Abstract

The major purpose of this study is to explore the basic mechanism of the aggression script by the aggressive films. The number of subjects are 117 fifth grade pupils and 113 high school juniors. The aggressive group and non-aggressive group are classified in terms of the two criteria ; self-rating scores and ratings by their teachers. An edited aggressive film of 9 minutes long was presented in the aggressive film condition, and landscape or tourism film was presented for the non-aggressive film conditions. Then three ambiguous situations were used as response stimuli and the subjects are arranged to judge the intention of the other party in the situation, and to produce the most avail­able and effective alternatives. The experimental design is 2(film) × 2(age of the subjects) × 2(degree of aggressiveness) between subject design. In the judgment process, the first one of the two subprocess of the social information processing, more ag­gressive intention was evaluated in the aggressive group. And in the responding process, the second subprocess, the adolescents produced more aggressive response comparing with the children after exposing to the aggressive film. And also, comparing with the non-aggressive subjects, aggressive subjects evaluated the aggressive responses as more effective and positive. From these results, the following conclusion can be drawn. First of all, the aggressive film has stronger priming effect of the aggression script in the aggressive adolescents, but not in the fifth grade children. There ­fore, this study has an important meaning in the sense of providing empirical data to support the social-cognitive perspective of aggression. Connecting some methodological shortcomings, further research in the future is urgently needed.