Maternal Aggression

Abstract

This chapter explores evolutionary psychological (EP) perspectives on maternal aggression, focusing on physical aggression, both lethal and nonlethal. It argues that the psychological mechanisms underpinning such aggression held an adaptive function to our foremothers. If such mechanisms formerly did hold an adaptive function, then maternal aggression should not be expected to be a random event, nor necessarily caused by pathology. Rather, the risk factors and characteristic traits of maternal aggression should follow an ancestrally adaptive and evolutionary logic. In which case, it should be a predictable phenomenon on a societal level. And as the chapter presents, the theoretical understanding of maternal aggression that EP perspectives offer has allowed for the successful prediction of risk factors and characteristic traits for such aggression. The chapter reviews these risk factors and traits, along with the theoretical reasoning the predictions are based on and the cross-cultural empirical support for their existence.