title: Sense of control and adolescents' aggression: The role of aggressive cues.
abstract: The misperception of aggressive cues is considered a risk factor for inducing adolescent aggression. Poor coping with life stress is also considered a major influence on aggression. The current study examined the relationship between subjective sense of control and adolescent aggression, considering influences upon the perception of these aggressive cues. In Study 1, 60 participants took part in a 2 (sense of control: high sense of control vs. low sense of control) × 2 (aggressive cue: aggressive vs. neutral) between-subjects contextual experiment. The result found that a lower sense of control led to an increase in adolescents' aggression; only in the low-sense-of-control condition did exposure to aggressive cues boost aggression. In Study 2, the catalytic effect of aggressive cues was further explored by an experiment in which 40 adolescents were randomly assigned to a low- or high-sense-of-control condition to test the importance of aggressive cues. The results suggest that adolescents in the low-sense-of-control condition show a higher salience for aggressive cues.
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Administration, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China.
authors.forename: Xucheng
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.affiliation: Centre for Family and Forensic Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Egan
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Jianxin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D000374:Aggression; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011897:Random Allocation; D013315:Stress, Psychological
keywords: adolescents’ aggression; aggressive cues; sense of control