Cognitive processes are understood to play an important role in aggression. However, little theoretical and empirical work has focused on the role of automatic processes in aggressive behavior. This paper reviews selected research in aggression and in social cognition to develop the argument that aggression research would benefit from consideration of the role of automatic processes. It begins with a brief review of the literature on two types of aggression defined as impulsive versus thoughtful. A parallel distinction is then made about the two types of aggression to the parallel made in social cognition between automatic and deliberative processes. The paper reviews different types of implicit measures issued from the research on automatic processes and describes more thoroughly the most commonly used, which is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). What is seen is that contrary to other recent implicit measures, the IAT has already been used to measure aggressiveness at the implicit level and more importantly, to predict aggressive behavior. References