BACKGROUND: The reactive aggressive behavior in individuals typically shows a rapid growth trend as individuals enter adolescence, and peaks during middle-school period. According to the Comprehensive Cognitive Model of Trait Anger, trait anger and hostile attribution bias play important roles in the development of reactive aggressive behavior. Based on this, current study explored the relationship between trait anger and reactive aggressive behavior in middle school students, as well as the mediating role of hostile attribution bias and interventions.
METHODS: The current study consisted of three sub-studies. Study 1 recruited 87 middle school students with an average age of 12.367 ± 0.889 years, investigated the relationship between trait anger and reactive aggressive behavior, as well as the mediating role of trait hostile attribution bias. Study 2 recruited 62 middle school students with an average age of 13.376 ± 0.963 years, investigated the relationship between trait anger and reactive aggressive behavior, as well as the mediating role of state hostile attribution bias. Study 3 recruited 80 middle school students with an average age of 13.392 ± 0.977 years, implemented an intervention targeting trait hostile attribution bias in middle school students with high trait anger to reduce their reactive aggressive behavior. In current study, data management was performed using SPSS 22.0. Descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test, paired samples t-test, repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), and path analysis were used for statistical analysis.
RESULTS: The results of Study 1 showed that trait anger predicted reactive aggressive behavior through trait hostile attribution bias. The results of Study 2 indicated that trait and state hostile attribution bias played mediating role intermediary, and trait hostile attribution bias had a stronger mediating effect than state hostile attribution bias. The results of Study 3 suggested that the intervention effectively decreased trait hostile attribution bias and reactive aggressive behavior.
CONCLUSIONS: Trait anger can predict the reactive aggressive behavior of junior high school students, with trait hostility attribution bias and state hostility attribution bias mediating this relationship. Intervening in the hostility attribution bias of high-anger junior high school students can effectively reduce their reactive aggressive behavior.

Aggression is one of the public social issues affecting campus harmony and stability, and social exclusion is an important interpersonal contextual factor among many factors affecting aggression. However, studies examining the influence of social exclusion on aggression and its mediating mechanism are not systematic enough. Based on the general aggression model (GAM), we intend to explore the role of hostile attribution bias (HAB) in both trait and state levels of social exclusion, which leads to aggression through a combination of questionnaire and experimental methods. Study 1 surveyed 388 current high school students (Mage = 16.09, SD = 1.01) and found that HAB mediates the relationship between long-term social exclusion (trait level) and aggression tendency. Study 2 experimented with 181 high school students (Mage = 16.95, SD = 1.13) to examine whether short-term social exclusion (state level) after initiating the Cyberball paradigm could still influence aggressive behavior through the mediating role of HAB. Results found that the mediating role of HAB still holds. The findings of the study further enrich the GAM and have important implications for a more targeted approach to aggression prevention and intervention.

Malicious online trolling is prevalent among Chinese college students and has recently garnered extensive attention from researchers due to the substantial harm it causes to the victims and the damage it inflicts on the online environment. Most previous studies have focused on examining how personal traits related to malicious online trolling. Further comprehensive research is needed to explore the mechanisms linking external environmental factors (antisocial media exposure) and malicious online trolling. A total of 1259 Chinese college students completed questionnaires regarding malicious online trolling, antisocial media exposure, hostile attribution bias, and empathy. The results indicated a positive association between antisocial media exposure and malicious online trolling among Chinese college students, with hostile attribution bias serving as a mediating factor. Furthermore, the direct and mediated paths between antisocial media exposure and malicious online trolling were moderated by empathy. Specifically, as the level of empathy increased among college students, the relations between the variables all weakened. Excessive exposure to antisocial media content among college students may trigger hostile attribution bias and lead to more malicious online trolling behavior. However, the relation between antisocial media exposure and malicious online trolling, hostile attribution bias and malicious online trolling, was attenuated when college students\' empathy levels were high.

Facial features are important sources of information about perceived trustworthiness. Masks and protective clothing diminish the visibility of facial cues by either partially concealing the mouth and nose or covering the entire face. During the pandemic, the use of personal protective equipment affected and redefined who trusts whom in society. This study used the classical investment game of interpersonal trust with Chinese participants to explore the impact of occlusion on interpersonal trust. Faces with moderate initial trustworthiness were occluded by a mask or protective clothing in Experiment 1 and were digitally occluded by a square in Experiment 2, and faces with three levels of initial trustworthiness were occluded by a mask in Experiment 3. Results showed that both undergraduates (Experiment 1a) and non-student adults (Experiment 1b) perceived the faces with protective clothing as more trustworthy than faces wearing standard masks and faces not wearing masks. Faces with the top halves showing were perceived as trustworthy as full faces, while faces with the bottom halves showing were perceived as less trustworthy. The effect of masks is weak and complex. Masks reduced participants\' trust in faces with high initial trustworthiness, had no effect on faces with low and moderate initial trustworthiness, and only slightly increased the trust of undergraduates in faces with moderate initial trustworthiness. Our findings indicate that the lack of information caused by occlusion and the social significance associated with occlusion collectively affect people\'s trust behavior in Chinese society. We believe the findings of this study will be useful in elucidating the effects of personal protective equipment usage on perceptions of trustworthiness.

