Effect of violence exposure on aggressive intervention in Chinese college students: A moderated mediation model

Abstract

The present study was mainly based on the General Aggression Model and combined it with the Bystander Intervention Model to explore the mechanism of aggressive intervention. A total of 1018 college students (mean age 19.59 years) from five universities in China were recruited, who completed a series of questionnaires, mainly concluding violence environment exposure questionnaire, the normative beliefs about aggression scale, subscale of the aggressive intervention, trait anxiety scale and number of bystanders. The results showed that after controlling for social desirability and gender, violence exposure positively predicted aggressive intervention, and normative beliefs about aggression partially mediated between the two variables. The three-way interaction of normative beliefs about aggression, anxiety, and the number of bystanders negatively predicted aggressive intervention. Moreover, anxiety moderated the mediating effect. Specifically, when the level of anxiety was higher, the mediating effect was larger. The number of bystanders played as a secondary moderator. The moderating effect of anxiety decreased as the number of bystanders increased. The results suggest that the General Aggression Model remains a theoretical model for explaining aggressive intervention, and the combination of anxiety and the number of bystanders influences the process of GAM.