Differences in the early stages of social information processing for adolescents involved in bullying

Abstract

Bullying victimization has commonly been associated with deficiencies in social information processing (SIP). In contrast, findings regarding bullying perpetration are mixed, with some researchers claiming that bullies may have superior SIP abilities than victimized or uninvolved youth. This study investigated the effects of bullying and victimization on early SIP; specifically the recognition and interpretation of social information. In stage 1, 2,782 adolescents (11-16 years) were screened for bullying involvement, and in stage 2, 723 of these participants (mean age = 13.95) were assessed on measures of emotion recognition, hostile attribution bias, and characterological self-blame (CSB). No associations between bullying and early SIP were found. In contrast, victimization was associated with more hostile attribution bias and CSB attributions. Girls performed better than boys on the emotion recognition task while boys showed greater hostile attribution biases. No interaction effects of bullying or victimization with gender were found. Follow-up categorical analyses that considered pure victims versus victims who also bullied (bully-victims) on SIP, found a similar pattern of findings. These findings suggest that those who purely bully others are neither superior nor deficient in the early stages of SIP. Victimized adolescents, however, show biases in their interpretations of social situations and the intentions of others. These biases may lead to maladaptive responses and may increase risk for further victimization by peers.

Bullying History and Mental Health In University Students: The Mediator Roles of Social Support, Personal Resilience, and Self-Efficacy

“…In contrast, in Germany, bullies were as socially supported and personally resilient but even more self-efficient than those not involved in any bullying. This is consistent with previous findings that bullying is little socially sanctioned and conducted by students who are competent social manipulators with good emotional well-being (e.g., 5,6,58,59).…”

Association between Facial Emotion Recognition and Bullying Involvement among Adolescents with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Previous studies investigating the relationship between bullying involvement and the ability to recognize facial emotion have focused primarily on adolescents with typical neurodevelopment rather than adolescents with ASD. Most of these studies on general children and adolescents have discovered that victims had a lower ability to correctly recognize others' facial emotions [43,44]; however, research has found no significant difference in emotion recognition abilities between bullying perpetrators and neutrals [45,46]. Pozzoli et al [44] studied adolescents with typical neurodevelopment and observed that bullying perpetrators were more likely to correctly recognize others' emotion of fear than nonperpetrators did, allowing them to more efficaciously perform aggressive behaviors.…”

Bullying and negative appearance feedback among adolescents: Is it objective or misperceived weight that matters?

“…Self-reported bullying was based on the Bullying and Friendship Interview schedule (Wolke, Woods, Bloomfield, & Karstadt, 2000), a validated measure of bullying behaviour (Griffiths et al, 2006;Schreier et al, 2009). The scale included 13 behavioural descriptions (Wolke, Lee, & Guy, 2017) and assessed three different types of bullying, i.e., direct (e.g., "been hit or beaten up"), relational (e.g., "had lies / nasty things spread about you") and cyber (e.g. "had embarrassing pictures posted online without permission").…”