The Effect of Anger Rumination on Malevolent Creativity: The Mediating Role of Aggression and the Moderating Role of Mindfulness

Abstract

Malevolent creativity, as a kind of harmful creativity, can seriously threaten social stability and can have profound negative impacts on society. Uncovering the influencing factors and mechanisms of malevolent creativity helps individuals understand its nature and characteristics, providing research support for preventing and controlling malevolent creativity events. This cross-sectional study is based on the generation process of thoughtful action in the General Aggression Model (GAM) to think about the mechanism of malevolent creativity. The study took 383 Chinese college students (76.2% female, M_age = 20.18, SD = 2.22 years) as a representative sample to examine the impact of angry rumination on malevolent creativity. In addition, this study tested a relational model incorporating angry rumination, mindfulness, aggression, and malevolent creativity. The results indicated that anger rumination not only directly predicts malevolent creativity, but also indirectly influences malevolent creativity through the partial mediating effect of aggression. More importantly, this study found an interesting result that mindfulness moderates the impact of anger rumination on aggression after controlling for gender, age, and education level. Specifically, high levels of mindfulness facilitated the mediating effect of angry rumination on aggression, thereby enhancing levels of malevolent creativity. In other words, instead of suppressing, mindfulness can intensify the path from angry rumination to aggression, a finding that conflicts with the view of mindfulness as a protective factor in previous studies. This study theoretically enriches the research on the influencing factors of malevolent creativity and helps to better understand the mechanism of malevolent creativity. It also has certain practical significance, providing some inspiration for the intervention of malevolent creativity under the theoretical framework of GAM.