The General Aggression Model

- Person and situation factors affect feelings, thoughts, and arousal.
- Feelings, thoughts, and arousal influence appraisal and decision-making processes.
- Appraisal and decision-making processes affect aggressive or nonaggressive behavior.
- Biological and environmental factors influence aggression as well.
- The General Aggression Model has been applied to many domains.

The General Aggression Model (GAM) is a comprehensive, integrative, framework for understanding aggression. It considers the role of social, cognitive, personality, developmental, and biological factors on aggression. Proximate processes of GAM detail how person and situation factors influence cognitions, feelings, and arousal, which in turn affect appraisal and decision processes, which in turn influence aggressive or nonaggressive behavioral outcomes. Each cycle of the proximate processes serves as a learning trial that affects the development and accessibility of aggressive knowledge structures. Distal processes of GAM detail how biological and persistent environmental factors can influence personality through changes in knowledge structures. GAM has been applied to understand aggression in many contexts including media violence effects, domestic violence, intergroup violence, temperature effects, pain effects, and the effects of global climate change.