human rights notion of disproportionate, surplus-excessive violence, and with specific historical-economic coordinates of production and symbolic consumption. In effect, surplus disproportionate and excessive violence functioned as a cipher or code for excessive, surplus unnarrated, unrecognized and unwanted (by the TRC) historical memory, perception, and experience. By accessing alternative historiographies, located in labor history, in local moral geographies, indigenous norms of healing and “folk” theories of sorcery and the demonic, I posed and began to answer the difficult question of how a political culture fashions power (symbolic and pragmatic) from techniques of production and substances of consumption–a question any truth commission could benefit from contemplating. A question that, if not addressed, leaves all truth commissions in a morass of symptomology and ad hoc moral condemnation that will ultimately make human rights discourse a laughing-stock or a circus-like spectacle. At the same time the salvaging of surplus historical memory tied to surplus and officially unnarrated political violence can promote the subjecthood and agency of those communities and individuals who have been the recipients of consuming colonial and postcolonial intrusions of their person and embodiment. And is not the dignified restoration of subjecthood and personhood one of the primary goals of human rights projects?

Translations of Antisemitism: The History of Jews and Violence in Indonesia

Jeffrey Hadler, Anthropology

Research Grant, 1999

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I conceived my research project in May, 1998, in the aftermath of the fall of President Soeharto in Indonesia. That month saw horrendous violence committed against the Chinese community in Jakarta—torture, rape, and murder. The dehumanizing rhetoric that accompanied this violence reminded me of European antisemitic discourse of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: describing a people who were urban, parasitic, exploitative, and antinationalistic, who participated in occult and deviant dietary and sexual rituals.

Scholars have assumed that Indonesian antisemitism is a case of “antisemitism without Jews”; that current anti-Jewish rhetoric is borrowed from Middle Eastern anti-Zionist propaganda. This viewpoint is limited. In my research I analyze the history and role of the Jewish community during the period of Dutch colonialism in the East Indies. I assess the position of both Dutch and so-called “oriental” or “Baghdadi” Jews in the economic and social life of the colony, discussing the role of Zionism and imperial antisemitism, and paying particular attention to the interactions of the Jews and the Indonesians. I scrutinize the antisemitic rhetoric of the Vaderlandsche Club, an Indies racist organization that channeled funds to and was eventually superseded in the 1930s by the Dutch Nazi Party, and I analyze the particular antisemitism cultivated by the Axis during the Japanese occupation.

In post-Soeharto Indonesia, there has been a curious revival of antisemitism, an effort to equate political "reformasi" and Zionism.

Indonesian colonial Jewry cut across official colonial categories, with Dutch, Arab, Chinese, and even “native” congregants. The community maintained a Zionist newspaper, “Erets Israel,” that was published from 1926 until the Japanese occupation. Jews met in the one synagogue in Surabaya and held services in Masonic Lodges and Theosophical Halls (two other groups reviled by conspiracy theorists today). In post-Soeharto Indonesia, there has been a curious revival of antisemitism, an effort to equate political “reformasi” and Zionism. The Surabaya synagogue has drawn the attention of Australian Lubavitchers and is now a sort of Jewish mission field. My research consisted then of two related projects. On one hand I undertook archival research into the history of the Jewish community in colonial Indonesia. The results of this research have been presented at conferences and are the subject of a forthcoming article.

My second project was more ethnographic and is ongoing—a study of the small community of Indonesian Jews in Jakarta and Surabaya and their relationship to both an Indonesian state that does not recognize Judaism as a religion and to a community of Muslim neighbors who are increasingly angry with Israel, the United States, and the perceived role of international Zionists in destabilizing Indonesia and the Islamic world. Furthermore I speculate about whether the ideological justifications for current anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia were not maintained throughout the New Order in easily translated antisemitism. If the violence of the late 1960s was hung on an anticommunist reed, then the racist rhetoric of 1998 echoed with antisemitism. Chinese are depicted as antinationalists, practitioners of native labor abuse and then reflexive capital flight. Such shadowy “conglomerates” and peripatetic urban exploiters are as Jewish as they are Chinese stereotypes. Of course Southeast Asians have a much longer experience of Chinese contact than they do Jewish interaction. However, in the face of state-sanctioned silence when it came to discussions of the Chinese, it is plausible that anti-Chinese rhetoric migrated towards antisemitism in the Soeharto era. This second project, since it involves a living and potentially threatened community, is far more difficult to publicize.

Mechanisms Underlying “Pathological” Forms of Aggression in Rats

Jozsef Haller, Biology, Institute of Experimental Medicine

Research Grant, 2001, 2002

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The involvement of the overproduction of stress hormones (glucocorticoids) in the etiology of mood disorders (e.g., anxiety and depression) is well established. In contrast, the psychopathological consequences of glucocorticoid underproduction received comparatively little attention, despite the fact that disparate human studies suggest an involvement of glucocorticoid deficiency in abnormal human aggression. We have recently reported that experimentally induced glucocorticoid insufficiency induces abnormal forms of aggression in rats. Such rats target their attacks to vulnerable parts (mainly the head) of their opponents. In addition, intention signaling (threat behavior) is deficient in these rats. These data suggest that glucocorticoid deficiency is a risk factor in the etiology of aggression-related psychopathologies.

In the present work, we aimed at understanding the mechanisms of glucocorticoid insufficiency–induced aggression, with special reference to mechanisms involved in fear and anxiety. In addition, possibilities of counteracting the behavioral anomaly are surveyed.

