The Relationship Between Adolescents’ Normative Beliefs And Aggression Among Normal School And Senior High School Students

For a long time, aggression has been one of the major research topics in psychology.Aggression is a negative social behavior, often occurring in young people, which has a greatinfluence on the social development of adolescent personality. Therefore, school educators andacademic circles have laid great emphasis on aggressive behavior of young people.Aggression means the behavior that intends and in fact has caused harm to others. Presentstudies have examined the characteristics of aggressive behavior among primary or juniorstudents. Meanwhile, the studies of high school students (medium of youth) are lack and mainlyconducted among students of ordinary high schools. In fact, normal schools have special schoolsituations. For example, the quality of students is worse than that of high schools. Different fromordinary high schools that emphasize high college acceptance rates, normal schools aim to trainqualified kindergarten and primary school teachers. Compared with ordinary high schools, thereare more girls in normal schools. In view of these characteristics, aggressive behavior of normalschool students may have different features compared to that of high school students. The firstpurpose of this research is to investigate the main characteristics of aggression types of normalschool and high school students and compare them.Aggression normative beliefs refer to the cognitive representation of what should be doneand what should not be done. Research shows that children’s aggressive behavior is influencedby its normative beliefs and there is a positive correlation between normative beliefs andaggressive behavior. The second purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics ofaggression normative beliefs of normal school and high school students and reveal its predictiveeffect on aggressive behavior.This study uses questionnaires to study the respective characteristics and differences ofphysical aggression and relational aggression among normal school and high school students,their characteristics and differences of aggressive normative beliefs, the predictive mechanism ofnormative beliefs and the regulative effect played by gender in normative beliefs on the impactof aggression.Study participants are619normal school and senior high school students from Penglai at the age of15to18(including297normal school students and292high school students). Therevised edition of the Chinese version of Buss and Perry Aggression Questionnaire, relationalaggression scale, aggressive behavior normative beliefs scale and Sex Role Scale by Bem areused as research tools. The main conclusions are as follows:1There are gender differences of aggression between senior high school students andnormal school students. The boys’ physical aggression is significantly higher than that of girls.2There exists school type difference between high school students and normal schoolstudents’ aggression. And normal school students score significantly higher than high schoolstudents.3There are gender role differences between senior high school students and normal schoolstudents. In detail, physical aggression of masculine and androgynous students is significantlyhigher than that of feminine and undifferentiated students; feminine students score significantlyhigher than the androgynous students in hostility; androgyny students score significantly higherthan feminine and undifferentiated students in verbal aggression.4There is no significant school type difference of normative beliefs between high schoolstudents and normal school students.5There are significant gender differences of aggression normative beliefs. The boys scoresignificantly higher than girls in physical aggression normative beliefs, but there is no significantdifference on relational aggression normative beliefs.6There is no significant gender role difference of aggression normative beliefs.7Normative beliefs have predictive effects on aggressive behavior. Physical aggressionnormative beliefs can significantly predict physical aggression and relational aggressionnormative beliefs can significantly predict relational aggression.8Sex plays a regulative role in the influence of normative beliefs on aggression. Boys andgirls’ physical aggression normative beliefs can significantly predict physical aggression, but thepredictive function of physical aggression normative beliefs for girls is stronger than that forboys; and only the girls’ physical aggression normative beliefs can significantly predict relationalaggression while the boys’ physical aggression normative beliefs can’t. School type and genderroles in aggression normative beliefs have no regulative effect in predicting aggression.