A Survey And Empirical Research On Aggression Of Junior High School Students In Earthquake Stricken Area

Aggression of junior high school students in the disaster area of Wenchuan Earthquake was studied in this research through two approaches:self-rating scale questionnaire survey and experiment study. Aggression Questionnaire (AQ2000for short), which was proposed by Buss in2000, was adopted in the first approach and applied to736students of Dujiangyan. The scores of the disaster area students on every dimension were higher than the sample of the results from previous studies conducted in Wuhan, Xiaogan and Ezhou. This result implicated that aggression level of the students in the disaster area was on average higher than that of other areas. Earthquake is therefore believed to exert a long-term impact to the aggressive behavior of junior high school students, and the behavior problems followed are calling for the concern of every circle of the society.Experiment study was carried out in five classes individually. Students from the5classes were divided into two groups of matched aggression level according to their AQ2000scores separately. Each group was given a piece of reading material as a priming:earthquake news for the experiment group as earthquake priming and weather report for the control group as neutral priming. Hostility was measured in two classes afterwards using Multiple Affect Adjective Check List (MAACL for short). For the other three classes, aggressive behavior was evaluated in terms of the penalty level that subjects gave to their peers in a competitive context. The result showed that Earthquake-primed group experienced more hostile affect significantly relative to that experienced by the group with neutral priming, however they demonstrated aggressive behavior of lower level within the immediate short period followed by the priming. The experiment had evidenced the direct relationship between earthquake information and negative affection, especially hostility. Also evidenced the truth that aggressive behavior should be somewhat isolated with aggressive affection, and aggressive behavior did embrace not only emotion arousal, but also cognitive processing and acquisition of response script.