Moral disengagement is an important aggressive and moral cognition. The mechanisms of changes in moral disengagement remain unclear, especially at the within-person level. We attempted to clarify this by exploring the serial effects of personal relative deprivation and hostility on civic moral disengagement. We conducted a three-wave longitudinal survey with 1058 undergraduates (63.61% women; mean age = 20.97). The results of the random intercept cross-lagged panel model showed that personal relative deprivation at Wave 1 and hostility at Wave 2 formed a serial effect on the within-person changes in civic moral disengagement at Wave 3, and the longitudinal indirect effect test showed that the within-person dynamics in hostility at Wave 2 acted as a mediator. The results of multiple group analysis across genders further showed that the longitudinal indirect role of hostility at Wave 2 was only observed for men, but not for women, which indicates the moderating effect of gender. These findings facilitate an understanding of the mechanisms of aggressive cognitions at the within-person level and offer implications for the prevention and intervention of aggression from the perspective of moral cognition.

BACKGROUND: Social comparison is an inevitable aspect of human life, often leading to personal relative deprivation, wherein individuals experience a sense of unfair treatment when they perceive themselves as being at a disadvantage in comparison to others. Earlier research has observed a phenomenon called \"lying flat\" associated with personal relative deprivation, characterized by a lack of motivation for self-improvement. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether this pattern is suitable for the domains of health-promoting lifestyles given that health-promoting is driven by self-improvement motivation.
METHODS: In three studies conducted in China, an understudied non-Western society, we investigated the association between personal relative deprivation and health-promoting lifestyles by utilizing diverse measures and samples.
RESULTS: Findings from Study 1 (N = 12,465) indicated a negative relationship between personal relative deprivation and health-promoting behavior. This effect was particularly prominent among older individuals (Study 2, N = 11,378). Study 3 (N = 234) indirectly explored the possibility that a decreased priority given to health goals explains the reduced adoption of health-promoting behaviors when experiencing personal relative deprivation.
CONCLUSIONS: First, all health-promoting lifestyles are self-reported. Second, the mechanism between PRD and health-promoting lifestyles was not directly examined.
CONCLUSIONS: Overall, this research confirms the physical \"lying flat\" phenomenon, highlighting that personal relative deprivation contributes to unhealthy diets and physical inactivity. Moreover, our findings also suggest that the lower significance placed on health goals relative to other life goals may serve as an underlying reason for this phenomenon.

This study aimed to investigate the predictive effects of two types of subjective socioeconomic status on self-reported physical and mental health. Specifically, we examined the MacArthur Scale (MacArthur) which measures perceived socioeconomic rank in the society and a novel scale called ComSim, which assessed how participants compared themselves socioeconomically to others coming from a similar socioeconomic background. We also considered the influence of income, education, and personal relative deprivation (PRD) in these analyses. Additionally, we explored whether these effects were mediated through negative and positive affect.
The data were collected through a cross-sectional, two-wave survey of 294 women and 294 men, with a mean age 41.6 years. Participants were recruited via an online platform.
The results from multivariate regression models revealed that socioeconomic status measured with both the MacArthur Scale and ComSim significantly predicted both self-reported health measures, whereas income and education did not predict any of these measures in the full multivariate models. PRD only predicted self-reported mental health. Mediation analyses showed that negative and positive affect mediated the relationships between socioeconomic status measured by ComSim and self-reported health measures.
These findings are discussed in the context of the similarity hypothesis of social comparison theory. The results underscore the importance of considering multiple dimensions when examining socioeconomic health disparities.

Evidence indicates that personal relative deprivation (PRD) can lead to various impulsive behaviors. Given that impulsive behaviors are usually caused by a failure to exert cognitive control, the purpose of this study was to explore whether PRD affects the ability to exert cognitive control on behavior. Forty-six healthy participants were randomly assigned to PRD or non-PRD group. Participants of the PRD group were told their income would lie below the Chinese average. While their electrophysiological responses were recorded, they underwent a Go/No-Go task simultaneously assessing the ability to detect response conflict and inhibit the predominant response. We found that the individuals with induced PRD show diminished ability to inhibit predominant response. We suggest this is because PRD-related concerns consume cognitive resources, leaving less for other tasks. However, we also found that individuals with induced PRD show enhanced ability to detect conflict. This might be because that individuals with induced PRD were sensitive to potentially threatening information (high-conflict No-Go trials) and they can detect conflict with less cognitive resources. These findings may facilitate future attempts to design interventions for relatively deprived individuals to manage their impulsive behavior.

Personal relative deprivation (PRD) refers to emotions of resentment and dissatisfaction caused by feeling deprived of a deserved outcome compared to some reference. While evidence suggests that relative deprivation based on objective data such as income affects well-being, subjective PRD has been less explored, especially in the East. This study evaluated the relationship between PRD and subjective well-being based on various aspects in the context of Japan. An online questionnaire survey, including the Japanese version of the Personal Relative Deprivation Scale (J-PRDS5) and various well-being indices, was administered to 500 adult participants, balanced for sex and age. Quantitative data analysis methods were used. PRD significantly correlated with subjective well-being as assessed by various aspects. Through mediation analysis, we found that a strong tendency to compare one\'s abilities with others may undermine subjective well-being through PRD. The results also indicated that well-developed human environments may be associated with the maintenance of subjective well-being levels, even when PRD is high. Toward developing future interventions to improve well-being and health, efforts must be undertaken in Japan to monitor PRD and further clarify the mechanism of the association between PRD and the factors that showed a strong relationship in this study.

