Involved In Bullying In Children's Social Information Processing Characteristics And Empathic Ability,

The subject of bullying has become a focus of attention for researchers all over theworld. Bullying is a negative, intentional behavior (physical, verbal or psychologicalharassment) displayed by children towards theirs peers. Initial interests focused on theincidence of bullying, but this soon gave a way to a variety of other approaches. Newinstruments based on peer reporting instead of self-reporting for assessing bullying andvictimization have been devised and studied. Studies have been carried out into thebackgrounds and characteristics of children involved in bullying and a fair amount ofwork has been done on ways of developing intervention programs in order to stop thisbehavior. More recently, investigators have begun to focus on social knowledge andsocial cognition of children involved in bullying. The studies are based on two importanttheories on the topic: social information processing and theory of mind.In the present study the issue of bullying was investigated from the perspective ofsocial information processing. The aim of the study was to investigate the way in whichbullies, victim, bully/victims, and those not involved process social information and theirempathy. A peer nomination measure of bullying and victimization was administered inorder to devise the role of the children involved in bullying. The sample consisted of 2174-6 grade pupils. To test how children responded when provoked, both spontaneouslyand after prompting, we used provocation scenarios, and to test their attributioninterpretations we used ambiguous scenarios. The empathy of the participants wasmeasured by scale. The major findings are as follows:(1) Under provocation scenarios, the 4th graders responded less aggressive andavoidance reactions than the 6th graders;The active behavior and the avoidancebehavior evaluated by the lower grade children were more positively than the highergraders. When the intent of the perpetrator was ambiguous, the lower grade childrenattributed more blame than the higher graders.(2) Boys evaluated the for help behavior more positively than girls, they respondedmore for help behavior as well. At the feeling of sadness and the understanding feelingssubscales, the ability of the girls was better than the boys'.(3) After prompting, for help behavior and active behavior were increased ,aggressive behavior and avoidance behavior were reduced and irrelevance behavior hadno significant change.(4) Both the bullies and those not involved children evaluated the aggressivereaction more effectively than the bully/victims. At the understanding of the scenariosand the feelings of sadness, the ability of direct bullies was lower than that of indirectbullies', the difference between indirect bully and involved children was not significant.(5) The victims responded more irrelevant reactions than bullies, bully/victims andthose not involved when provoked, only spontaneously.(6) The bully/victims had a lower understanding ability about the scenarios thanthose not involved. There were no significant differences among bully/victims, bulliesand those not involved. When the intent of the perpetrator was ambiguous, bully/victimsattributed more blame. The feeling of sadness of bully/victims was lower than that ofthose not involved.