Feeling cybervictims’ pain—The effect of empathy training on cyberbullying

Abstract

As the world's population increasingly relies on the use of modern technology, cyberbullying becomes an omnipresent risk for children and adolescents and demands counteraction to prevent negative (online) experiences. The classroom-based German preventive intervention "Medienhelden" (engl.: "Media Heroes") builds on previous knowledge about links between cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and cyberbullying, among others. For an evaluation study, longitudinal data were available from 722 high school students aged 11-17 years (M = 13.36, SD = 1.00, 51.8% female) before and six months after the implementation of the program. A 10-week version and a 1-day version were conducted and compared with a control group (controlled pre-long-term-follow-up study). Schools were asked to randomly assign their participating classes to the intervention conditions. Multi-group structural equation modeling (SEM) showed a significant effect of the short intervention on cognitive empathy and significant effects of the long intervention on affective empathy and cyberbullying reduction. The results suggest the long-term intervention to be more effective in reducing cyberbullying and promoting affective empathy. Without any intervention, cyberbullying increased and affective empathy decreased across the study period. Empathy change was not generally directly linked to change in cyberbullying behavior. "Media Heroes" provides effective teaching materials and empowers schools to address the important topic of cyberbullying in classroom settings without costly support from the outside.

Efficacy of Cyberbullying Prevention on Somatic Symptoms—Randomized Controlled Trial Applying a Reasoned Action Approach

“…Students that completed the long intervention form reported significantly fewer cyberbullying behaviors and fewer somatic symptoms than the control group students 6 months after intervention. Together with findings supporting the interventions’ long‐term effects on cognitive and affective empathy (Schultze‐Krumbholz et al., ), this study suggests that Media Heroes is a suitable preventive approach not only for cyberbullying and related social competencies but with additional beneficial effects on somatic complaints.…”

“…Attitudes and morals concerning the problem behavior have also been identified as useful predictors of cyberbullying (Boulton, Lloyd, Down, & Marx, 2012;Heirman & Walrave, 2012). Recently, researchers considered interactions of these variables and proposed more sophisticated explanatory models of cyberagression (Barlett, 2017;Hawley & Williford, 2015;Schultze-Krumbholz, Schultze, Zagorscak, W€ olfer, & Scheithauer, 2016). Multiple studies focused on already established theoretical frameworks, such as the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) or the more parsimonious theory of reasoned action (ToRA; Madden, Ellen, & Ajzen, 1992).…”

“…In summary, we hypothesized that For other publications that used parts of the data set at hand to answer different research questions see W€ olfer et al (2013) and Schultze-Krumbholz et al (2016).…”

“…However, the overall difference (4 months on average) between the conditions was low and therefore students were still likely to attend the same grade level. Thus the groups were considered homogenous (see also Schultze-Krumbholz et al, 2016).…”

A Study on Cyberbullying: Its Forms, Awareness and Moral Reasoning Among Youth

“…Additionally, moral values can be instilled by creating cognizance amongst the public on the moral reasoning behind the activities of cyberbullying [32]. With the establishment of moral reasoning in a person, cyberbullying activities can be minimized [33]. The findings in this study revealed that victims of cyberbullying will usually experience high negative impact psychologically and most of the time caused the victim to lower their self-esteem [34,35] and this activity is prevalent and has gaining its popularity amongst youth.…”