Sport and Aggressive Behavior

Envision the best collegiate football player you know. There’s a good chance his fame is attributed to how aggressive he is, praised for his no-mercy attitude. While this mentality suits the field, it can translate onto college campuses, where many student-athletes are recruited to play for the school. A case study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania revealed that certain environments encourage aggression over others. Societies with higher levels of male dominance, tolerance of violence, and greater gender segregation tended to fall into this category. Now recall that collegiate football player. Sound familiar?

According to Boys to Men: Sports Media by Children Now, a national child advocacy, they proposed that “98% of U.S. boys through the ages of 8 to 17 consume some form of sports related media everyday” (2). Our sport programmers display and commend aggressive athletic behaviors to be the most exhilarating part in a sport (3). Many of the violent acts are praised and given credit when a recap occurs to show fans the significant moments that happened during the game. When recapping a moment, sport commentators emphasize these violent plays and use “language of war and weaponry” to describe what is going on (4). Boys often look up to this image of being masculine through speed, danger, and aggression to be normal (Messer, Hunt, Dunbar 10). It has become a norm for athletes to put their life at risk by using aggression in order to meet the expectations of being a winner in

Aggression is something that is seen in all walks of life being that it's one of the defining characteristics humans have in common with other species within the animal kingdom. It is both an emotional reaction intending to harm- an act of hostility, and, a means of maintaining social order. Just as animals compete over food, mates and homes, to establish their superiority, human beings mainly young males in particular fight for respect, resources and acceptance as partners in relationships pursuing these goals by boasting, bragging, showing off and humiliating other competing males. There are a number of psychological theories and models that have been advanced to explain aggression. In the main they fall under two broad categories.

Youth sports today is becoming more violent due to the emotional attachment parents have to their kids and their relationship with them to sports. Parents in youth sports tend to identify themselves as a team member. Parents

In order to eradicative any negative connotations associated with sports, should all violent aspects of

It is not clear if on-field violent behavior leads to off-field violence. It would be somewhat logical to assume that people who become accustomed to using physical intimidation and violence in sport naturally revert to those behaviors when facing conflict outside of sport. However, sport may not be the cause of violence, but rather a result of the athletes’ upbringing or natural disposition, which led them to choose a violent sport to begin with. Drug and alcohol use should also be noted, since they and not sport may be the cause of violence. Alcohol consumption and binge drinking add to the problem of

To understand what the public believes on violence in sports, a survey was conducted among American youths ages 13 to 17 in October of 2000. The Gallup Youth Survey showed that 63 percent of teens said there was too much violence in hockey. In comparison, 41 percent said football was too violent, 25 percent said basketball was too violent, and 17 percent said baseball was too violent. One question that remains though is how does one qualify violence. A study completed in December 2000 by the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Research tried to do just that. According to the test analysis, 1.69 "acts of aggression" occurred in hockey for every aggressive act in basketball, the only other sport in the study (Grant).

According to Hollingdale and Greitemeyer (2014), Video games that are violent are identified as very popular games that are played by the consumers. There is a concern that violent video games may pose a public health risk due to the levels of aggression due to the effects of the video games. In a cross sectional studies it has been found that there is a positive correlations with real life and video game aggression. Also in longitudinal studies shows that playing violent video games constantly it can predict that there may be later aggression even after controlling for initial levels of aggression. Experimental studies have showed that playing the video game is a factor of an increase level of

In 2002, Thomas Junta was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after he attacked Michael Costin, who later died of his injuries. Mr. Costin was refereeing a pickup game of hockey. The fight was witnessed by a dozen children including the children of both Mr. Junta and Mr. Costin (Butterfield, 2002). While this is by far one of the worst incidents in sports rage, there are other types of behavior that can still harm our youth. Physical violence is often a rare occurrence; verbal abuse and intimidation have been seen frequently. When a parents scream at their child after practice that he/she did not run fast enough or hit hard enough, can be considered a form of verbal abuse. Also consider when a parent of one child screams at the team for not performing well and not winning the game, this combined with swearing can reduce a child to tears. Daniel Wann, PhD states that if a

