Frustration

Abstract

Frustration, which MeSH classifies under emotions, is the motivational and affective state produced when goal-directed activity is blocked or an expected reward is withheld. Psychology has studied it along three lines: as the trigger of aggression, in the frustration-aggression hypothesis and its reformulation; as the aversive consequence of surprising reward omission, in frustration theory and its comparative successors; and, more recently, as a laboratory probe of the brain systems that turn thwarted motivation into vigorous and sometimes hostile action. The construct now organises the clinical study of irritability in children, where exaggerated responses to frustration define a dimension of psychopathology. This article defines frustration as an event and as a reaction, reviews the aggression and reward-omission traditions, summarises the neural evidence, and traces the route from frustration intolerance to pathological irritability.

Keywords: frustration, frustration-aggression hypothesis, frustrative nonreward, reward omission, irritability

Frustration names two things at once: the circumstance in which a goal is blocked, and the state that circumstance produces. Mammalian studies show that frustration is experienced when goal-directed activity is blocked, and despite its strongly negative role in health, aggression and social relationships, its neural mechanisms were until recently not well understood (Yu et al., 2014). The construct matters to cognitive psychology because it sits where motivation meets emotion. A thwarted goal is a cognitive event, a discrepancy between an expected and an obtained outcome, and the response to it is an emotional one that can energise behaviour or redirect it toward harm. Frustration is also one of the oldest experimental manipulations in the study of aggression, and one of the newest tools in developmental psychiatry.

What Frustration Is

The MeSH thesaurus, which indexes the medical literature, defines frustration as the motivational and/or affective state resulting from being blocked, thwarted, disappointed or defeated, and files it under emotions. The research literature keeps the two halves of that definition apart. In the aggression tradition, frustration is typically understood as an event instead of an emotion, and the basic assumption of frustration-aggression theory is that this event increases the tendency to act or react aggressively (Breuer & Elson, 2017). In the reward-learning tradition the term names the reaction: a surprising reward omission occurs when an appetitive reinforcer is not presented, or is reduced in magnitude or quality, even though there are signals for its impending presentation (Papini & Dudley, 1997), and the aversive state that follows is the frustration.

A useful way to hold the two together comes from the neuroscience of reward omission. Psychological considerations suggest that the omission of rewards in humans comprises two effects: an allocentric effect that triggers learning and behavioural change and is potentially processed by dopaminergic neurons according to prediction-error theory, and an egocentric effect that represents the individual's emotional reaction, commonly called frustration (Abler et al., 2005). The first effect is information: the world was not as expected, and the expectation is updated. The second is affect: the thwarted organism feels something, and what it feels drives what it does next. Most of what follows concerns the second effect, which is where frustration becomes a topic for the psychology of emotion rather than only for the psychology of learning.

Frustration and Aggression

The frustration-aggression hypothesis is one of the most seminal theories in aggression research; since it was first formulated in the late 1930s it has been applied and studied in psychology, ethnology, sociology, and criminology (Breuer & Elson, 2017). Its original statement was uncompromising: the authors postulated that aggression is always a consequence of frustration, indicated manifestations of this sequence in almost every field of human behavior, and interpreted aggression as assuming many forms and as being affected by other psychological factors (Dollard et al., 1939). One of the five authors revisited the hypothesis two years later (Miller, 1941), and there have since been several reformulations, additions, and changes (Breuer & Elson, 2017).

The reformulation came half a century after the original. Berkowitz examined the Dollard et al. (1939) hypothesis and found that the original formulation's main proposition is limited to interference with an expected attainment of a desired goal on hostile, that is emotional, aggression, that although some studies have yielded negative results, others support the core proposition, and that frustrations can create aggressive inclinations even when they are not arbitrary or aimed at the subject personally (Berkowitz, 1989). His proposed revision of the 1939 model holds that frustrations generate aggressive inclinations to the degree that they arouse negative affect, a view that is summarised in his cognitive-neoassociationistic model (Berkowitz, 1989). Interpretations and attributions, on this account, can be understood partly in terms of the original analysis, but they can also influence the unpleasantness of the thwarting (Berkowitz, 1989). Frustration, in other words, is one aversive event among many, and it is the aversiveness rather than the thwarting as such that does the work.

