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.
Shock collar
Tortora applied a method called "safety training" to treat aggression in 36 cases exhibiting a form of "instrumental aggression", selected after screening a population of 476 cases. "Instrumental aggression" was defined as describing aggressive acts that "do not have a clear evolutionary significance, are not directly related to emotional arousal, do not have specific releasing stimuli, are not directly modulated by hormones, and do not have an identifiable focus in the brain". Tortora states that in the context of the article "instrumental aggression" was specifically defined as "aggressive responses that have "a specifiable learning history, show a growth function over time and are modulated by their consequences. These dogs had few operant alternatives to gain reinforcement by compliance and were channeled down a path that allowed their innate aggressiveness to come under the control of the negatively reinforcing contingencies in the environment". The dogs initially behaved as though they "expected" aversive events and that the only way to prevent these events was through aggression. The dogs were therefore a highly selected subset that had not learned strategies for coping with threat.