Abstract
The purpose of the study was to examine the priming effect of exposure to violent pictures on implicitaggression in a sample of 94 Chinese college students, and to verify the validity of General Aggression Model(GAM) and Cognitive New-association Model (CNM). Violent and nonviolent pictures, as well as aggressiveand nonaggressive words, were used as primes to explore the relationship between violent stimuli and implicitaggression of college students by employing modified Go-Nogo task. The results suggested that the primingeffect of exposure to violent pictures on participants was obvious, and that brief exposure to violent picturesincreased implicit aggression. Repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) found that interaction betweenstimuli type (violent vs. nonviolent) and target word (aggressive vs. nonaggressive) was significant, implyingthat violent stimuli primed implicit aggression among college students. Further simple effect analysis showedthat implicit aggression was significantly primed by violent stimuli for participants with high aggressiveness(HA) and moderate aggressiveness (MA), but not for participants with low aggressiveness (LA). This resultshould be cautiously explained that only implicit aggression of college students with HA and MA wassignificantly primed by violent stimuli.
Highlights
Research on violence and aggressive behavior was the focus of psychology at home and abroad
Prior research found that it was easy to form aggressively cognitive schema if someone exposed to media violence for a long time, and the aggressive schema stored in brain was to be activated by related stimuli, and affecting the cognitive processing of information (Huesmann, 1988)
In our points of view, participants appeared lots of attention and cognitive processing on aggressive information because their aggressive schema could be activated by violent pictures
Summary
Research on violence and aggressive behavior was the focus of psychology at home and abroad. Prior researchers mainly defined aggression from three perspectives: cognitive process, explicit emotion and behavioral performance. Dodge et al assumed aggression was determined by the cognitive processing in human mind (Coie, Dodge, Terry & Wright, 1991). Buss et al contended aggression was an intentional behavior which caused harm to others, the targets attempted to escape (Buss, 1961; Berkowitz & Leonard, 1965; Baron & Richardson, 2004; Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Pan, 2005). Aggression could cause psychological and physiological hurt to others, and cognition, personality and emotion may lead to aggressiveness. We concluded implicit aggression was a kind of aggression to injure others by violating social norms and standards, including aggressive cognition, thinking and affect
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