The serial mediating roles of physical activity and anger rumination in the relationship between ego depletion and cyberaggression among college students

Abstract

The General Aggression Model proposes that input factors influence aggressive outcomes through cognitive and emotional processing, yet most existing research has focused on pairwise relationships or parallel mediation models without testing the sequential pathways among variables. This study aimed to test a serial mediation model examining whether ego depletion is associated with cyberaggression through the sequential mediating roles of physical activity and anger rumination. A cross-sectional design was adopted. A total of 1,016 Chinese college students (aged 18–24 years) were recruited through stratified sampling. Standardized self-report scales were used to assess ego depletion, physical activity volume, anger rumination, and cyberaggression. Controlling for gender and academic grade, serial mediation pathways were evaluated using the PROCESS macro with bootstrap resampling (5,000 iterations). The total effect of ego depletion on cyberaggression was significant ( b = 0.522, p < 0.001), with a significant direct effect remaining after incorporating mediators ( b = 0.240, p < 0.001). Mediation analysis indicated that physical activity and anger rumination partially mediated this relationship through three distinct indirect pathways: (1) physical activity alone (effect = 0.084, p < 0.001), (2) anger rumination alone (effect = 0.169, p < 0.001), and (3) the sequential pathway of physical activity followed by anger rumination (effect = 0.028, p < 0.001). The total indirect effect was 0.282, accounting for 54.02% of the total effect. Bootstrap 95% confidence intervals for all indirect pathways excluded zero. Ego depletion is both directly and indirectly associated with cyberaggression through the independent roles of physical activity and anger rumination, as well as their sequential combination. These findings highlight the value of addressing both self-regulatory depletion and cognitive-emotional processing in understanding online aggressive behaviors among university students.