Emotional intelligence and empathy in aggressors and victims of school violence.

Abstract

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.

Are Loneliness and Emotional Intelligence Important Factors for Adolescents? Understanding the Influence of Bullying and Cyberbullying Victimisation on Suicidal Ideation

“…There is a paucity of studies examining the association between suicide and EI in adolescence (Domínguez-García & Fernández-Berrocal, 2018), and even less in contexts of traditional bullying and cyberbullying. However, some findings (e.g., Baroncelli Estévez et al, 2019;Extremera et al, 2018;Quintana-Orts et al, 2019) have suggested that EI may be an important protective factor against the detrimental effects of bullying and cyberbullying victimisation, by promoting more positive ways of coping with stressful situations.…”

“…Recent research using adolescent participants (Estévez et al, 2019;Gomez-Baya et al, 2017;Martins et al, 2010) has found that individuals high in EI are more likely to deal appropriately with negative events than their lower-EI peers. Such effects have been attributed to this group's superior affective perceptions which, in turn, reduce the risk of negative mood states and emotional problems.…”

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence in Adolescent Cyberaggressors and Cybervictims

“…Deficits in EI or its dimension have been positively related to cybervictimization [ 24 ], as recently indicated by Elipe et al [ 25 ], who found that, when taking into account the dimensions of EI, cybervictims have greater competence in attending to their emotions, but lower competence in understanding and regulating them [ 25 , 38 , 39 ]. These results suggest the important role that the emotion regulation dimension plays in cybervictims.…”

Self-Regulation of Emotion Module to Reduce Aggressive Behavior

“…An emotional quotient also contributes to someone's aggressive behavior. Many studies conclude that emotional quotient significantly affects students' aggressive behavior [11], [12].…”