Students’ perceptions of the concepts of “trolling” and “flaming” as predictors of the occurrence of aggression in cyber communications

The paper presents the results of a study on cyber aggression, which is dangerous in its ability to transcend the virtual world and have negative consequences for all participants in the act of Internet communication. Theoretically, it has been substantiated that the processes of socialization and enculturation have been transferred from the real to the virtual space. There is evidence that aggression in cyberspace always has consequences in the real life of adolescents, as it increases their insecurity, lowers self-esteem and leads to apathy or suicide at-tempts. Predictors of aggressive behavior were identified, including not only emotional states, but also psychological defenses, as well as cognitive models of the personality of the essence of this phenomenon. Associative experiment was conducted, in which 540 students of Kemerovo State University took part. The stimulus words were the lexemes “flaming” and “trolling”. The results revealed a rather low degree of students' awareness of these manifestations of cyber aggression and an even lower degree of vigilance towards these phenomena