The reformulation also changes what counts as evidence. If aggressive inclinations track the unpleasantness of the thwarting rather than the thwarting as such, then how a frustration is interpreted should matter to its consequences, which is what the finding that interpretations and attributions can influence the unpleasantness of the thwarting delivers (Berkowitz, 1989). A graded effect of appraisal is what the negative-affect account requires and what an all-or-none account cannot accommodate.

Figure 1

From the 1939 Hypothesis to the Negative-Affect Reformulation

A substantial proportion of the research since has dealt with identifying boundary conditions, moderators and mediators of the causal path from frustration to aggression, and irrespective of these refinements there is ample empirical evidence for the existence of the effect; despite a decline in the overall number of publications that refer to it, the theory has recently found novel applications in areas such as media psychology (Breuer & Elson, 2017). The hypothesis survives, then, not as the law its authors first stated but as a well-supported tendency with known conditions. It is also no longer the only account of aggression in play: a review that listed cognitive neoassociation, social learning, social interaction, script and excitation transfer theories as the major domain-limited theories of aggression argued that the field had progressed to a point at which a unifying framework was needed, and proposed the general aggression model, in which cognition, affect and arousal mediate the effects of situational and personological variables on aggression (Anderson & Bushman, 2002).

Frustrative Nonreward

The second tradition approaches frustration from the laboratory of learning rather than of aggression. In two theoretical papers, Amsel developed frustration theory, placing frustrative nonreward at the centre of accounts of partial reinforcement and discrimination learning (Amsel, 1958; Amsel, 1962). It was not the only account of partial reinforcement on offer: a rival hypothesis explained the same effects as sequential effects (Capaldi, 1966). The core idea is that the omission of an expected reward is not a neutral absence but an active, aversive state with measurable physiological and behavioural consequences (Papini & Dudley, 1997).

The empirical base for this view is wide. Evidence reviewed in support of the hypothesis that surprising reward omissions produce an aversive emotional reaction with physiological and behavioral consequences shows that such omissions are followed by pituitary-adrenal activation; changes in immune function; odor emissions in rodents; distress vocalizations in rodents and primates; and increases in locomotion, aggressive behavior, drinking, and eating (Papini & Dudley, 1997). Surprising reward omissions can also support the acquisition of new escape responses and invigorate previously acquired responses (Papini & Dudley, 1997). The list is instructive: a thwarted animal shows a stress response, signals distress, becomes more active and more aggressive, and will learn to escape the situation. Frustration, on this evidence, behaves like a punisher that happens to be the absence of a reward.

The comparative programme has since reframed frustrative nonreward as a form of pain. Three types of pain can be distinguished: physical pain, an aversive state related to actual or potential injury and disease; social pain, an aversive emotion associated to social exclusion; and psychological pain, a negative emotion induced by incentive loss (Papini et al., 2015). Psychological pain is studied in nonhuman animals with two procedures involving incentive loss, successive negative contrast, the unexpected devaluation of a reward, and appetitive extinction, the unexpected omission of a reward, and the evidence points to substantial commonalities, but also some differences and interactions, between physical and psychological pains (Papini et al., 2015). The claim that losing a reward hurts, in a sense continuous with bodily injury, is a modern statement of what frustration theory implied.

The Neural Signature of Frustration

Human imaging has located both of the effects of reward omission. In a study of the omission of monetary reward with functional magnetic resonance imaging, the contrast of omission relative to receipt of reward led to a decrease in ventral striatal activation, consistent with prediction-error theory, while increased activation for this contrast was found in areas previously related to emotional pain, the right anterior insula and the right ventral prefrontal cortex, which the authors interpreted as a neural correlate of the egocentric effect (Abler et al., 2005). The striatal dip is the allocentric signal, the update; the insular and prefrontal rise is the frustration.

