ABSTRACT
Social distancing policies have been practiced in different regions around the world to minimize the number of cases of COVID-19. After an outbreak in mid-July 2020, the Hong Kong government adopted a series of adminis-trative measures and strongly encouraged residents to stay at home. This lockdown period provided an oppor-tunity to study variations in levels of aggression when people spend more time than usual in an overcrowded liv-ing environment. A total of 185 Hong Kong residents were recruited for this study. Their perceptions of the crowdedness of their living space, aggression level (measured using the BPAQ-SF), proneness to boredom (meas-ured by the BFS-SF), and perceptions of risk regarding COVID-19 were collected via online questionnaires. Perceived crowdedness, proneness to boredom, and perceptions of susceptibility to COVID-19 were found to signi-ficantly predict the variance of different types of aggression in a regression model. In a mediation analysis, anger acted as a mediator of the relationship between proneness to boredom and different types of aggression. Parti-cipants' perceptions of their susceptibility to COVID-19 suggested an underlying worry about the contagious-ness of the virus, which was in turn associated with feelings of uncertainty and a rise in aggression level. © 2023, Universitaet Bielefeld. All rights reserved.