SEX-DIFFERENCES IN AGGRESSION - SOCIAL REPRESENTATION AND SOCIAL ROLES

Previous research suggests that men hold an instrumental social repres entation of aggression in which aggression is viewed as a functional i nterpersonal act aimed at imposing control over other people while wom en view aggression in expressive terms as a breakdown of self-control over anger. The present study examines the relative contribution of ge ndered personality differences (communality-agency) and occupational r ole in accounting for these differences. Men and women in the armed fo rces and nursing profession completed the Personal Attributes Question naire (PAQ: Spence & Helmreich, 1976) together with a psychometric mea sure of their tendency to view aggression as expressive rather than in strumental (Expagg: Campbell, Muncer & Coyle, 1992). The results indic ate that occupational role and sex are both important correlates of in dividuals' representations of aggression. Though agency showed a signi ficant negative zero-order correlation with expressive aggression, the impact of gendered personality traits was diminished when occupation and sex were taken into account. The data strongly support social role theory's emphasis upon contemporaneous occupational factors in explai ning sex differences in the understanding of aggression but are less s upportive of the role of masculine and feminine personality traits.