Working in Movement

If someone asked you who are the most aggressive and violent people on the planet, who would you finger? The answer, according to a newspaper article titled The Most Violent People on Earth might surprise you. Violence and aggression are normally thought of as qualities of adults. But the article points to research that says babies and toddlers are by far the most aggressive and violent among us. That's the bad news. The good news is toddlers are too weak and uncoordinated to inflict much damage from their aggressive behavior.

The article cites research by Richard Tremblay from the University of Montreal, an world-class expert in human aggression studies. Tremblay began his studies focusing on violent criminals and young offenders. When he found his attempts at rehabilitation failing, he began to wonder where the trouble started for these people. He began to find earlier and earlier patterns.

In Montreal in 1982, he launched his first long-term study, this time on kindergarten students. Ten years later, he had found the signs of an unexpected pattern: Almost every subject had been more physically aggressive at 6 than they were at 16. But was that where it began? Next, he turned to newborns.

What Dr. Tremblay and his colleagues around the world have now demonstrated is that the ability to feel rage exists the moment human beings take their first breaths. A four-month-old infant can show anger. And as they gain more control over their arms and legs, their mothers report increasing incidents of kicking and biting: They can also act in anger

Fortunately, your typical baby or toddler doesn't have the strength and coordination to inflict much damage. (Otherwise the old Monty Python "Killer Babies" skit wouldn't seem so funny.) But still, the dramatic thing here is the sheer number of aggressive or violent incidents.

... according to Dr. Tremblay's work, a typical two-year-old, playing with others over the course of an hour, will commit one act of physical aggression for every four social interactions.

With teenagers, he says, researchers talk in terms of years or months or weeks between aggressive acts -- never hours -- though the incidents, obviously, are more severe. By their third birthdays, children have the motor skills to perform any of the acts of aggression an adult can

It's virtually a no-brainer to take the next step in logic here: To do OK in society, you need to learn to control the aggression and violence. This is where learning comes in, though the need seems to emerge much earlier than we might have thought. And there are biological factors at work as well.

While Dr. Tremblay was beginning to unravel the social roots of aggression, geneticists were pinpointing its biological source. That work has focused on the frontal lobes, particularly the prefrontal cortex -- the emotional circuitry of the brain that sits behind the forehead. This area is more highly evolved in humans than any other animal; without it, we wouldn't be much more than robots, reacting to stimulus by instinct, not thought.

Even with a compromised nervous system, learning has a very important role here, particularly among the very young. As with any learning, the context it's available in has a big impact. One promising thing from the article was a reference to touch as a positive thing here.

A Norwegian program has preschoolers giving each other back rubs because research suggests that affectionate touch deflects aggression.

I tried to find the research referred to on the web but didn't have any luck. But this touch thing seems to work in both the cognitive and affective realm. Touch of the right kind can impart a sense of deep sense of safety and allow the nervous system to drop (for the moment) its fierce sense of self-preservation. And that is a big thing at work here. According to Tremblay,

Aggressive behaviour, except in the rarest circumstances, is not acquired from life experience. It is a remnant of our evolutionary struggle to survive, a force we learn, with time and careful teaching, to master. And as if by some ideal plan, human beings are at their worst when they are at their weakest.