Social-Emotional Processing and Bullying Behaviour
Date
2014-07-17
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Abstract
Bullying is a prevalent form of aggressive behaviour that is associated with negative social, emotional, and educational outcomes for children involved in bullying and victimization. Prevalence and negative outcomes associated with bullying has lead researchers to examine potential individual characteristics associated with bullying that can guide prevention and intervention efforts. While the relation between poorer empathy and facial affect recognition and aggressive behaviour is well documented, few studies have examined these individual characteristics and bullying behaviour. Moreover, research to date presents conflicting results, making it difficult to form conclusions and inform practice. Differing methods across studies and limited inclusion of different types of bullying (i.e., physical and relational) and different associated roles (i.e., bully-victim) likely explain conflicting results. Building upon these limitations, this study explored relations between affective empathy, facial affect recognition, and bullying behaviour in a sample of Canadian children. A total of 192 children in grades four to six participated in this study. Females were found to report significantly higher affective empathy than males, and higher facial affect recognition accuracy was associated with higher affective empathy scores in males only. Involvement in more frequent bullying and bully- victimization was associated with poorer affective empathy in females only. Further analysis indicated that for females poorer affective empathy predicted more frequent bullying and bully- victimization. Results of this study are discussed in terms of theoretical, empirical, and practical implications. The strengths and limitations of this study are also discussed and directions for future research are presented.
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Educational Psychology
Citation
Pugliese, G. V. (2014). Social-Emotional Processing and Bullying Behaviour (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27811