In the experiments performed so far, we have shown that chronic but not acute glucocorticoid deficiency facilitates aberrant attacks. An acute suppression of glucocorticoid synthesis decreased aggressive behavior without affecting attack targeting. In contrast, chronic glucocorticoid deficiency did not affect the level of aggressiveness, but increased attacks aimed at vulnerable body parts of the opponents, and decreased intention signaling. Glucocorticoid deficiency did not affect anxiety levels in nonsocial settings but induced signs of anxiety in the social interaction test of anxiety. This suggests that glucocorticoid deficiency disrupts social behavior in challenging situations without affecting anxiety levels in general. Glucocorticoid deficiency also induced deviant cardiovascular responses in challenging situations. Rats with experimentally induced glucocorticoid deficiency showed decreased heart rate increases when challenged with an opponent in familiar or unfamiliar environments. The difference was not due to differences in work load, as glucocoticoid deficiency did not affect locomotion in either setting. Notably, violent criminals were shown to have decreased basal heart rates and decreased cardiovascular reactivity in challenging situations.

This suggests that glucocorticoid deficiency disrupts social behavior in challenging situations without affecting anxiety levels in general.

We have also studied the effects of glucocoticoid deficiency on the aggression-induced activation of various brain centers. We have assessed the neuronal activation patterns induced by aggressive behavior in rats. The so-called cFos technique employed provided results largely consistent with those provided earlier by lesion and stimulation techniques. We have noticed, however, that the activation of a neuronal path involving the hypothalamic attack area, mediodorsal thalamus, and frontal cortical areas is a prerequisite of attacks. We have also noticed that the activation patterns of brain centers involved in aggression control were not affected by glucocorticoid deficiency. In contrast, glucocorticoid deficiency induced a strong activation of the brain centers involved in the stress response and fear. Currently, we investigate the connections and the neurochemical nature of neurons involved in aggression control, to get more insights into the neural control of glucocorticoid deficiency–induced abnormal aggression.

The data presented above suggest that fear is an important determinant of glucocorticoid deficiency–induced aggression. Therefore, we assessed whether anxiolytics are able to suppress the abnormal behavioral pattern induced by glucocorticoid deficiency. Surprisingly, the serotonergic anxiolytic buspirone aggravated rather than ameliorated the behavioral anomaly. Studies are currently being performed with other anxiolytics and compounds used for treating aggression-related human disorders.

Social Dominance and Coercive Strategies of Resource Control in Children

Patricia H. Hawley, Psychology, Southern Connecticut State University

Research Grant, 2001

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Aggressive behavior has traditionally been considered an indicator of psychological or behavioral maladaptation (impulsivity, social cognitive deficits) that puts the child at risk for peer rejection. Yet we casually observe that many high-status and well-accepted individuals (e.g., CEOs, political leaders) are modestly aggressive in their own right. Is aggression in some contexts adaptive and socially competent?

A strategy-based evolutionary perspective on resource control and social dominance suggests that there are at least two types of aggressive individuals: those who engage in purely coercive strategies of resource control (e.g., make threats of harm) and those who balance coercion with prosocial strategies (e.g., promise reciprocation, friendship). Hypothesized here is that those who balance the two strategies enjoy high resource control and high status. Furthermore, these children were hypothesized to be relatively socially skilled, in contrast to prevailing views that suggest aggressive children are particularly unskilled.

Two independently measured resource control strategies (prosocial and coercive) give rise to five resource control groups: prosocial controllers (high prosocial control, low coercive control); coercive controllers (high coercive, low prosocial); bistrategic controllers (high on both); noncontrollers (low on both); and typical children (midrange on both).

Teachers described bistrategic controllers as being supreme resource controllers. Additionally, these children were similar to prosocial controllers in terms of positive characteristics as well as similar to coercive controllers in terms of negative characteristics.

One hundred and sixty-three preschoolers participated in this study. Teachers were asked via questionnaire about the children’s resource control abilities and strategies (prosocial, coercive), personalities, aggressive behavior, and social skills. The children were interviewed for their verbal ability, moral reasoning (e.g., “Is it right or wrong to take a toy from another child?”), and social problem-solving skills (e.g., “What would you do to get a turn?”). We also assessed whether the children were esteemed by peers by asking each child to nominate peers who they most liked. Those who received the most nominations were considered well-accepted.

Teachers described bistrategic controllers as being supreme resource controllers. Additionally, these children were similar to prosocial controllers in terms of positive characteristics as well as similar to coercive controllers in terms of negative characteristics. For example, bistrategics were well above average on peer acceptance and highest on attention to social cues (they know how they make others feel) and emotional manipulation (they can pretend to be angry/sad to get what they want). Prosocial controllers were rated equally as accepted and equally skilled as the bistrategics, but not emotionally manipulative. Coercive controllers were neither accepted nor skilled, but, like bistrategics, highly manipulative. The bistrategic personality profile stands out as low on anxiety and high on extroversion. They were rated high on all types of aggressive behavior (hitting, social exclusion) like coercive controllers, but uniquely high in relational aggression (i.e., social exclusion; “you can’t play with us”). Despite their aggression, they were the least likely to admit to using coercion and most likely to claim to use competent strategies on the social problem-solving measure. Furthermore, they were the most developed in their moral reasoning. Last, they as a group received the most “like most” nominations from their peers.

The approach applied here highlights the utility of exploring different subgroups of aggressive children. Aggressiveness paired with prosociality may be in some ways adaptive and, rather than being associated with skills deficits, appears to be associated with indicators of social competence.

Bibliography

1. Hawley, P.H. (2003). Strategies of control, aggression, and morality in preschoolers: An evolutionary perspective. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 85, 213-235.

2. Hawley, P.H. (2003). Prosocial and coercive configurations of resource control in early adolescence: A case for the well-adapted Machiavellian. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 49, 279-309 (Special volume: Aggression and adaptation: The bright side to bad behavior).