Family Incivility and Cyberbullying Perpetration Among College Students: Negative Affect as a Mediator and Dispositional Mindfulness as a Moderator

Abstract

Although family factors are associated with cyberbullying, few studies have investigated the relationship between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration. The current study aimed to examine the associations between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration among college students, and further investigate the underlying moderated mediation mechanism. Study 1 was a cross-sectional survey among 640 Chinese undergraduate students ( Mage = 20.29 years, SD = 1.38). Demographics, family incivility, cyberbullying perpetration, and negative affect were assessed. The results supported the idea that negative affect plays a role in mediating the relationship between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration. Study 2 used a two-wave longitudinal design, aiming to examine both the mediating role of negative affect and the moderating role of dispositional mindfulness (represented through five facets—observing, describing, acting with awareness, nonjudging, and nonreacting—each of which were analyzed separately). The data were collected from 200 Chinese undergraduate and graduate students ( Mage = 22.18, SD = 2.56). Negative affect was also found to play a mediation effect in this study. Furthermore, the results found that acting with awareness and nonjudging weakened the relationship between family incivility and negative affect, whereas observing exacerbated it. Moreover, nonjudging exacerbated the relationship between negative affect and cyberbullying perpetration. The present findings indicate that negative affect may play a role in explaining the association between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration. Furthermore, acting with awareness and nonjudging could buffer the relationship between family incivility and cyberbullying perpetration via negative affect, which provides a new insight for the prevention of and intervention on cyberbullying perpetration.

The relationship between trait mindfulness and resilience: A meta‐analysis

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Family incivility and workplace bullying: mediating and moderating model of psychological safety, optimism and organization-based self-esteem

“…Family incivility, psychological safety and workplace bullying Scholars have established family incivility obstructs positive and promotes adverse outcomes at work (Bai et al, 2016;Gopalan et al, 2021;Lim and Tai, 2014;Paul et al, 2021). Also, the link between family incivility and adverse interpersonal outcomes has been analyzed (Bai et al, 2020;Jin and Miao, 2022;Naeem et al, 2020;Sharma and Mishra, 2021;Ren et al, 2022). To our best knowledge, no study has examined the link between family incivility and positive interpersonal outcomes (e.g.…”