An Experimental Research On Gender Differences In The Way Of Implicit Aggression Performance Among University Students

Aggression was an important research area in psychology, it attracted the psychologists widespread and lasting attention. The sex was an important variable that many researchers were interested in, and the gender difference in aggression is especially obvious. The former researches which much used questionnaire, observation and experiment to test the aggression, universally showed that male was obviously higher than female in the explicit aggression.In recent years, the implicit social cognition research area has developed swiftly. In our country, some researchers also attempted to use the methods that used in the implicit social cognition area to test the aggression, the results showed that objects prefer to the aggressive information unconsciously, that proved the implicit aggression surely existed in people's minds; And it was relatively independent to the explicit aggression; male was higher than female in the explicit aggression, but there was no significant gender difference in the implicit aggression.This study built on the predecessors'researches, it divided the aggression into the action aggression and the verbal aggression according to the performance way. Its purpose was to inspect the gender differences between the action aggression and the verbal aggression in the implicit aggression, it was also to confirm the results in the explicit aggression simultaneously, and attempted to discuss the relationship between the implicit aggression and the explicit aggression. 127 college students in Nanchang participated in this study, the explicit aggression was measured by the Aggression Questionnaire; the implicit aggression was measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that compiled by ourselves. The IAT had target concept and attribute dimension, target concept included ten male/female names; attribute dimension included ten action/vocal aggression words.The results showed: (1) there was no significant gender difference in the total explicit aggression, but male was higher than female in action aggression. (2) In implicit aggression, male were associated with action aggression more closely while female with verbal aggression. (3) The relationship between the explicit aggression and the implicit aggression could not just be decided by their coefficient of correlation.