A later study varied how much frustration a blocked reward produced. Levels of experienced frustration were parametrically varied by manipulating participants' motivation to obtain the reward prior to blocking, through their proximity to the reward and the amount of effort expended in attempting to acquire it; in the first experiment, proximity and expended effort independently enhanced participants' self-reported desire to obtain the reward, and their self-reported frustration and response vigor, measured as key-press force, following blocking (Yu et al., 2014). In the second experiment, both proximity and expended effort modulated brain responses to blocked reward in regions implicated in animal models of reactive aggression, including the amygdala, midbrain periaqueductal grey, insula and prefrontal cortex, and the authors suggested that frustration may serve an energizing function, translating unfulfilled motivation into aggressive-like surges via a cortical, amygdala and periaqueductal grey network (Yu et al., 2014). The finding brings the two older traditions together: a blocked reward, the nonreward theory's manipulation, recruited regions implicated in animal models of reactive aggression.

Table 1. Human imaging findings on frustration, blocked reward and irritability, as reported in the cited abstracts.

Note. Each row lists only the regions named in that paper's abstract (Abler et al., 2005; Yu et al., 2014; Tseng et al., 2019; Kircanski et al., 2018).

Frustration Intolerance and Irritability

If frustration is an event everyone meets, individuals differ in how badly they bear it, and that difference has a clinical name. Frustration intolerance beliefs are hypothesised by rational-emotive behaviour therapy to form one of two major categories of psychological disturbance, along with beliefs about self-worth, and a multidimensional measure, the Frustration Discomfort Scale, was developed from that theory; exploratory factor analysis indicated four dimensions, emotional intolerance, involving intolerance of emotional distress, entitlement, involving intolerance of unfairness and frustrated gratification, discomfort intolerance, involving intolerance of difficulties and hassles, and achievement, involving intolerance of frustrated achievement goals, with the revised scale showing good internal reliability and evidence of discriminative validity (Harrington, 2005). The scale turns frustration from a situation into a disposition: a person can be measured on how much thwarting they believe they can stand.

In children the disposition becomes a diagnostic question. Irritability is a common and impairing clinical presentation in children and adolescents, and chronic and severe irritability is the primary symptom of the DSM-5 diagnosis disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, although questions regarding the validity of that diagnosis have been raised; irritability is also a trait distributed continuously in youth, fitting the National Institute of Mental Health Research Domain Criteria initiative (Brotman et al., 2017). The category grew out of an argument about whether chronically irritable children were bipolar. Severe mood dysregulation was defined to capture children with severe, nonepisodic irritability and the hyperarousal symptoms characteristic of mania but who lack the well-demarcated periods of elevated or irritable mood characteristic of bipolar disorder; longitudinal data indicate that nonepisodic irritability in youths is common and is associated with an elevated risk for anxiety and unipolar depressive disorders, but not bipolar disorder, in adulthood, and youths in both groups experience more frustration than normally developing children (Leibenluft, 2011). The position of irritability in DSM-5 was debated as the manual was being drafted, with research showing its differentially strong relationship to depressive and generalised anxiety disorders compared with disruptive behaviours (Stringaris, 2011).

A systematic review and meta-analysis of the measurement literature addressed several of these questions. Irritability forms a distinct dimension with substantial stability across time, it is specifically associated with depression and anxiety in longitudinal studies, it is moderately heritable with its overlap with depression explained mainly by genetic factors, and youth with persistent irritability exhibit altered activations in the amygdala, striatum, and frontal regions compared with age-matched healthy volunteers (Vidal-Ribas et al., 2016). Because youths with irritability exhibit exaggerated responses to frustrating stimuli, frustration itself became the experimental probe. In a transdiagnostic sample of 195 youths, a cued-attention task differentiated neural activity in response to frustration, delivered as rigged feedback, from activity during attention orienting in the trial following frustration; irritability was positively associated with frontal-striatal activation, specifically in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, and caudate, and in some frontal and posterior regions higher irritability was more strongly related to increased activation in younger than in older youths (Tseng et al., 2019). A companion study used a bifactor model to separate irritability from the anxiety that so often accompanies it: when the task required attention away from threat, higher parent-reported irritability was associated with increased activity in the insula, caudate, dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and inferior parietal lobule, whereas higher anxiety was associated with decreased amygdala connectivity, a double dissociation that did not emerge using a diagnostic approach (Kircanski et al., 2018). Frustration, one of the oldest manipulations in aggression research, has become an experimental probe of irritability in children.

