Preservice Preschool Teachers' Responses to Bullying Scenarios: The Roles of Years of Study and Empathy

Abstract

The present study is aim to examine whether preservice preschool teachers' respond differently to physical, verbal and relational bullying, and how their years of study and trait empathy related their responses. There were 242 preservice teachers in the present study. Empathy was measured with the self-report Interpersonal Reactive Index; the Bullying Attitude Questionnaire was used to assess their perceptions of incident seriousness, their sympathy toward the victim of the bullying, and their possibility to intervene in the situation. The results revealed that the participants responded most to physical bullying and least to relational bullying. Interestingly, responses to relational bullying tended to decrease during the university period. The empathy dimensions played different roles in the participants' responses to bullying, while cognitive empathy have little relationship with the participants' responses to bullying, emotional empathy played a more complex role in the participants' responses to bullying: empathic concerns moderated the relationship between years of study and responses to bullying, and personal distress negatively predicted the participants' responses to all types of bullying. The implications for bullying intervention and the suggestion for teacher education are discussed.

Warning signs of preschool victimization using the strengths and difficulties questionnaire: Prevalence and individual and family risk factors

“…The manifestation of peer victimization in the preschool years is similar to that of school-age children in many ways but differs in others depending on the child’s development of social cognition [21]. Younger students usually tend to resort to physical aggression, possibly because they have not yet developed the required sophistication of verbal or social skills to obtain what they want.…”

What Is the Relationship Between Empathy and Mental Health in Preschool Teachers: The Role of Teaching Experience

“…Among the components of empathy, personal distress and fantasy facilitate the overwhelming merging from self to others to feel the others’ feeling, which increases one’s susceptibility to negative emotions and stresses and consequently results in higher risk of stress and mental health problems ( Keaton, 2017 ; Huang et al, 2018 ). Empathic concern and perspective taking are based on the distinction between self and others, protect one from being overwhelmed by others’ emotion, and consequently help in resisting stress and mental health problems.…”

“…Experience is also found to be related with empathy. For example, in psychiatrists, subjects with more years of experience had lower empathic concern scores (Santamaría-García et al, 2017); in preservice preschool teachers, years of study is also found to correlate with various dimensions of empathy (Huang et al, 2018). Katz (1972) has emphasized that teaching experience is one of the core variables of preschool teachers' characters.…”

“…According to a research on student preschool teacher (Huang et al, 2018), the mechanisms underlying the changing pattern of empathy are dehumanization and detachment, which are indexes of job burnout (Haslam and Loughnan, 2014). Preschool teaching typically involves emotional labor, of which emotional engagement is a core part (Philipp and Schüpbach, 2010).…”

Teacher empathy and students with problem behaviors: Examining teachers' perceptions, responses, relationships, and burnout

“…Empathy can also influence teachers' attitudes and behaviors toward vulnerable populations and diverse youth in multicultural schooling contexts. Affective empathy in particular seemed to play an important role in special education and general education teachers' positive attitudes toward their students with disabilities (Parchomiuk, 2019) and student–teachers' likelihood of intervening in a bullying scenario (Huang et al, 2018). Both forms of empathy related to increased use of culturally sensitive practices when teaching diverse populations of students (Warren, 2018).…”