West Samuel J, Thomson Nicholas D
Department of Psychology, Virginia State University, Petersburg, Virginia, USA.
Department of Surgery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, USA.
J Pers. 2025 Jun;93(3):581-598. doi: 10.1111/jopy.12953. Epub 2024 Jun 14.
Myriad psychological research evinces a negative association between self-control and aggression with some arguing for self-control failure as a cause of aggression. Recent literature suggests that the relationship between aggression and self-control is likely more complex and even positive in some cases. One source of such conflict in the literature could be the presence of unaccounted for random item slopes in commonly used measures of self-control which may inflate the likelihood of Type I errors. This study (N = 1386) tested the hypothesis that self-control would share random item slopes with the facets of trait aggression using random item slope regression.
We measured trait aggression and self-control via two common self-reports: the Buss-Perry Questionnaire and the Brief Self-Control Scale.
Our analyses revealed that the facets of trait aggression shared significant random item slopes with self-control and that many of these slopes were positive, rather than negative. We also found that Type I error inflation was evident in models that did not account for these random slopes.
These findings may in part explain some of the conflicting results in the literature and that researchers interested in studying self-control and aggression should test for random item slopes.
大量心理学研究表明自我控制与攻击性之间存在负相关，一些人认为自我控制失败是攻击行为的一个原因。最近的文献表明，攻击行为与自我控制之间的关系可能更为复杂，在某些情况下甚至是正相关。文献中这种冲突的一个来源可能是常用的自我控制测量方法中存在未被考虑的随机项目斜率，这可能会增加I类错误的可能性。本研究（N = 1386）使用随机项目斜率回归检验了自我控制与特质攻击的各个方面共享随机项目斜率的假设。
我们通过两种常见的自我报告来测量特质攻击和自我控制：布斯-佩里问卷和简短自我控制量表。
我们的分析表明，特质攻击的各个方面与自我控制共享显著的随机项目斜率，而且其中许多斜率是正的，而非负的。我们还发现，在未考虑这些随机斜率的模型中，I类错误膨胀很明显。
这些发现可能部分解释了文献中一些相互矛盾的结果，并且对研究自我控制和攻击行为感兴趣的研究人员应该检验随机项目斜率。
