RT Journal Article
T1 The pleasure of aggressiveness among inmates in preventive and longTerm detention
A1 Cabanac, Michel
A1 Ramirez, J. Martin
A1 Millana Cuevas, Luis Clemente
A1 Toldos Romero, María Paz
A1 Bonniot-Cabanac, Marie-Claude
AB To a large degree, humans use pleasure (hedonicity) maximization to guide decision making, thereby optimizing their behaviour, as shown by research on either sensory or purely mental pleasure (e.g., pleasure from video-game playing or mathematical problem-solving). Our group has now found that pleasure determines decision making in situations of interpersonal aggression, i.e., people tend to behave aggressively in proportion to the resulting pleasure. In the present study, two groups of inmates in a Spanish prison were compared: those serving long sentences and those being held in preventive detention. All participants answered self-administered questionnaires that had been devised to examine how hedonicity influences decision making in the case of aggressive behaviour. The questionnaires described social conflict situations and offered four options ranging from a passive response to a highly aggressive response. Previous research showed similar results between inmates serving long terms and a non-delinquent population, even though the degree of hedonicity was higher in the inmates: increasingly aggressive behavior is increasingly pleasurable to the aggressor, but only up to a certain level.. In contrast, this paper shows that inmates in preventive detention did not rate any of the aggressive responses as pleasant. Such a difference was present in males only and may have been caused by a desire for social acceptance.
PB Bentham Science Publishers
SN 1874-9178
YR 2008
FD 2008
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/52977
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/52977
LA eng
DS Docta Complutense
RD 3 may 2024