The Relations Between Parental Style, Moral Disengagement And Aggression Of Children

Moral is a considerably important issue both for the individual and for social harmony. Internalization of moral standards is essential for self-directed, self-monitoring, self-regulation in the daily life. According to the social cognitive theory of the moral self, moral reasoning is linked to moral action through affective self-regulatory mechanisms by which moral agency is exercised. However through the cognitive progress of moral disengagement, the affective self-regulatory mechanisms can be deactivated. Moral disengagement is a cognitive process that justify the cruel behaviors or violations, which separates individual's behaviors and his or her internal moral standards, thereby self-sanctions are avoided. Since researchers began to focus this research domain of moral disengagement, they have explored the relationship between moral disengagement and antisocial behaviors. A large amount of studies have shown strong links between moral disengagement and antisocial behaviors both in adults and older school-age children and adolescents. In addition, one study showed that moral disengagement had mediating influence on the relationship between parental style and children's antisocial behaviors. But little studies investigate the relationships between parental style, moral disengagement and proactive or reactive aggression. So the purpose of this study is to compensate for the lack of domestic research. On the basis of exploring the characteristics of moral disengagement and proactive and reactive aggression of junior middle school students, this study further reveal the relationships between parental style, moral disengagement and proactive and reactive aggression. This study was expected to explore environmental factors (parental style) and cognitive factors (moral disengagement) of proactive and reactive aggression, which provided psychological basis for intervention of proactive and reactive aggression of junior middle school students.Applying cross-sectional design, the present study used a sample of 780 children who were recruited from two junior middle schools in Jinan City, Shandong Province. Self-reported questionnaires were administered to collect the data which included moral disengagement scores of junior middle school students, parenting style scores and scores of the students'proactive and reactive aggression.The main conclusions were as follows:1. Significant gender differences in junior middle school students'moral disengagement was observed. Boys had higher scores on moral justification, distorting consequences, dehumanization and total scores than girls.2. There were significant gender differences in junior middle school students'proactive aggression, but not in reactive aggression. The level of proactive aggression of boys was significantly higher than girls.3. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison and displacement of responsibility could significantly and positively predict proactive aggression and attribution of blame could significantly and negatively predict proactive aggression, and that moral justification and dehumanization could significantly and positively predict reactive aggression and advantageous comparison could significantly and negatively predict reactive aggression.4. Parental style could significantly predict moral disengagement of junior middle school students. The more positive parental style was, the lower the level of moral disengagement of the students was.5. Parental style could significantly predict proactive and reactive aggression of junior middle school students. The more positive parental style was, the lower the level of proactive and reactive aggression of the students was.6. Moral disengagement of junior middle students had totally mediating effect on the relationship between parental style and proactive and reactive aggression of the students.