[Correlations among resilience against violent behavior toward the self and others, rumination, and anger in high...

Objectives Correlations among resilience against violent behavior toward the self and others, ruminations, and anger were examined to obtain data for preventive interventions for violent behavior toward the self and others in high school students.Methods An anonymous self-report questionnaire was administered to first, second, and third-year high school students (N=327). There were 280 valid responses (85.6%). The following causal model was assumed based on the data: Resilience directly affects violent behavior toward the self and others and simultaneously affects violent behavior through rumination and anger. The goodness of fit of the model and correlations among variables were analyzed using structural equation modeling, with gender and school year as control variables.Results The goodness of fit of the model to the data indicated that the comparative fit index was 0.980 and the root mean square error of approximation was 0.043. Statistically significant negative correlations among the variables were indicated between resilience and rumination and between violent behavior toward the self and others. On the other hand, statistically significant positive correlations were indicated between rumination and anger and between anger and violent behavior toward the self and others. The contribution ratio of the model to violent behavior was 82.9%. Furthermore, gender, which was one of the control variables, had a statistically significant positive correlation with resilience and a negative correlation with violent behavior.Conclusions Results of structural equation modeling indicated that resilience decreased rumination and directly decreased violent behavior toward the self and others. Moreover, rumination had a strong effect on violent behavior mediated by anger. It is suggested that increasing resilience and suppressing rumination that reinforces anger would effectively prevent violent behavior toward the self and others.