Several studies have demonstrated a directional link between rage rumination and aggression. However, recent research suggests that this relationship is bidirectional. The current study examined the complex relationships between anger rumination and aggression using a moderated network approach in a longitudinal design while considering personal relative deprivation.
A total of 665 participants (59.25% female, agemean±SD  = 19.01 ± 1.25) were enrolled at two-time points. Assessments included self-report measures of the Anger Rumination Scale, Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire, and Relative Deprivation Scale. A Moderated Network Model (MMN) was used to test the complex links among anger rumination, aggression, and personal relative deprivation.
The analysis revealed that the link between anger rumination and aggression was complex and bidirectional. Notably, as the level of personal relative deprivation increased, verbal aggression had a positive conditional effect on anger afterthoughts in Wave 2, and thoughts of revenge had a positive conditional effect on verbal aggression in Wave 2. Moreover, as the first discovery, anger afterthoughts and anger had a negative conditional effect on each other across levels of personal relative deprivation in Wave 2. In addition, network comparison indicates that the MNMs structure was significantly different across timepoints, implying that anger rumination and aggression were inextricably linked in college students during isolation and that this complicated relationship was weakened after isolation.
This study deepens our understanding of the bidirectional relationships between anger rumination and aggression and recognizes the moderating role of personal relative deprivation.

Scant research has investigated the potential influence of personal relative deprivation on moral disengagement, and little is known regarding the mechanisms underlying this relationship. Inspired by relative deprivation theory, this study proposed a moderated mediation model to explore the relationship between personal relative deprivation and moral disengagement by examining the mediating role of malicious envy and the moderating role of Honesty-Humility. Five hundred and eighty-nine Chinese adults completed anonymous measures of personal relative deprivation, malicious envy, Honesty-Humility, and moral disengagement. Results revealed that personal relative deprivation was positively correlated with moral disengagement and that malicious envy fully mediated this relationship. Moderated mediation analysis indicated that Honesty-Humility moderated the relationship between personal relative deprivation and malicious envy and that between malicious envy and moral disengagement. Specifically, both relationships became weaker for adults with higher levels of Honesty-Humility. These findings not only highlight the importance of identifying the underlying mechanisms between personal relative deprivation and moral disengagement, but also provide valuable implications for the effective prevention and mitigation of moral disengagement.

Little research describes the mechanisms underlying depressive symptoms and personal relative deprivation in Chinese populations.
In this study, the respondents were (N = 914) residents of Beijing (17-59 years old) and robust multiple linear regressions were used to assess the main relationship between relative deprivation and depressive symptoms and social support as a potential moderator for that relationship.
Individuals who reported higher personal relative deprivation had greater depressive symptoms than those who reported lower personal relative deprivation. Perceived social support buffered the relationship between depressive symptoms and personal relative deprivation.
The findings of this current study demonstrate the importance of relative deprivation for psychological strain and income in explaining how socioeconomic indices correlate with depressive symptoms. They also demonstrate the need to acknowledge the interaction of perceived social support and personal relative deprivation for influencing depression.

The literature has indicated that personal relative deprivation (PRD) results in anxiety disorders. Given that some cognitive models propose that attention bias toward a threat causes and maintains anxiety, relatively deprived individuals may have difficulty gating threat from working memory. To test this hypothesis, this study investigated the influence of PRD on the filtering ability of happy, angry, and neutral facial distractors from visual working memory using electroencephalography (EEG). Participants were randomly assigned to a PRD (n = 24) or a non-PRD group (n = 24). Filtering ability was reflected by comparing the contralateral delay activity (CDA) amplitude for one-target, one-target-one-distractor, and two-targets conditions. The CDA was measured as the difference in mean amplitudes between activity in the hemispheres contralateral and ipsilateral to the to-be-remembered information. Results indicated that individuals in the PRD group showed a reduced ability to filter out neutral and angry facial distractors, as reflected by similar CDA amplitudes for one-target-one-distractor and two-targets conditions for both angry and neutral distractors in the PRD group. However, PRD did not impair the ability to filter out happy facial distractors, as reflected by similar CDA amplitudes for one-target-one-distractor and one-target conditions for happy distractors in the PRD group. As neutral faces might then be taken as potentially threatening information by relatively deprived individuals, these results support the hypothesis that relatively deprived individuals might have difficulty filtering out threat-related information.

The present work investigated the influence of experimentally manipulated relative deprivation (RD) on aggressive behavior in a game context. Participants experienced personal RD as the difference between own rewards and the rewards of a fictitious other player. Going beyond previous research, three yet-unexplored moderators of the RD-aggression link were experimentally tested: In Experiment 1 (N = 157), we tested the effect of the scarcity of resources one is deprived of, and the intensity of the RD experience in terms of the magnitude of the disadvantaged comparison. In Experiment 2 (N = 195), we investigated whether aggressive behavior is influenced by imposing possible or actual sanctions (i.e., costs) for aggression. The results show effects on aggressive behavior toward the other player that were mediated by the personal perception of RD and that only actual but not possible costs eliminated this indirect effect. Implications for the aggression-related behavioral consequences of RD are discussed.