The first article read that discusses the topic of structured recess for this literature review was Behavioral School Psychology Goes Outdoors: The Effect of Organized Games on Playground Aggression written by H. Murphy, J. Hutchison, and J. Bailey from Florida State University. While conducting this research project, there was a focus placed on the inappropriate, largely aggressive behavior of the students on the playground prior to the beginning of the school day. In this quantitative research study, the researchers studied the behavior of 344 k-2 students while on the playground before the beginning of the school day. It was observed that the students were very aggressive with each other during the time they were on the playground before the start of the school day. The purpose of this study was to see if “When dealing with large groups, antecedent environmental manipulation may be more practical than providing consequences for the behavior exhibited by identified individuals” (Murphy, Hutchison, & Bailey, n.d.).

A common theme I noticed within the readings, videos, and discussions this week is idea of deviance in sport. After watching Dr. Kent’s video about violence in sport, I feel that athletes can potentially develop a violent behavior based on the environment they are exposed to. For example, in past discussions, I learned that some people feel that football players are more likely to be abusive due to the fact they are highly aggressive on the field. Boxers and MMA fighters are looked at similarly, therefore many parents do not want their children to look up to these athletes. Also, it was mentioned this week how domestic violence is the number one crime committed by athletes. Although some athletes convey this deviant behavior outside of the sport, I feel that the sport organizations have been trying to regulate these combat sports while also helping bring awareness to the issues of domestic violence and

Kids who play competitive sports can also experience unsportsmanlike behaviors such as yelling, cursing, and violence.Writer, Leaf Group. "The Disadvantages of Children in Sports." Back. Azcentral.com, 26 June 2012. Web. 18 Apr.

When someone experiences anger, there body goes through a series of steps to produced the emotion. The first step begins in the amygdala; it sends out a signal that alerts someone when they are in danger. This happens naturally without anyone having to think about it. The brain does not have time to process enough information in the cortex to decide whether the threat is pertinent. The second step involves the muscles in the body tensing up, and someone experiencing a sudden increase in energy. Adrenal gland release adrenaline and someone's body becomes focused on the instigator of their anger. Luckily, someone's prefrontal cortex controls the person's reasoning and makes the final decision on what to do when they are angry. Just as the body takes steps to become angry, it takes steps to calm down. Someone starts to calm down when the instigator is no longer present. Even with the instigator no longer present, someone can still be easily angered because the body has adrenaline present in its system, and it can take days for them to go back to

Yet the literature supports possible reasons for why violent crime occurs, since participating in athletics is just their profession. It is suggested that people who become accustomed to using physical intimidation and violence in sport naturally revert to those behaviors when facing conflict outside of sport (Woods, 2016). However, athletes who do respond physically may be simply reflecting cultural upbringing that was established outside of sport. Sport may not be the cause of violence, but rather a result of the athletes’ upbringing or natural disposition, which led them to choose a violent sport. Rather than rely on information from the media, solid data such as rates of occurrence to compare with the data for other groups of people need to be discovered. In addition, drugs and alcohol must also be considered plausible factors of violence. We need to address this issue as a society and take steps to prevent violence (Hughes,

Participation in rough-and-tumble sports can increase aggressive behavior. Jeffrey Goldstein wrote his encyclopedic review Aggression and Crimes of Violence, he concluded that participation in athletic activities has a measurable effect on aggressive behavior, increasing it in proportion to the level of aggression contained within the particular sport engaged in. Contact sports like hockey, football, basketball, rugby, and soccer pose a greater risk than non contact sports like tennis and golf. Aggression is contagious. This has led to the constant debate within educational, mental health, and coaching circles about how to prevent this type of aggression in the first place or, if that fails, how to contain it when it does occur.