Negative Reinforcement

Something that made me angry in the past month was in regards to a trip that I was supposed to go on with my friend and her mom this Summer. We had to go to a travel agency in order to coordinate the trip and be able to put a down payment to secure our place. However, they would vacillate in the days we would be going to the travel agency and would always cancel. They would say we would go the next day, the day would come and the same thing would happen. I do not become angry often, but this became extremely frustrating because I change my plans during February break in order to accommodate the time to go with them to the travel agency. Frustrated, I eventually told them I would no longer go on the trip because they kept rescheduling when we would go, they had done something similar in the past, and I was afraid that in the future they would bail out from the trip, and I could lose my money. So I took cues from their past and current behaviors to predict a possible situation in the future. …show more content…
The trip would have been cheaper if three people would have gone, rather than two, so by me deciding not go anymore, they would have to pay more money. In this way, I engaged in instrumental aggression, as try hurting them as a means to some goal other than just causing pain. This situation is in line with frustration-aggression theory, as my perception of being prevented from attaining a goal (depositing the money to go on the trip), increased the probability of me having an aggressive response. I could have used some anger management techniques, like letting my friend and her mother know that since I was returning to college soon and I was planning what I was going to do with my Summer, I need to know whether I was going to need some time off or not. However, I did not do this because I was too overwhelmed and