Anke Köbach, Corina Nandi, Anselm Crombach, Manassé Bambonyé, Britta Westner, Thomas Elbert
Abstract
Research has identified appetitive aggression, i.e., the perception of committed, violent acts as appealing, exciting and fascinating, as a common phenomenon within populations living in precarious and violent circumstances. Investigating demobilized soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) demonstrated that violent offending is associated with appetitive aggression and not necessarily with symptoms of posttraumatic stress. In the present study, we sought to replicate these results in an independent and larger sample of demobilized soldiers from Burundi. As with the Congolese ex-combatants, random forest regression revealed that the number of lifetime perpetrated violent acts is the most important predictor of appetitive aggression and the number of lifetime experienced traumatic events is the main predictor for posttraumatic stress. Perpetrated violent acts with salient cues of hunting (pursuing the victim, the sight of blood, etc.) were most predictive for perceiving violent cues appealingly after demobilization. Moreover, the association of violent acts and appetitive aggression as well as traumatic events and posttraumatic stress remains strong even years after demobilization. Patterns of traumatic events and perpetrated acts as predictors for posttraumatic stress and appetitive aggression seem to be robust among different samples of ex-combatants who fought in civil wars. Psychotherapeutic interventions that address these complementary facets of combat-related disorders-namely, posttraumatic stress and appetitive aggression-are indispensable for a successful reintegration of those who fought in armed conflicts and to achieve a successful transition to peace.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 01 March 2018.
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#7,553,942
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Outputs from Frontiers in Psychology
#10,884
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Outputs of similar age
#117,534
of 392,187 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#181
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Altmetric has tracked 23,692,259 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 67th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 31,590 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.6. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 64% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 451 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 59% of its contemporaries.
