Intellectual functioning and aggression

In a 22-year study, data were collected on aggressiveness and intellectual functioning in more than 600 subjects, their parents, and their children. Both aggression and intellectual functioning are rea-sonably stable in a subject's lifetime and perpetuate themselves across generations and within mar-riage pairs. Aggression in childhood was shown to interfere with the development of intellectual functioning and to be predictive of poorer intellectual achievement as an adult. Early 1Q was related to early subject aggression but did not predict changes in aggression after age 8. On the other hand, differences between early IQ and intellectual achievement in middle adulthood were predictable from early aggressive behavior. A dual-process model was offered to explain the relation between intellectual functioning and aggressive behavior. We hypothesized that low intelligence makes the learning of aggressive responses more likely at an early age, and this aggressive behavior makes con-tinued intellectual development more difficult. Aggression has been demonstrated to be a reasonably stable characteristic from childhood to middle adulthood (Eron