The objective of the present study was to analyze the extent to which violent peer behavior and victimization, both traditional and cybernetic, and predict certain indicators of psychological maladjustment in adolescents, such as self-concept, satisfaction with life, feeling of loneliness, depressive symptomatology, perceived stress, social anxiety, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Participants in the study were 1318 adolescents of both sexes, aged between 11 and 18 years and enrolled in Compulsory Secondary Education schools. The design of the study was cross-sectional. The results indicated that the victims generally present greater maladjustment than the aggressors. Both victims and cybervictims showed a greater decrease in all the dimensions of self-concept, compared with aggressors and cyberaggressors. However, the two types of aggressors showed a higher likelihood of presenting low levels of empathy. Feeling of loneliness, depressive symptomatology, perceived stress, and degree of life satisfaction was more probable to be present in all groups of aggressors and victims. Finally, with regard to emotional intelligence, victims had a higher probability of obtaining low scores in all the dimensions of this construct; this was the case for traditional aggressors only in the dimension of emotion regulation. These results contribute to our understanding of the consequences of harassment in the adaptation of the students involved, with relevant practical implications.

The present study was organized around 2 main objectives: first, to analyze emotional intelligence (EI) both in aggressors and victims of school violence, considering 3 dimensions of EI—emotional attention, emotional clarity, and emotion regulation—and second, to analyze empathy in aggressors and victims of school violence, taking into consideration 2 dimensions—cognitive and affective empathy. Participants were 1,318 Spanish adolescents, aged between 11 and 17 years (47% boys) enrolled in 4 secondary schools, and who completed self-report measures. Analyses of variance were conducted to analyze the data. The results indicated that, regarding EI, victims of school violence scored significantly higher in the dimension of emotional attention, but significantly lower in emotional clarity and emotion regulation; aggressors showed differences only in emotion regulation, with significantly lower scores. With regard to empathy, victims showed less empathetic joy, a subdimension of affective empathy, which indicated that they are, at the moment, unable to feel happiness for others’ successes; aggressors obtained lower scores both in cognitive and affective empathy. These results underscore the importance of managing emotions in the main school violence roles in adolescent students and help us to understand differences between aggressors and victims in the managing of affect.

The main objective of the present research was to examine the role played by emotional intelligence in its three dimensions—emotional attention, emotional clarity, and emotion regulation—and by empathy in its four dimensions—perspective-taking, empathic understanding, empathic stress, and empathic joy—in cyber violence, both in aggressors and victims. A total sample of 1318 adolescents (47% boys; aged between 11 and 17 years), enrolled in four secondary compulsory education schools in Spain, participated in the study. The results indicated that, regarding emotional intelligence, cyberaggressors showed statistically significant differences in the dimension of emotion regulation. Participation in violent online behaviors is associated with a lower capacity to regulate emotions; cybervictims showed statistically significant differences in the three dimensions of emotional intelligence. Regarding empathy, cyberaggressors obtained statistically significant group differences in three of these dimensions: perspective-taking, empathetic joy, and empathic stress. Finally, the empathy dimensions for the cybervictimization groups did not show significant mean differences, indicating that there was no statistical relationship between the degree of cybervictimization and the individual’s empathy. These findings stress the relevance of emotion regulation in cyberviolence in students in adolescence and allow us to understand the different roles it plays for offenders and victims.