Differences in Severity and Emotions for Public and Private Face-to-Face and Cyber Victimization Across Six Countries

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of medium (face-to-face, cyber) and publicity (public, private) in perceptions of severity and emotional responses to victimization among adolescents from China, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, India, Japan, and the United States, while controlling for gender, individualism, and collectivism. There were 3,432 adolescents (age range = 11-15 years, 49% girls) included in this study. They read four hypothetical victimization scenarios, which were manipulated based on the medium and publicity, including public face-to-face victimization, private face-to-face victimization, public cyber victimization, and private cyber victimization. After reading the scenarios, adolescents rated the severity of each scenario and their feelings of anger, sadness, and embarrassment following victimization. Overall, higher severity related to each of the emotional responses. Furthermore, greater perceptions of severity increased adolescents’ feelings of anger, sadness, and embarrassment more often for public victimization and face-to-face victimization than for private victimization and cyber victimization. Some variations were found in these associations based on country of origin. The findings from this study indicate that perceived severity and emotional responses are different in various victimization contexts. Therefore, it is important to consider various victimization contexts.

Comparing Early Adolescents’ Positive Bystander Responses to Cyberbullying and Traditional Bullying: the Impact of Severity and Gender

“…The level of bullying severity for both traditional and cyberbullying vignettes was differentiated by the intensity of the mean/aggressive comment, the repetitive nature of the incident and the extent to which the victim was upset. Such factors in the literature are known to impact perceived severity and increase negative feelings for the victim (Gini and Espelage 2014;Palladino et al 2017;Wright et al 2017), and as such, formed the rationale for the development of the severity categories for the vignettes. After each scenario had been read out by the researcher (to overcome any literacy/comprehension issues), participants were asked BWhat would you do in this situation?…”

Analysis of Moral Disengagement as a Modulating Factor in Adolescents’ Perception of Cyberbullying

“…Researchers use a particular set of criteria to differentiate an episode of cyberbullying from an act of cyber-aggression – power imbalance, intentionality to hurt, repetition, publicity, and anonymity (Thomas et al, 2015). Adolescents have not only established a hierarchy of these criteria (Talwar et al, 2014; Barlett et al, 2016; Wright et al, 2017; Samoh et al, 2019), but have also constructed synergistic pairwise relationships among them (Nocentini et al, 2010; Palladino et al, 2017; Fernández-Antelo and Cuadrado-Gordillo, 2018). In this sense, studies indicate that although adolescents point to repetition of the aggression as being an identifying criterion for cyberbullying (Thomas et al, 2017), they generally consider it to be a second-order factor dependent on other primary factors such as publicity or intentionality to hurt.…”

“…However, they perceive publicity as being a key element in the identification of cyberbullying. They understand that when abuses are committed in private, they can be classified as aggressions but not as cyberbullying because they do not cause the same pain as if the abuse transcends into the public plane through its diffusion with the use of technological resources (Chen and Cheng, 2016; Wright et al, 2017).…”

Divergent Perceptual Processes on Cyberbullying Between Victims and Aggressors: Construction of Explanatory Models

“…Other researchers, however, warn of the limited relevance of this criterion when defining and identifying cyberbullying episodes, arguing that a single aggression that spreads uncontrollably (virality) may cause recurring harm to the victim in a similar way to that produced if the behavior was performed continuously (Hutson, 2016 ). Although embarrassing private content may only have been sent to one recipient, it may be seen and then forwarded by others, not only increasing the durability of the harm (Pieschl et al, 2015 ) but also the perception of its seriousness (Schultze-Krumbholz et al, 2014 ; Wright et al, 2017 ).…”