[1] Two years later, however, Miller[2] and Sears[5] re-formulated the hypothesis to suggest that while frustration creates a need to respond, some form of aggression is one possible outcome.
For example, if a man is disrespected and humiliated at his work, but cannot respond to this for fear of losing his job, he may go home and take his anger and frustration out on his family.
This theory is also used to explain riots and revolutions, which both are believed to be caused by poorer and more deprived sections of society who may express their bottled up frustration and anger through violence.
[11][12] In 1989, Berkowitz expanded on the hypothesis by suggesting that negative affect and personal attributions play a major role in whether frustration instigates aggressive behavior.
The Yale psychologists behind the monograph were John Dollard, Leonard Doob, Neal Miller, O. H Mowrer, and Robert Sears.
[1] The book is based on many studies conducted by the group that touched a variety of disciplines including psychology, anthropology and sociology.
The authors stated that despite an ample amount of empirical research that examines the link between frustration and aggressive behaviors, there is a decline in the number of studies that specifically refers to the frustration–aggression hypothesis.
Breuer and Elson propose that there is utility in using the frustration–aggression hypothesis as a theoretical foundation for aggression literature and that this theory may have novel applications for other areas such as media psychology.
The Yale group thus reformulated the hypothesis as following: "frustration produces instigation to a number of different types of response, one of which is aggression".
[17] With this new formulation, the researchers left more place for the idea that aggressive impulses are not the only kinds that can emerge when an individual feels frustration.
[18] He stated that it is easier to fit the hypothesis in people whose culture portray life as series of neutral or frustrating events that lead to satisfying ends.
[19] In 1955, he published results of a study he conducted, which included 60 female students, that showed that people were less likely to demonstrate aggression when social standards were stressed.
[19] Moreover, he built on what Doob and Sears' study previously claimed, which is that demonstration of aggressive behavior will depend on the anticipation of punishment.
Dill and Anderson found that participants in the unjustified frustration condition rated the research staff as less able and less likable, knowing this would affect their financial situation as graduate students.
The system is made up of and follows from the amygdala to the hypothalamus and finally to the periaqueductal gray matter (PAG)[30] In greater detail, research suggests that when one is threatened or frustrated by some stimuli, parts of our frontal cortex, that is our orbital, medial and ventrolateral frontal cortex, is activated which works in tandem with our threat response system, the amygdala-hypothalamus-PAG.
[31] More simply put, threatening events generate more action potentials in the frontal cortex regions which then relay onto the amygdala-hypothalamus-PAG.
This has not shown to interfere with the basic circuitry at the neuronal level and simply implies that certain stimuli generate more action potentials than others, and thus stronger responses than others respectively.
[32] What this means is that the closer a frustrating stimulus is presented to us, the greater the chances our basic response systems will be activated and thus will give rise to certain behaviors accordingly.
[33] What this research suggests is that people who get frustrated more easily than others show greater activity in the frontal cortex in connection with the amygdala-hypothalamus-PAG, the system that makes us act, given a strong enough stimulus, aggressively with reference to the studies at hand.
One study by Williams[34] examined the impact of violent content and frustration with game-play and assessed how these factors are related to aggressive personality (i.e., trait hostility).
During this phase participants were asked to complete a series of questionnaires that assessed their video game playing habits and aggression.
Ultimately, this study found that exposure to violent content influenced participants' aggressive responses when playing video games.
The authors tested the relationships between individual differences in social information processing, history of physical maltreatment, and child negative affect and their aggressive behaviors.
The first session involved the children completing an emotional oddball task while having their neural responses recorded via event-related potentials (ERPs).
Ultimately, these findings suggest that physical maltreatment of children leads to child dysregulation of their negative affect and aggression.
[25] For example, Seward, who studied rat behavior, suggested that aggression can also be caused by dominance struggles, which for him were different from frustration.
In this study, participants from a sample of 131 college students were presented with the verbal description of two types of situations, arbitrary and non-arbitrary.
Berkowitz addressed this criticism in his 1989 article and proposed that frustration, and ultimately aggression, is induced when individuals think they have been deliberately and wrongly kept from their goal.
Mahatma Gandhi exemplified this technique that essentially denounces the principles of the frustration–aggression theory in that he restrained himself from feeling these innate desires.
[39] The Yale group's hypothesis does not explain why aggressive behavior could be manifested in different social environments without previous provocation or feeling of frustration.