The Relationship Between Social Exclusion And Aggressive Behavior In College Students:The Moderating Effect Of Hostile Attribution Bias

As an important basic problem in psychological research,aggressive behavior has received continuous attention from many researchers.Especially in recent years,college students’ campus aggressive incidents have occurred from time to time,which not only endangers the development of college students’ physical and mental health,but also seriously destroys the harmony and stability of the school and even the whole society.How to reduce the occurrence of this problem on the college campus has become imminent.According to the theoretical view of the general aggression model,aggressive behavior will be affected by the interaction of personal factors and environmental factors.Among them,social exclusion,as a common phenomenon in the process of interpersonal communication among college students,will threaten the satisfaction of students’ basic needs,and even lead to some students to take aggressive behaviors for revenge.However,some studies have shown that college students’ prosocial behaviors will increase after social exclusion.In this regard,the current research conclusion has not been unified.So why do some college students adopt more aggressive behaviors in response to the stimulation of others or the environment?According to the social information processing model,hostile attribution bias,as an important cognitive individual variable,will affect the processing and interpretation process of college students’ information about others or the environment,and lead to differences in subsequent behavioral responses by automatically processing the information into hostile or non-hostile.Therefore,based on the theoretical viewpoints of general aggression model and social information processing model,this study uses the methods of cross-sectional,experiment research and short-term longitudinal tracking to explore the relationship among social exclusion,aggression and hostile attribution bias of college students.The specific research content and results are as follows:(1)In Study 1,the cross-sectional research was used to preliminarily explore the relationship among social exclusion,aggressive behavior and hostile attribution bias.The results show that social exclusion can positively predict aggressive behavior,but the cross-sectional moderating effect of hostile attribution bias is not significant.(2)Therefore,Study 2 uses the experimental method to investigate whether hostile attribution bias plays a moderating role in the relationship between social exclusion and aggressive behavior of college students in a single exclusion event.The results show that social exclusion leads to aggressive behavior,and this relationship is affected by the interaction between social exclusion and hostile attribution bias.That is,under the condition of medium intensity of social exclusion,college students with high hostile attribution bias will show more aggressive behaviors than those with low hostile attribution bias.However,there is no significant difference in subsequent aggressive behavior between college students with high and low hostile attribution bias in the acceptance and high social exclusion conditions.(3)In Study 3,further adopts the method of short-term longitudinal tracking,to examine the impact of changes in social exclusion on changes in college freshmen’s aggressive behavior under the natural situation of the college transition,and explores the role of hostile attribution bias in it.First of all,the correlation analysis results show that there is a stable positive correlation between social exclusion and aggressive behavior of college freshmen during the college transition.Secondly,the variables were modeled with an unconditional latent variable growth model,and the results showed that the social exclusion of college freshmen increased linearly,while the aggressive behavior decreased linearly.Based on this,a multivariate latent variable growth model is constructed,and the results show that the initial level of social exclusion can positively predict the initial level of aggression,and the faster the rise of social exclusion,the slower the decline of aggression.Finally,the group test of the multivariate latent variable growth model shows that the level of hostile attribution bias can moderate the predictive effect of the change slope of social exclusion on the change slope of aggressive behavior of college freshmen.In summary,this study systematically discusses the relationship among college students’ social exclusion,aggressive behavior and hostile attribution bias through the above three sub-studies in turn,and proves that college students’ social exclusion positively predicts their aggressive behavior,and when individuals experience a medium-intensity exclusion event or short-term exclusion event,the interaction of the level of social exclusion and hostile attribution bias affects the generation of its subsequent aggressive behavior.This finding is consistent with the theoretical views of the general aggression model and the social information processing model,which is of great significance for understanding the internal cognitive process that affects the aggressive behavior of college students after suffering from social exclusion,and provides an effective intervention direction for the society and colleges to reduce the occurrence of campus aggression.