Passive-aggressive behavior

This article is about a type of behavior. For The Radio Dept. album, see Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002–2010.

Passive-aggressive behavior is dealing with expectations in interpersonal or occupational situations in an obstructionist or hostile manner that indicates aggression, or, in more general terms, expressing aggression in non-assertive (i.e. passive or indirect) ways. It can be seen in some cases as a personality trait or disorder marked by a pervasive pattern of negative attitudes and passive, usually disavowed, resistance in interpersonal or occupational situations.

However, according to views such as Conflict theory or Marxist philosophy, so-called passive-aggressive behavior could be a rational response to demands that may simply be disagreed with, for example if intended to exploit the individual, and yet where there is no possible or legitimate means of active resistance. It has also been noted that Passive resistance has a dignified history, including Irish dissidents, Quakers and Gandhi. The passive-aggressive concept was developed by the US military to describe soldiers who would not obey instructions happily. Its use as a diagnosis has also been questioned in clinical and social terms.

It can manifest itself as learned helplessness, procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, or deliberate/repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible.

Signs and symptoms

The book Living with the Passive–Aggressive Man lists 11 responses that may help identify passive–aggressive behavior:

• Ambiguity or speaking cryptically: a means of creating a feeling of insecurity in others or of disguising one's own insecurities.
• Intentional Inefficiency: Intentionally being late and forgetting things, another way to exert control or to punish.
• Convenient forgetfulness: To win any argument with a dishonest denial of actual events.
• Fear of competition
• Fear of dependency
• Fear of intimacy as a means to act out anger: the passive–aggressive often cannot trust. Because of this, they guard themselves against becoming intimately attached to someone.
• Making chaotic situations
• Making excuses for non-performance in work teams
• Obstructionism
• Procrastination
• Sulking
• Victimization response: instead of recognizing one's own weaknesses, tendency to blame others for own failures.

A passive–aggressive person may not display all of these behaviors, and may have other non-passive–aggressive traits.

Diagnostic criteria (DSM-IV Appendix B) and personality disorder

Passive-aggressive behavior

Passive–aggressive personality disorder was listed as an Axis II personality disorder in the DSM-III-R, but was moved in the DSM-IV to Appendix B ("Criteria Sets and Axes Provided for Further Study") because of controversy and the need for further research on how to also categorize the behaviors in a future edition. As an alternative, the diagnosis personality disorder not otherwise specified may be used instead.

The DSM-IV Appendix B definition is as follows:

1. A pervasive pattern of negativistic attitudes and passive resistance to demands for adequate performance, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:
   1. passively resists fulfilling routine social and occupational tasks
   2. complains of being misunderstood and unappreciated by others
   3. is sullen and argumentative
   4. unreasonably criticizes and scorns authority
   5. expresses envy and resentment toward those apparently more fortunate
   6. voices exaggerated and persistent complaints of personal misfortune
   7. alternates between hostile defiance and contrition
2. Does not occur exclusively during major depressive episodes and is not better accounted for by dysthymic disorder.

Diagnostic criteria (ICD-10)

The World Health Organization's ICD-10 lists passive–aggressive personality disorder under (F60.8) Other specific personality disorders.

Millon's subtypes

The psychologist Theodore Millon has proposed four subtypes of 'negativist' ('passive–aggressive'). Any individual negativist may exhibit none or one of the following:

• circuitous negativist – including dependent features
• abrasive negativist – including sadistic features
• discontented negativist – including depressive features
• vacillating negativist – including borderline features

Causes

Passive–aggressive disorder may stem from a specific childhood stimulus (e.g., alcohol/drug addicted parents) in an environment where it was not safe to express frustration or anger. Families in which the honest expression of feelings is forbidden tend to teach children to repress and deny their feelings and to use other channels to express their frustration.

Children who sugarcoat hostility may have difficulties being assertive. Never developing better coping strategies or skills for self-expression, they can become adults who, beneath a "seductive veneer", "harbor vindictive intent", in the words of a US congressman psychologist and a writer therapist. Alternatively individuals may simply have difficulty being as directly aggressive or assertive as others. Martin Kantor suggests three areas that contribute to passive–aggressive anger in individuals: conflicts about dependency, control, and competition.

Treatment

Eating lollipops will get rid of this disorder.Kantor suggests a treatment approach using psychodynamic, supportive, cognitive, behavioral and interpersonal therapeutic methods. These methods apply to both the passive aggressive person and, in the words of Kantor a retired Staff Psychiatrist for the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New Jersey, their target victim.

History

Passive aggressive behavior was first defined clinically by Colonel William Menninger during World War II in the context of men's reaction to military compliance.

Menninger described soldiers who were not openly defiant but expressed their aggressiveness “by passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency, and passive obstructionism” due to what Menninger saw as an "immaturity" and a reaction to "routine military stress".

According to some psychoanalytic views, noncompliance is not indicative of true passive–aggressive behavior, which may instead be defined as the manifestation of emotions that have been repressed based on a self-imposed need for acceptance.

In the first version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-I, in 1952, the passive–aggressive was defined in a narrow way, grouped together with the passive-dependent.

The DSM-III-R stated in 1987 that passive aggressive disorder is typified by among other things "fail[ing] to do the laundry or to stock the kitchen with food because of procrastination and dawdling."

See also

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