Previous research shows that both adults and children by 5 or 6 years of age appreciate socially mindful actions where one leaves a choice for others. However, less is known as to whether children consider motivations in their evaluations of socially (un)mindful actions. Here we investigated whether children and adults can spontaneously evaluate socially (un)mindful behaviors depending on contextual cues, specifically whether the actions happen in public or in private. We also investigated how children evaluate these actions when provided with explicit information on motivations. We presented 99 children (aged 6-11 years) and 99 adults in China with two characters performing the same socially mindful or unmindful behaviors. One character acted publicly, whereas the other acted privately. Participants were asked to compare the two characters first spontaneously and then again after explicit information on the characters\' motivations was provided. We found that whereas adults spontaneously favor private socially mindful acts, children favor public socially mindful acts. Only after motivations were provided did children favor private socially mindful acts like adults. In addition, we found asymmetry in that motivation seems to matter more in evaluations of socially mindful actions than in evaluations of socially unmindful ones. These findings are the first to reveal children\'s consideration of motivations in their evaluations of socially mindful behaviors.

Understanding how the human brain maps different dimensions of social conceptualizations remains a key unresolved issue. We performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study in which participants were exposed to audio definitions of personality traits and asked to simulate experiences associated with the concepts. Half of the concepts were affective (e.g. empathetic), and the other half were non-affective (e.g. intelligent). Orthogonally, half of the concepts were highly likable (e.g. sincere) and half were socially undesirable (e.g. liar). Behaviourally, we observed that the dimension of social desirability reflected the participant\'s subjective ratings better than affect. FMRI decoding results showed that both social desirability and affect could be decoded in local patterns of activity through distributed brain regions including the superior temporal, inferior frontal, precuneus and key nodes of the default mode network in posterior/anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Decoding accuracy was better for social desirability than affect. A representational similarity analysis further demonstrated that a deep language model significantly predicted brain activity associated with the concepts in bilateral regions of superior and anterior temporal lobes. The results demonstrate a brain-wide representation of social knowledge, involving default model network systems that support the multimodal simulation of social experience, with a further reliance on language-related preprocessing.

Individuals often use others\' gaze and head directions to direct their attention. To investigate the influence of autistic traits on social attention, we conducted two experiments comparing groups with high and low autistic traits in single-cue (Experiment 1) and conflicting-cue (Experiment 2) scenarios. Our findings indicate that individuals responded more rapidly to the direction of a single social cue or the consensus of multiple cues. However, we did not observe significant differences in social attention between individuals with high and low autistic traits. Notably, as the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) increased, individuals with low autistic traits exhibited greater improvements in reaction speed compared to those with high autistic traits. This suggests that individuals with low autistic traits excel at leveraging temporal information to optimize their behavioral readiness over time, hinting at potential variations in cognitive flexibility related to autistic traits.

The debate surrounding whether social and non-social attention share the same mechanism has been contentious. While prior studies predominantly focused on engagement, we examined the potential disparity between social and non-social attention from both perspectives of engagement and disengagement, respectively. We developed a two-stage attention-shifting paradigm to capture both attention engagement and disengagement. Combining results from five eye-tracking experiments, we supported that the disengagement of social attention markedly outpaces that of non-social attention, while no significant discrepancy emerges in engagement. We uncovered that the faster disengagement of social attention came from its social nature by eliminating alternative explanations including broader fixation distribution width, reduced directional salience in the peripheral visual field, decreased cue-object categorical consistency, reduced perceived validity, and faster processing time. Our study supported that the distinction between social and non-social attention is rooted in attention disengagement, not engagement.

Speech is a complex auditory signal that contains multiple layers of linguistic and non-linguistic structure, it contains both linguistic and social class information. Perceivers are exquisitely sensitive to this layered structure and extract not only linguistic properties, but also indexical characteristics that provide information about individual talkers and groups of talkers. Social class information involves inferring the speaker\'s social class or forming an impression of their social status based on their speech. Previous research on social class perception in speech has primarily focused on English, with relatively little research on Chinese. This study examines social class perception in Chinese speech. Study 1 employed class judgment and evaluation tasks with a subjective social class scale as the main measure to examine whether listeners could infer class information from Chinese speech and how their own class background influenced their perception. The results of Study 1 showed that subjects could accurately discriminate between speakers\' social classes, but there may be a response bias that overestimates lower-class speakers as upper-class speakers. Study 2 focused on whether the speech of different classes of speakers actually differed on a number of indicators. It was found that the speech of higher class speakers was perceived to be more standardised, more pleasant to listen to and less accent-intensive. Overall, listeners can perceive class information from Chinese speech; different classes of Chinese speech do contain different levels of indexical information. In Chinese language societies, individuals can also judge their class information through the speech, which is consistent with the relevant research results in English.

This study examined the development of social power perceptions among Chinese children aged 3-5 years (N = 105). After watching videos about various social power cues, such as resource possession, resource control, goal achievement, permission, giving orders, setting norms and popularity, the children were asked to identify the powerful agents (whom do you believe is the more powerful person?) in the videos and provide explanations (why do you think he (she) is a powerful person?). Three-year-olds can recognize powerful agents who can grant \'permission\' to other agents. By the age of 4, children begin to associate \'popularity\', \'resource possession\' and \'goal achievement\' with social power. Five-year olds demonstrated the ability to recognize agents who control resources as being more powerful. Analysis of the reasons the children provided for their judgements revealed that for almost every cue (except giving orders), more than 14% of the responses highlighted \'possession of material resources\' as an indicator of power. For children aged 3-5 years, \'resource possession\' cues may be their preferred basis for inferring and explaining power differences. These results would facilitate researchers to further unravel the mechanisms underlying the development of children\'s social power perceptions.