Different Names, Same Issue

First of all, let me congratulate the authors for having written an excellent and impor-tant article. It is high time that the problem of the three names for the same issue is addressed, namely, the problem of the competing terms indirect aggression, used by our research group, relational aggression, used by Crick and her colleagues, and social aggression, used by Cairns and his colleagues, although in one article only (Cairns et al., 1989). Lately, Galen and Underwood (1997) has also used Cairns ' concept. It is evident from the article by Underwood, Galen, and Paquette that they too are of the opinion that the same phenomenon is referred to by these three concepts: otherwise, they would not call it indirectlrelationaVsocial aggression, as they do, all through the text. In the mid-1980s, our research group in Finland became increasingly aware of the fact that research on human aggression suffered from a severe imbalance: too much focus on male forms of aggression, too often only male subjects, and the studies too often conducted by male researchers (being a male myself, I still agree with this third point). Female forms of aggression were not focused upon, or, alternatively, researchers thought female aggression was exactly like male aggression, only less. Clearly, this was dissatisfactory. We felt that the myth of the non-aggressive female was nothing but exactly that, a myth. Starting with open-ended interviews with school children, on the basis of which we developed our quantitative instruments, we embarked upon our still on-going project on sex differences and developmental trends in regard to aggressive behavior.In 1988, our research group published our first article on indirect aggression: " Is indirect aggression typical offemales? ' (Lagerspetz, Bjorkqvist, & Peltonen, 1988). This was followed a few years later by ' Do girls manipulate and boys fight?'