Worked Example

The irritability imaging studies report their samples and effects in forms that repay a little arithmetic. The frustration-paradigm study describes a transdiagnostic sample of 195 youths made up of 52 with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, 42 with an anxiety disorder, 40 with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 61 healthy volunteers (Tseng et al., 2019). The four groups sum to 52 + 42 + 40 + 61 = 195, so the healthy volunteers were 61/195 = 31% of the sample and the three clinical groups together 69%. The design is transdiagnostic by construction: irritability was measured as a continuous score in every participant rather than inferred from which group they sat in.

The same study reports that age moderated the association between irritability and activation in several regions with partial eta squared between 0.09 and 0.13 (Tseng et al., 2019). Partial eta squared is the share of the unexplained variance accounted for by the effect, and it converts to Cohen's f by f = √(η²/(1 − η²)). For η² = 0.09 that gives f = √(0.09/0.91) = √0.0989 = 0.314; for η² = 0.13 it gives f = √(0.13/0.87) = √0.1494 = 0.387. Both fall in the range conventionally described as medium to large, which is why an age moderation found in a sample of this size is treated as a substantive developmental result rather than a statistical curiosity.

The bifactor study reports 197 participants, of whom 141 were youth with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, an anxiety disorder, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and 56 were healthy, with a mean age of 13.1 years and 91 females (Kircanski et al., 2018). The two groups sum to 141 + 56 = 197, and 91/197 = 0.462, the 46.2% the abstract reports. Its reported irritability effects are t values of at least 4.15 on 189 degrees of freedom (Kircanski et al., 2018). A t of 4.15 on 189 degrees of freedom corresponds to a correlation of r = t/√(t² + df) = 4.15/√(17.22 + 189) = 4.15/14.36 = 0.29, a moderate association between parent-reported irritability and activity in the regions named, computed at the whole-brain threshold the study used.

Discussion

Three lessons follow for cognitive psychology. First, frustration shows how an informational event becomes an emotional one. The omission of an expected reward carries an allocentric prediction-error signal that updates learning and an egocentric signal that is felt, and the two have separable neural correlates (Abler et al., 2005).

Second, the history of the frustration-aggression hypothesis is a model of how a strong claim is kept by being weakened. The 1939 postulate that aggression is always a consequence of frustration (Dollard et al., 1939) did not survive, but the reformulated claim that frustrations generate aggressive inclinations to the degree that they arouse negative affect (Berkowitz, 1989) did, and it is the version with which the imaging of blocked reward is consistent, since the regions recruited are those implicated in animal models of reactive aggression (Yu et al., 2014).

Third, frustration is the construct through which developmental psychiatry has rebuilt irritability as a dimension. Youths with severe, nonepisodic irritability experience more frustration than typically developing children and are at risk for depression and anxiety rather than bipolar disorder (Leibenluft, 2011), irritability is stable, heritable and shows altered activations relative to healthy youth (Vidal-Ribas et al., 2016), and a latent-variable analysis of threat orienting now separates it from the anxiety it travels with (Kircanski et al., 2018). What began as a manipulation has become a measurement.

Current Directions

The research front is clinical and developmental. Irritability is distributed continuously in youth and fits the National Institute of Mental Health Research Domain Criteria initiative, and the agenda now includes clarifying its definitions with translational animal work, charting its prevalence and longitudinal course, and exploring treatment options (Brotman et al., 2017). Because irritable youths exhibit exaggerated responses to frustrating stimuli, rigged-feedback tasks delivered under functional MRI are being used to map the frontal-striatal systems that mediate attention orienting, top-down regulation of emotion and motor execution after a frustration, with dysfunction in the anterior cingulate cortex and posterior regions more pronounced in younger children (Tseng et al., 2019). The companion finding that data-driven phenotyping yields a double dissociation between irritability and anxiety that diagnostic categories miss (Kircanski et al., 2018) points toward dimensional rather than categorical targets for treatment.

