Compensatory Online Aggressive Behavior Is Associated With Psychological Distress Through Emotional Venting and Negative Affect Duration, Moderated by Empathy
Description
This dataset supports the study entitled “Compensatory Online Aggressive Behavior Is Associated With Psychological Distress Through Emotional Venting and Negative Affect Duration, Moderated by Empathy.” The study used a cross-sectional questionnaire design to examine the association between compensatory online aggressive behavior (COAB) and psychological distress (PD), with perceived emotional venting (PEV) and negative affect duration (NAD) examined as indirect emotional processes and empathy (EP) examined as a moderating variable. Data were collected from 442 adult social media users recruited through convenience and snowball sampling via Wenjuanxing, WeChat, and offline channels. Eligible participants were aged 18 years or older and had experienced, witnessed, or been exposed to online aggressive behavior in sports event–related online discourse. All responses were collected anonymously. All five measures used in the study were developed by the author specifically for the present research. Existing theories, construct definitions, and prior empirical studies were used to inform construct conceptualization and item generation; no previously published scale was directly adopted, translated, or reproduced. The initial questionnaire contained 50 items, with 10 items for each construct. After exploratory factor analysis, 45 items were retained for subsequent analyses: 9 COAB items, 8 PEV items, 10 NAD items, 8 PD items, and 10 EP items. The hypotheses examined were: H1: COAB is positively associated with PD. H2: COAB is indirectly and positively associated with PD through PEV. H3: COAB is indirectly and positively associated with PD through NAD. H4: COAB is indirectly and positively associated with PD through the serial pathway PEV → NAD. H5: EP moderates the COAB–PD association, such that higher EP is associated with a weaker positive relationship between COAB and PD. Structural equation modeling was conducted in AMOS with 5,000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples. PROCESS v4.1 (Model 1) was used only as a supplementary simple-slope probing procedure for the moderation effect. The dataset can be used to reproduce the descriptive statistics, factor analyses, correlations, direct and indirect effects, serial indirect effect, and moderation analyses reported in the manuscript. Because the study is cross-sectional, the data and findings should be interpreted as evidence of associations rather than causal effects.