Some Influences on Perception and Justification of Aggression in Themselves and in their Social Environment.
The authors of the present study attempt to increase the knowledge of how pre-adolescents and
adolescents perceive their own violence and those with whom they interact in their immediate
environment: friends, family, school, neighborhood and those with more extent, unspecific,
and global ranges, such as the city or the world.
In this way, by understanding their mental
perception of the violence in themselves and in their environments, parents and educators may
be more successful in their effort to teach teenagers about how to behave in a non-violent way.
Even if it has a strong relation to the objective world, it corresponds with its interaction with the neural activity of the central nervous system of each subject. This neural activity is unique to
each person because it informs about the Unwelt an environmental situation, specific to each
individual and occasion. This explains why Mountcastle said “in certain respect, we are living
amidst the world in the prison of our brain.”
Aggression should not be an exception to these assertions about perception. As any other behavior, aggression, far from being a static phenotype, is a flexible developmental process that reflects the neurobiological plasticity, open to any input experience. Even within the typical universal trends, there are specific human ways and individual differences in the display of these universals. For instance, some situations demand a more specific approach, like young man vs. adult man vs. old man, or any other situation, as its closeness to the subject.
Besides the individual psychobiological factors, we cannot forget the influence of our social context: family, peers and friends, school, and different levels of community as well as other socio-cultural factors on the perception and evaluation of an eventual risk, such as aggression might be.
