The Effect Of Validation And Invalidation On Aggressive Behavior

Linehan(1993)is the first person who introduced validation into psychology,in order to treat the clients with borderline personality disorder.Subsequently,a lot of researchers studied the effects of validation and invalidation on positive and negative emotion,arousal,cognitive ability,task performance,emotional self-efficacy,and relationship.Especially,receiving validating responses was related to greater positive affect and reduced negative affect as compared to receiving invalidating responses.However,there is few studies exploring the effect of validation and invalidation on aggression.This study aims to investigate the influence of validation and invalidation on aggression,as well as the moderating effect of aggression traits and social distance.Taking college students as the participants,this study adopted the Teacher-Student paradigm variation to measure the aggression after the participants were validated or invalidated though the design method of repeated measurement.The study included three sub-studies,the first of which was to explore the effect of feedback and aggression traits on aggression of college student in the context of classroom;The second sub-study making some adjustments and improvements on the basis of the first one was to clarify the impact of feedback and aggression traits on aggression of college student under laboratory condition;The third one verified the influence of feedback and social distance on aggression.Key findings are listed as following:1.In the context of classroom,validation led to significant less aggression than did invalidation.Among individuals with higher aggressive traits,aggression was significantly higher than those with lower aggressive traits,and was generally high but did not differ after validation as compared with invalidation.The findings suggest that validation of emotional experience may help to prevent aggressive behaviors among individual with low aggressive traits.2.Under laboratory condition,validation led to significant less anger than did central condition and invalidation,but there were no significant differences between central condition and invalidation.Also validation led to significant less aggression than did central condition,and invalidation led to significant more aggression than did central condition.Among individuals with low aggressive traits,validation was related to less anger when compared with central condition,and invalidation was related with more anger than central condition.While there were no significant differences between validated and central participants with low aggressive traits,but invalidated participants showed increased aggression.We cannot find significant differences in individuals with high aggressive traits when comparing validation and invalidation.3.Validation led to significant less anger and aggression than did invalidation.Invalidation coming from acquaintance was related with more anger and aggression than coming from stranger.There were no differences between closer person and stranger when receiving validation.