Perceived Parenting and Adolescent Cyber-Bullying: Examining the Intervening Role of Autonomy and Relatedness Need Satisfaction, Empathic Concern and Recognition of Humanness

Abstract

Due to the progress in information technology, cyber-bullying is becoming one of the most common forms of interpersonal harm, especially among teenagers. The present study (N = 548) aimed to investigate the relation between perceived parenting style (in terms of autonomy support and psychological control) and cyber-bullying in adolescence. Thereby, the study tested for the intervening role of adolescent need satisfaction (i.e., autonomy and relatedness), empathic concern towards others, and adolescents’ recognition of full humanness to cyber-bullying offenders and victims. Findings revealed both a direct and an indirect relation between parenting and cyber-bullying. More specifically, parental psychological control directly predicted cyber-bullying, whereas parental autonomy support related to less cyber-bullying indirectly, as it was associated with the satisfaction of adolescents’ need for autonomy, which predicted more empathic concern towards others, which in turn differentially related to recognition of humanness to victims and bullies. The discussion focuses on the implications of the current findings.

The effects of ethnic group membership on bullying at school: when do observers dehumanize bullies?

“…In this study we hypothesized a differential attribution/denial of humanness to bullies by the observers, depending on the group membership (ingroup versus outgroup ethnicity) of both the bullies and the victims. Despite the focus of the literature on the importance of HU over HN traits in bullying phenomena (Fousiani et al, 2016;van Noorden et al, 2015), we claim that denial of both senses of humanness can occur in intergroup bullying. Both types of humanness are ".…”

“…According to the literature, bullies seem to score lower in human uniqueness characteristics but not in human nature traits. Low HU of people fosters moral disengagement and delegitimization of victims and can therefore explain why individuals scoring low in HU engage in bullying behaviors (Fousiani et al, 2016). To the best of our knowledge there is no study to date investigating these effects in an ethnicity-based intergroup context.…”

“…There is limited research evidence linking anti-social behavior and bullying at school with such dehumanizing practices (Costello & Hodson, 2014;Fousiani et al, 2016;van Noorden et al, 2015;van Noorden, Cillessen, Haselager, Lansu, & Bukowski, 2017). Van Noorden and colleagues (2015) found that denial of HU to peers is more common than denial of HN and that non friends are attributed lower HU than friends.…”

“…According to the definition of empathy by Gini (2006), two main dimensions of empathy can be distinguished: (a) an affective dimension, often referred to as empathic concern, which represents the ability to experience another's emotions; and (b) a cognitive dimension, often referred to as perspective taking, which reflects the ability to understand another person's emotional state (Gini, 2006). Empathic concern as a personality variable, has been related to lower recognition of humanness to the bullies and higher recognition of humanness to the victims (Fousiani et al, 2016). In the current study, instead of measuring empathy as a personality trait, we focused on adolescents' empathic concern towards the victim and on their perspective taking towards the bully as states that might depend on the group membership of both the victim and the bully.…”

“…Finally, the mediating role of observers' perspective taking of the bully and empathic concern towards the victim was explored. Interestingly, contrary to prior research, we probed the role of empathy not as a dispositional trait (Fousiani et al, 2016), but as a state (see Bauman & Del Rio, 2006) that may depend on the group membership of bullies and victims.…”