How Childhood Maltreatment Impacts Aggression from Perspectives of Social Comparison and Resilience Framework Theory

ABSTRACT

The current study explored internal mechanisms by which childhood maltreatment influenced aggression from perspectives of social comparison theory and resilience framework theory for the first time. Authors randomly recruited 811 participants and asked them to complete Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), Dispositional Envy Scale (DES), Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) and Aggression Questionnaire (AQ). Finally, the data were analyzed by structural equation model method. The results showed that envy and resilience were both important mediating mechanisms between childhood maltreatment and aggression, and childhood maltreatment could affect envy through resilience and then influenced aggression. The present findings provide important practical guidance for how to effectively inhibit the influence of childhood maltreatment on aggression.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood maltreatment
• aggression
• envy
• resilience
• structural equation model

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the support and grant funding contributed by General Program of Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province of China [2019JJ40195].

Disclosure statement

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical standards and informed consent

The present study was approved by the Academic Committee of the School of Psychology of the authors’ institution and all procedures were followed in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation [institutional and national] and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. All participants provided informed consent before completing the questionnaires and were paid after completing the whole questionnaires. No identifying information was used in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the General Program of Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province of China [2019JJ40195]. The funding source had no influence on study design; the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; the writing of the report; or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.