NCJ Number
223709
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 14 Issue: 6 Dated: June 2008 Pages: 612-633
Date Published
June 2008
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This study measured the perception of emotional versus physical aggression.
Abstract
The findings suggest that people do not perceive emotional aggression to be nearly as harmful as it actually is. Results showed that participants did not perceive the perpetrator's behavior in the emotional aggression condition to be any worse than the verbal aggression condition and, in most cases, no worse than the baseline condition. More traditional participants and participants who were perpetrators of psychological aggression had more positive perceptions of the perpetrator; just world beliefs and participant sex did not predict perceptions. The work sought to determine if emotionally aggressive conflicts were perceived to be more unacceptable than conflicts involving verbal or baseline levels of psychological aggression, and to examine individual differences in perceptions of psychologically aggressive conflicts. One hundred eighty nine participants (109 females and 80 males) from a large midwestern university read a hypothetical marital conflict that varied the husband's level of aggression. The study was a between-subjects experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to read the scenarios in which three levels of physical aggression (absent, low and high) were crossed with three levels of psychological aggression (baseline, verbal and emotional). Tables, references