Summer Boggs, a doctoral student working in the lab, successfully proposed her master’s thesis earlier this week. Summer’s thesis aims to advance the literature on relational aggression among college students by focusing on the fear of negative evaluation component of social anxiety, as suggested by Andrews and colleagues’ (2019) application of Social Information Processing theory. She plans to test hostile attribution bias as a mediator and to include empathy as a moderator of at least one predicted relationship. The literature is filled with conflicting findings about the relationship between social anxiety and relational aggression, so we hope that Summer’s project can help to clarify it.

Congratulations to Summer on her successful thesis proposal!

Tags: relational aggression, anxiety