Aggression
Some scholars believe that behaviors like aggression may be partially learned by watching and imitating people's behavior, while other researchers have concluded that the media may have some small effects on aggression. There is also research questioning this view. For instance, a long-term outcome study of youth found no long-term relationship between playing violent video games and youth violence or bullying. One study suggested there is a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression than has been found with television violence on aggression. This effect is positively associated with type of game violence and negatively associated to time spent playing the games. The author concluded that insufficient evidence exists to link video game violence with aggression. However, another study suggested links to aggressive behavior.
Aggression
Aggression can have adaptive benefits or negative effects. Aggressive behavior is an individual or collective social interaction that is a hostile behavior with the intention of inflicting damage or harm. Two broad categories of aggression are commonly distinguished. One includes affective (emotional) and hostile, reactive, or retaliatory aggression that is a response to provocation, and the other includes instrumental, goal-oriented or predatory, in which aggression is used as a mean to achieve a goal. An example of hostile aggression would be a person who punches someone who insulted him or her. An instrumental form of aggression would be armed robbery. Research on violence from a range of disciplines lend some support to a distinction between affective and predatory aggression. However, some researchers question the usefulness of a hostile versus instrumental distinction in humans, despite its ubiquity in research, because most real-life cases involve mixed motives and interacting causes.