Attentional Bias For Aggression Cues In High School Students With Fragile High Self-esteem

Self-esteem, aggression, and the relationship between tow of them haveaccumulated a lot of research results in psychology, but for the relationship betweenself-esteem and aggression there are two different points of view. One is thatindividual with lower self-esteem’s level has higher aggression. The opposite point ofview is that high self-esteem’s level will cause aggression. Both views havecorresponding empirical study results as support. The two different points of viewmake researchers to rethink on the definition of self-esteem, and they put forward theheterogeneity of high self-esteem. They consider that some individual’s highself-esteem is not based on the stabilized positive self evaluation, but on the surface ofa feel-good for defending against the negative self evaluation inner. The self-center ofindividual with this kind of high self-esteem is vulnerable to be threatened, so they areprone to be aggressive. This research explores the relationship between self-esteemand aggression through the study of aggressive cognition of high school students’fragile self-esteem.First, measure the explicit and implicit self-esteem with self-esteemquestionnaire of high school students and the implicit association test (IAT). Subjectswith high explicit self-esteem and low implicit self-esteem are attributed to fragilehigh self-esteem group, and participants with high explicit self-esteem and highimplicit self-esteem subjects are attributed to secure high self-esteem group.Then two groups participate in the experiment of spatial cueing task, and weobserve whether there is attentional bias for aggression cues and explore thecomposition of attentional bias, or difficulty disengaging attention away from theaggressive cue. For covering the shortage of spatial cueing task in exploring ofattention’s facilitating, the participants take a part in the experiment of dot probe task.At the same time, record subject’s eye movement data in the process of experiment,and the eye movement data includes latency of first fixation, time of first fixation andtotal gaze duration. The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1) High school students fragile high self-esteem have attention bias foraggressive cues, and they have difficulty disengaging attention away from theaggressive cue.(2) High school students with fragile high self-esteem have no attention toaggressive cues at the early time, but later they will maintain attention to aggressivecues.