ABSTRACT

Over twenty years ago, Infante and Wigley (1986) defined verbal aggression as “attacking one’s self-concept instead of, or in addition to, one’s positions on a topic of communication” (p. 8). As this volume attests, verbal aggressiveness has attracted a huge amount of research over the past decades. One of the enduring theoretical questions concerns the possible causes of verbal aggressiveness. Two accounts dominated the literature for over ten years, one derived from the principles of social learning theory and the other attributing aggressive symbolic tactics to an argumentative skills deficit (for a review, see Wigley, 1998). However, the mounting literature in the fields of behavioral genetics, psychobiology, and cognitive neuroscience as well as the relatively low predictive power of models based on social learning theory and argumentative skills deficiency began redirecting theoretical attention to individual differences in verbal aggressiveness as an expression of mostly inborn, hardwired individual differences in neurobiological systems (e.g., Beatty & McCroskey, 1997). This chapter will present an empirical basis for a theory of verbal aggressiveness rooted in biological differences and contrast it with both social learning theory and the argumentative skills deficiency perspective.