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Toward a Conceptual Model of Motive and Self-Control in Cyber-Aggression: Rage, Revenge, Reward, and Recreation

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Abstract

Despite widespread public attention to cyberbullying, online aggression and victimization have received scant conceptual development. This article focuses on how opportunities for aggression are distinct online from those of offline social contexts. The model developed here is informed by a recent aggression typology, which extends the reactive–proactive distinction by distinguishing aggression based on the affective motive (appetitive vs. reactive) and the recruitment of self-control. This typology informs an analysis of psychological processes linked to individual differences that are relevant to adolescents’ aggressive activities. Processes implicated include hostile schema activation, anger and fatigue effects on self-control, anger rumination, empathic failure, excitation transfer, and thrill-seeking. With these processes established, the proposed model focuses on how features of online social platforms may afford opportunities for distinct types of aggression by engaging these processes in adolescent users. Features of online settings that present distinct opportunities for activation of these processes are reviewed for each process, including social cue ambiguity, temporal lag, cue permanence, anonymity, the continual perception of audience, and the availability of online gaming and online pornography. For each of the conceptually grounded cyber-aggression-relevant processes, implications for innovative research directions on adolescent cyber-aggression are presented.

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Notes

  1. This article retains the widely-used term reactive to describe aggression motivated by anger-driven responses to (perceived) provocation, rather than the more general term aversive, as the former better captures the specific role of perceived provocation in motivating aggression. The term appetitive is adopted rather than proactive as the former term captures the role of positively-valenced affective reward, and the latter term conflates the role of self-control and motive.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Roger Levesque and the reviewers for their valuable feedback on this manuscript, to Jennifer Halbert for her assistance, and to Varnya Bromilow for her invaluable support.

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  1. Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies, University of Victoria, PO Box 3010, Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4, Canada

    Kevin C. Runions

  2. Child Health Promotion Research Centre, Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, Australia

    Kevin C. Runions

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Runions, K.C. Toward a Conceptual Model of Motive and Self-Control in Cyber-Aggression: Rage, Revenge, Reward, and Recreation. J Youth Adolescence 42, 751–771 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-013-9936-2

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