## 4 Discussion  
The current study explored whether the behavioral parameters from the VR-based communication modification program effectively reflect participants' characteristics related to aggression. To compare the communication styles between individuals with marked differences in aggression levels, participants were recruited from the highest 25% and the lowest 25% groups of the AQ scores among young male adult volunteers. However, since they were all volunteers recruited from the general population, even the HA group had an average total AQ of 77.7 \(\pm\) 15.4, not as high as 87.4 \(\pm\) 21.7 for prisoners [53] and 97.2 \(\pm\) 21.2 for dating violent offenders [54]. Nevertheless, our overall results suggest that individuals with high aggression display different ways of communicating compared to those with low aggression. The significant difference in the task of exploring the communication style between the HA and LA groups was seen only in the NS-blaming. Since this task was configured in a format to select a communication type repeatedly, the number of selections may reflect an individual's preference for the communication style in interpersonal conflict situations. In the Satir model, communication was viewed as a coping method to survive while protecting oneself from anger experienced in an external conflict situation. It was explained that the experience of anger might be different between dysfunctional communication types. Specifically, placaters tend to be difficult to express anger, whereas blamers express anger indiscriminately [55]. Previous studies have demonstrated the higher the aggression, the more the anger is expressed to the outside through aggressive behaviors [56; 57]. Therefore,  
Figure 2: Comparison of the behavioral parameters obtained in the task of exploring the communication style between participants with high aggression and low aggression. Standard deviations are represented as error bars. * \(p<0.05\). greater NA-blaming in participants with high aggression seems to properly reflect their characteristics related to anger expression. Additionally, the correlation analysis between the number of selections for dysfunctional communication type and psychological assessments showed different patterns between the two groups. Particularly, the NS-distracting showed a negative correlation with the AQ-anger subscale scores in the HA group, and this correlation was the only one that showed a significant group difference in the z-tests after [PERSON]'s transformation. Individuals with the distracting communication style avoid conflicting emotion by blurring focus without paying attention to self, others, and situations [58]. The AQ-anger may reflect a tendency to harm others directly and physiological arousal and readiness for aggression [45]. Therefore, the result in the HA group suggests that the greater the direct aggression reflected by anger, the less choice of distracting communication style. This is consistent with the previous research that reported the higher the aggression or anger, the higher the possibility of direct violent action to resolve negative emotion [22]. In the task of practicing functional communication, the HA group did not show significant differences in the communication scores in the interactions with all dysfunctional communication styles compared with the LA group, nor did they show significant correlations between the communication scores and psychological scale scores. People with blaming communication are known to easily provoke anger in others [31]. Given that the HA group showed significantly higher NS-blaming than the LA group, the negative results in the task of practicing functional communication, which had no significant finding even in the CS-blaming, are not as expected. These are not because the virtual environment in the task did not induce conflict feelings in the HA group, but because there may be other confounding factors affecting the determination of the communication score based on self-evaluation.