Abstract:

Aggressive behavior can make individuals produce positive emotions, indicating it has a pleasurable effect. It is supported by evidence from at least three aspects. First, the direct emotional experience of aggressive behavior is pleasurable, which exists not only in reactive aggression but also in proactive aggression. Secondly, this effect is also reflected in the association between some personality traits (such as sadism, sensation-seeking, and psychopathy) and aggression, among which the most typical is sadism. In addition, this effect is supported by neuroimaging studies of aggressive behaviors, in which aggressive behaviors activate reward-processing regions represented by the nucleus accumbens and weakens the prefrontal cortex's regulation of these areas. The opponent-process theory and the reinforcement model of aggression explain the formation of this effect. The former pays close attention to the change of individual level, focuses on extreme violence, and thinks that individuals will produce intense negative emotions when they first attack, and aggression will gradually become pleasurable as the experience of violence accumulates. While the latter explains the causes from the perspective of population evolution, focusing on everyday aggressive behavior and arguing that humans have developed an inherent link between aggression and reward over time. They illustrate the gradual internalization of motivation for aggressive behavior from different perspectives. The long-term accumulation of this effect will make individuals gradually form “aggressive behaviors can make people happy” cognition. On this basis, when making decisions, an individual will have the anticipative pleasurable experience of the possible attack scenes in the future, which will facilitate him to continue to make aggressive behavior. This explanation path can be incorporated into the meta-theoretical framework of the aggression-General Aggression Model, enriching its short-term and long-term effect models. The pleasurable effect of aggressive behavior indicates that we should avoid using cathartic therapy singly or excessively in psychotherapy, especially in violent criminals with reward preference. At the same time, the neurophysiological basis of aggression also suggests that aggression and addiction have similarities, and the future needs to explore the common mechanism between them. Future research should consider the physiological arousal of emotion based on the measurement of its valence and monitor the emotional changes in real-time during aggression through emotion computing and other technologies. It is also necessary to further explore the factors that affect the pleasurable effect of aggressive behavior, such as gender, the perception of the victim's pains, and the type of aggression. In addition, the future should conduct research in real situations to further improve the ecological validity of the field, using the empirical sampling method to avoid possible ethical issues.

Key words: aggression, positive emotion, sadism, reward system, mood management