The Influence Of Perceived Social Hostility On College Students’ Aggression

Hostile situations are the important factors that affect aggressive behavior.Previous studies show that in relatively “violent” hostile situations such as provocation and irritation,it is more likely to trigger college students’ aggressive behavior.On the contrary,less research has been done on whether a relatively “mild” hostile situation affects aggression.Social hostility is considered to be a relatively “moderate” hostile situation.It is known as a negative mode of interpersonal communication that action implementers use relatively inconspicuous and small gestures to convey a hostile signal.There search explores the influence of perceived social hostility on College Students’ aggression from the perspective of “the attack originates from subtle events”.The research covers four studies.Study1 makes a use of the perceived social mindfulness paradigm to manipulate the perceived social hostility,and applies the hot sauce paradigm to test the overt aggression of college students,showing the influence of perceived social hostility on students’ overt aggression.Based on Study1,Study2 introduces the variable of experienced emotion,and adopts the “Chinese version of Positive Negative Sentiment Scale”(PANAS)to measure the subjects’ baseline mood before the experiment and the subjects’ immediate mood after the experiment to investigate the role of emotional experience in the connection of perceived social hostility and overt aggression of college students.Study3 filtrates 60 subjects of interpersonal external attribution and 60 subjects of interpersonal internal attribution through the interpersonal attribution part of “the Multidimensional-Multiattributional Causality Scale”(MMCS),applying 2(perceived social hostility,perceived social mindfulness)*2(interpersonal external attribution,interpersonal internal attribution)design mode to investigate the relationship between perceived social hostility,emotional experience and explicit aggression.Based on Study1,Study4 takes implicit aggression as the dependent variable,and repeats the research steps of last three studies to investigate the impact of perceived social hostility on college students’ implicit aggression.According to the experimental outcomes and analysis,the main results of the research are as follows:(1)Perceived social hostility affects the overt aggression of college students.Compared with normal situations,subjects perceived social hostility may behave more overt aggressive.(2)Subjects perceived social hostility may have a stronger negative emotional experience.Perceived social hostility has a great correlation with negative emotion and explicit aggression,and negative emotional experience plays a partial mediating role in perceived social hostility and explicit aggression.(3)Different interpersonal attributions play a moderating role in perceived social hostility when it influences negative emotional experience and overt aggression.After perceiving social hostility,subjects with interpersonal external attributions have a stronger negative emotional experience and higher possibility of overt aggression.(4)Subjects perceived social hostility show a higher level of implicit aggression.Interpersonal attribution styles have a moderating effect on perceived social hostility and implicit aggression.After perceiving social hostility,interpersonal external attribution subjects had a higher level of implicit aggression.