Reactive, Emotional Violence and Predatory, Cold, Instrumental Violence

Violence, for some, a behavior different from aggression or aggressive behavior, constitutes one of the leading social, human, and public health problems. Aggression, understood as an innate behavior that leads an organism to cause harm to another, can occur intraspecifically (towards individuals of the same species or group) and interspecifically. It is also important to clarify that violence can occur reactively as a response to an internal or external stimulus or as the result of a cold, premeditated plan. The former is associated with neuropsychological deficits, and the latter may be associated, on the contrary, with good cortical functioning that controls subcortical impulses, ensuring that the violent action occurs in a controlled and regulated manner by the individual, notwithstanding the levels of cruelty that it may entail, as in the case of armed actors in wars, as in the Colombian conflict, in which there have been many psychopathic crimes, which however seem to be mainly due to processes of moral disconnection and not to neuropsychological or psychopathological problems.