On the comparative side, the framing of incentive loss as psychological pain, studied through successive negative contrast and appetitive extinction and related to behavioral, pharmacological, neurobiological and genetic factors (Papini et al., 2015), is drawing the frustration literature into the study of pain more broadly. And the oldest strand has new applications: despite a decline in the number of publications referring to it, frustration-aggression theory has recently been applied in media psychology (Breuer & Elson, 2017), where the thwarting is delivered by a game rather than an experimenter.

Common Misconceptions

“Frustration always leads to aggression.”

That was the 1939 postulate, and it is the part of the hypothesis that did not survive. The reformulation holds that frustrations generate aggressive inclinations to the degree that they arouse negative affect, and a substantial proportion of research since has dealt with the boundary conditions, moderators and mediators of the frustration-to-aggression path (Berkowitz, 1989; Breuer & Elson, 2017).

“Frustration is just another word for anger.”

In the aggression literature frustration is typically understood as an event, the blocking of a goal, rather than as an emotion, and the emotional reaction to a withheld reward is only one of two effects the omission produces, the other being a learning signal (Breuer & Elson, 2017; Abler et al., 2005).

“Irritability in children is just disruptive behaviour.”

Irritability relates more strongly to depressive and generalised anxiety disorders than to disruptive behaviours, and in longitudinal studies it is specifically associated with later depression and anxiety (Stringaris, 2011; Vidal-Ribas et al., 2016).

“Chronically irritable children have bipolar disorder.”

Children with severe, nonepisodic irritability lack the well-demarcated mood episodes that define bipolar disorder, and longitudinal data associate nonepisodic irritability with later anxiety and unipolar depression, not bipolar disorder (Leibenluft, 2011).

Glossary

Aggression.

Behaviour intended to harm; in the frustration-aggression tradition, the response whose likelihood a thwarting event is held to raise.

Allocentric effect.

The informational consequence of a reward omission, a learning signal consistent with prediction-error theory, as distinct from the felt reaction.

Appetitive extinction.

The unexpected omission of a previously delivered reward; one of two laboratory procedures for studying incentive loss.

Cognitive-neoassociationistic model.

The reformulated account in which aversive events, frustration among them, arouse negative affect that is associatively linked to aggressive inclinations.

Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.

The DSM-5 diagnosis whose primary symptom is chronic and severe irritability in children and adolescents.

Egocentric effect.

The individual's emotional reaction to a reward omission, commonly called frustration, as distinct from the learning signal the omission also carries.

Frustration Discomfort Scale.

A multidimensional self-report measure of frustration intolerance beliefs with four factors: emotional intolerance, entitlement, discomfort intolerance and achievement.

Frustration intolerance.

The belief that frustration, discomfort or unfairness cannot be borne; in rational-emotive behaviour therapy one of two major categories of disturbed belief.

Frustration-aggression hypothesis.

The 1939 proposal that aggression is always a consequence of frustration, later reformulated so that frustration produces aggressive inclinations to the degree that it arouses negative affect.

Frustrative nonreward.

In frustration theory, the aversive and motivating state produced when an expected reward is withheld.

Irritability.

A proneness to anger and exaggerated responses to frustration; in youth a stable, heritable dimension associated with later depression and anxiety.

Negative affect.

Unpleasant feeling; in the reformulated hypothesis, the mediating state through which frustration and other aversive events produce aggressive inclinations.

Prediction error.

The difference between an expected and an obtained outcome; a reward omission produces a negative prediction error reflected in reduced ventral striatal activity.

Psychological pain.

A negative emotion induced by incentive loss, distinguished from physical pain and from social pain, and studied in animals through reward devaluation and omission.

Response vigor.

The force or intensity of a response, measured for example as key-press force, which rises after a reward is blocked.

Severe mood dysregulation.

A research syndrome defined by severe, nonepisodic irritability with hyperarousal but without the discrete mood episodes of bipolar disorder.

Successive negative contrast.

The unexpected devaluation of a reward, producing a response decrement that marks incentive loss.

Surprising reward omission.

The non-presentation, or reduction in magnitude or quality, of an appetitive reinforcer despite signals of its impending presentation.

