Some sources estimate that as many as 2 million women are beaten three or more times each year by a male partner. Because of the premise that thoughts drive behavior, a carefully designed study, Articulated Thoughts of Maritally Violent and Nonviolent Men During Anger Arousal, (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1997) compared maritally violent men with nonviolent men on cognitions, anger, and marital aggression. The findings present no surprises. When listening to audiotapes designed to arouse anger and sexual jealousy, maritally violent husbands articulated more hostile blaming biases and had fewer anger-controlling statements than nonviolent men.
A next step in such studies would be to explore the neurobiology of anger arousal by physiologic measures of heart rate, movement sweating, blood pressure and pulse during the experiment. Maritally violent men themselves describe the tension build up or moodiness and irritability phase, followed by the unleashing of aggression, ending with the apologies and attempts to make amends or promise to seek help. This is described by clinicians as the "cycle of violence." Scientists suggest the biology of aggression is a powerful reinforcing component of arousal anger as an explanation for the repetitive or cyclic nature of the behavior. In fact a recent study by Jacobson and Gottman labels and delineates two distinct types of batterers based on physiologic variables. The "cobras," or 20 percent of the men studied, who looked, sounded, and acted aggressively on video actually had a significant decrease in physiological measures of arousal. The "pit bulls," or 80 percent of the sample, were slow to show verbal aggression toward their wives but did so at a steady and increasing rate.
This study alerts us to a possible differential emotional state between subjects in the sample. Concerned about the "unpleasantness of anger arousal" and the affective state of the subjects, the researchers report that in the debriefing, six of the 31 men indicated an arousal state of five (out of 10) while 25 of the men indicated they did not feel more negative emotions than when they arrived.
It is not reported what the "five" represented as to affective state. The debriefing used words of upset and unpleasant to describe the audiotapes. It would be instructive to hear what word the men would use to describe their feelings after the 14-minute experiment.
