Abstract
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, fear has run rampant across the globe. To curb the spread of the virus, several governments have taken measures to drastically transition businesses, work, and schooling to virtual settings. While such transitions are warranted and well-intended, these measures may come with unforeseen consequences. Namely, one’s fear of COVID-19 may more readily manifest as aggressive behaviors in an otherwise incognito virtual social ecology. In the current research, a moderated mediation model examined the mechanisms underlying the relation between fear of COVID-19 and overt and relational aggressive online behavior among Chinese college students. Utilizing a large sample of Chinese college students (N = 2,799), results indicated that moral disengagement mediated the effect of fear of COVID-19 on college students’ overt and relational online aggressive behavior. A positive family cohesion buffered the effect of moral disengagement on relational aggressive behavior, but only for females. The findings, theoretical contributions, and practical implications of the present paper are also discussed.
Highlights
In order to minimize the spread of COVID-19, the Chinese government advised citizens to stay home and avoid non-essential travel early in the pandemic
Cohesion Family cohesion was measured via the cohesion subscale of the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale [FACES; Olson et al, 1982; Chinese version revised by Fei et al (1991)], α = 0.89
Online Aggressive Behavior Online aggressive behavior was assessed by Adolescent Online Aggressive Behavior Scale (Zhao and Gao, 2012), α = 0.76
Summary
In order to minimize the spread of COVID-19, the Chinese government advised citizens to stay home and avoid non-essential travel early in the pandemic. Recent evidence suggests that approximately 59.47% of Chinese college students have participated in online aggressive behavior at one time or another (Jin, 2018) across various platforms, such as via social media and gaming (Wright, 2020). Aggression commonly manifests in two forms, (1) overt (i.e., confrontational acts) and (2) relational aggression (i.e., social gossip and interpersonal damage) (Crick, 1996; Zhao and Gao, 2012). Both types of aggression can result in severe psychological (Guo, 2016; Pabian and Vandebosch, 2016) and physiological consequences
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