Citation

Blake KR, Bastian B, Denson TF. Aggressive Behav. 2018; 44(1): 40-49.

Affiliation

School of Psychology, Mathews Building, The University of New South Wales, UNSW Sydney NSW, Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, International Society for Research on Aggression, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/ab.21722

PMID

28771741

Abstract

Research from a variety of disciplines suggests a positive relationship between Western cultural sexualization and women's likelihood of suffering harm. In the current experiment, 157 young men were romantically rejected by a sexualized or non-sexualized woman then given the opportunity to blast the woman with loud bursts of white noise. We tested whether the activation of sexual goals in men would mediate the relationship between sexualization and aggressive behavior after romantic rejection. We also tested whether behaving aggressively toward a woman after romantic rejection would increase men's feelings of sexual dominance.

RESULTS showed that interacting with a sexualized woman increased men's sex goals. Heightened sex goal activation, in turn, predicted increased aggression after romantic rejection. This result remained significant despite controlling for the effects of trait aggressiveness and negative affect. The findings suggest that heightened sex goal activation may lead men to perpetrate aggression against sexualized women who reject them.

© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Language: en

Keywords

aggression; rejection; sex goals; sexual dominance; sexualization