The Relationship Between Self-esteem And Aggression Of Male Prisoners

The prisoner is a special group, along with the increasing number of reports of prisoners’ violence occurrence by the media, people’s attention to this group is becoming more and more higher. However, since the specificity and security of the prison management, researches of inmates mostly concentrated in the mental health, personality traits, the level of self-esteem and aggression, and the interrelationship of these elements, for a long time, and less of studies used the empirical method. This is not enough for us to acquaint, understand and master the current situation of aggression, the relationship of self-esteem and aggression clearly and precisely. And with the concept of implicit social cognition being put forward, the innovation of research techniques(eg. the Implicit Association Test), as well as the improvement of the supervision department management facilities and personnel equipped with adequate, all of these enable the possibility of take empirical research on inmates.The present dissertation adopts the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale and Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire to examine the level of explicit self-esteem and explicit aggression of prisoners respectively. Moreover, we explored implicit self-esteem and implicit aggression of prisoners with the implicit association test, and investigated the relationship of these four elements. Based on this, we compared the relationship of the explicit and implicit self-esteem, as well as the explicit and implicit aggression of the prisoners with ordinary people. In the end, the dissertation uses the evaluative conditioning test to interfere the implicit self-esteem level of prisoners with high explicit and low implicit self-esteem, in order to explorer the level change of the elf-esteem and aggression, as well as the relationship between between them further. The results are listed as follows:(1) There are significant implicit self-esteem effect and implicit aggression effect. Moreover, there is significant separation between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem; similarly, there is significant separation between implicit aggression and explicit aggression.(2) There is no significant correlation between implicit self-esteem and explicit aggression, while implicit self-esteem is negatively correlated with implicit aggression. Moreover, there is no significant correlation between explicit self-esteem and implicit aggression, while explicit self-esteem is negatively correlated with explicit aggression.(3) Among the four structure types of self-esteem, prisoners with secure high self-esteem showed the lowest level of implicit aggression, while, prisoners with fragile high self-esteem showed the highest level of implicit aggression, Those who had low-level explicit self-esteem and high-level implicit self-esteem showed the most explicit aggression, anger and hostility.(4) Evaluative conditioning (EC) could effectively improve implicit self-esteem without significant influence on explicit self-esteem.(5) By EC, fragile high self-esteem could transform to secure high self-esteem, the level of implicit aggression reduces significantly while the level of explicit aggression shows no significant change.