Reactive and Proactive Aggression in Daily Life: An Exploratory Experience-Sampling Method Study

Trait aggression is often separated into two functional dimensions: reactive and proactive tendencies. Reactive aggression is the tendency to engage in emotionally driven aggressive responses to perceived provocation, whereas proactive aggression is the tendency to engage in premeditated aggressive behaviors in the service of goal attainment. To date, the majority of empirical investigations examining these interrelated constructs have done so using cross-sectional data that have important limitations (e.g., recall bias). In the current study, we used an experience-sampling approach to investigate similarities and differences in reactive and proactive aggression's relations with affective and interpersonal constructs in a sample of 477 US undergraduate students. Our results indicated that baseline reactive and proactive aggression scores were predictive of aggression-related behavior, cognition, and affect in real-world dyadic encounters. Additionally, although reactive aggression showed stronger relations with investigated maladaptive outcomes (e.g., negative affectivity, lack of interpersonal warmth), profile similarity analyses indicated that these trait aggression dimensions shared substantial overlap in their nomological nets.