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14.3.4 Situational Causes of Aggression :
 
Heat (Temperature) and Alcohol :
 
There are many Situational factors that influence aggressive 
behavior. Situational forces refers to the context in which the 

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aggression occurs and weather it is viewed as acceptable in a 
given culture or not. There are many situational factors that 
influence aggression. The two most important situational factors 
that can influence aggression are as follows: 
Heat 
(Temperature) 
Alcohol 
We would now briefly discuss these two situational causes of 
aggression. 
 
a) 
Heat (Temperature) : Social psychological researchers 
have found a close connection between temperature (heat) and 
aggression. Some earliest classic studies in this area was 
conducted in the 1970s by Baron (1972) and his associates (Baron 
and Lawton, 1972). Their results indicated that heat increases 
aggression, but only up to a point. Beyond some level, people 
become so uncomfortable that they lack the energy for engaging in 
aggression or any other kind of vigorous activity. Paul Bell and 
Baron (1975) have presented a negative affect escape model to 
explain this phenomenon. According to them aggression did 
increase as temperatures rose in to the mid-80s Fahrenheit, but 
then dropped off at higher levels. Recently Anderson, Bushman 
and Groom (1997) obtained correlation between temperature and 
violent crimes. These researchers collected average annual 
temperatures for 50 cities in the USA over a 45-year period (1950 –
1995). In addition, they obtained information on the rate of both 
violent crimes (aggravated assault, homicide, etc.) and property 
crimes (burglary, car theft, etc.) as well as another crime that has 
been often viewed as primarily aggressive in nature: Rape. They 
then performed analysis to determine whether temperature was 
related to these crimes. Results indicated that the hotter years did 
indeed produce higher rates of violent crimes, but that they did not 
produce increase in property crimes or rape. This was true, even 
when the effect of many other variables that might also influence 
aggressive crimes (e.g. poverty, age distribution of the population, 
etc.) was eliminated. These findings and those of related studies 
(e.g. Anderson, Anderson and Deuser, 1996), suggest that heat is 
indeed linked to aggression. 
Recent research by Rotton and Cohn, (2000), has revealed 
that the relationship between heat and Aggression is curvilinear. 
These researchers found that in two large U.S. cities, the incidence 
of violent assaults rose with increasing temperatures, but only up to 
a point; beyond this level, as temperature continued to rise, the 
incidence of assaults actually dropped.