Key Researchers

Abram Amsel

(1922-2006). Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, previously the University of Toronto; formulated frustration theory, in which the omission of an expected reward is an aversive, motivating event that explains the partial-reinforcement extinction effect and discrimination learning. Wikipedia

Leonard Berkowitz

(1926-2016). Vilas Research Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; re-examined and reformulated the frustration-aggression hypothesis so that frustration produces aggressive inclinations only to the degree that it arouses negative affect, within his cognitive-neoassociationistic account of aggression. Wikipedia

Johannes Breuer

. Professor of Digital Social Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen and team leader at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Bochum; co-authored the standard contemporary review of frustration-aggression theory, tracing the hypothesis from its 1939 statement through its revisions to its applications in media psychology. ORCID - Faculty Page

Melissa A. Brotman

. Chief of the Neuroscience and Novel Therapeutics Unit, Emotion and Development Branch, National Institute of Mental Health; leads a programme that uses frustration-induction paradigms and neuroimaging to characterise pathological irritability in youth, and co-authored the Annual Review synthesis of irritability in children and adolescents. ORCID - Faculty Page

Ellen Leibenluft

. Chief of the Section on Mood Dysregulation and Neuroscience, Emotion and Development Branch, National Institute of Mental Health; defined severe mood dysregulation and established frustration-induction paradigms as the experimental route into chronic irritability in children, reframing its boundary with pediatric bipolar disorder. ORCID - Wikipedia

Mauricio R. Papini

. Professor of Psychology at Texas Christian University; extended frustration theory into a comparative and neuroscientific account of reward loss, arguing that surprising reward omission produces a psychological pain with substantial commonalities to physical pain. ORCID

Argyris Stringaris

. Chair in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at University College London, formerly at the National Institute of Mental Health and King's College London; argued for irritability's place in DSM-5 and co-authored the conceptual and quantitative review establishing irritability as a distinct, stable and heritable dimension in youth. ORCID

Frequently Asked Questions

What is frustration in psychology?

Frustration is the state produced when goal-directed activity is blocked or an expected reward is withheld; in the aggression literature it is typically understood as the blocking event itself, while in reward research it names the aversive reaction to a surprising reward omission (Yu et al., 2014; Breuer & Elson, 2017; Papini & Dudley, 1997).

What is the frustration-aggression hypothesis?

It is the 1939 proposal that aggression is always a consequence of frustration, one of the most seminal theories in aggression research, which has since been reformulated several times while retaining the core claim that frustration increases the tendency to act aggressively (Dollard et al., 1939; Breuer & Elson, 2017).

Does frustration always cause aggression?

No. Berkowitz's reformulation holds that frustrations generate aggressive inclinations to the degree that they arouse negative affect, and much research has identified moderators and boundary conditions of the effect (Berkowitz, 1989; Breuer & Elson, 2017).

What is frustrative nonreward?

It is the aversive, motivating state that follows the omission of an expected reward; surprising reward omissions are followed by stress-hormone release, distress signals, and increases in locomotion, aggression, drinking and eating, and they can energise new escape responses (Papini & Dudley, 1997).

What happens in the brain when a goal is blocked?

Blocking a reward recruits regions implicated in animal models of reactive aggression, including the amygdala, midbrain periaqueductal grey, insula and prefrontal cortex, with the response modulated by how close the reward was and how much effort had been spent on it (Yu et al., 2014).

Is frustration the same as a prediction error?

Only in part. The omission of a reward has an allocentric effect, a learning signal processed according to prediction-error theory and reflected in reduced ventral striatal activity, and an egocentric effect, the emotional reaction commonly called frustration, reflected in the anterior insula and ventral prefrontal cortex (Abler et al., 2005).

What is frustration intolerance?

It is the set of beliefs that frustration, discomfort or unfairness cannot be tolerated, hypothesised in rational-emotive behaviour therapy to be one of two major categories of disturbed belief and measured by the four-factor Frustration Discomfort Scale (Harrington, 2005).

How is frustration related to irritability in children?

Irritable youths show exaggerated responses to frustrating stimuli, so frustration tasks are used to study irritability, a distinct and stable dimension in youth that is specifically associated with later depression and anxiety rather than bipolar disorder (Tseng et al., 2019; Vidal-Ribas et al., 2016; Leibenluft, 2011).

References