Victims of Bullying: Emotion Recognition and Understanding

Abstract

Introduction: Victims of bullying often show interpersonal problems, such as having less high-quality interpersonal relationships compared to non-involved individuals. Research suggests that interpersonal struggles are associated with diminished emotional intelligence and competence and can lead to mental health problems such as depression. Therefore, we examined emotion recognition abilities, empathic accuracy, and behavioral responses to emotions in bullying victims and non-involved individuals. Based on previous research, we expected victims to show diminished skills in all three domains.Methods: Adolescents (Mage=17years; 67% female; no “other” gender participants) with (N=24) and without (N=21) a self-reported history of bullying victimization in high school completed a Virtual Reality facial emotion recognition task (ERT-VR), an empathic accuracy task (EAT) using videos of people recounting real-life autobiographical events, and a computer task in which they indicated their likely behavioral responses to facial emotions.Results: The two groups only significantly differed in recognizing emotions when taking their depression symptoms into account. Across emotions, victims had lower recognition accuracy than non-involved individuals. When examining emotion-specific differences, victims showed lower accuracy for neutral faces which they mainly mistook for angry faces.Conclusion: In contrast to expectations, adolescents with a high-school history of bullying victimization mostly showed similar emotional intelligence and competence skills as non-involved individuals. Nonetheless, we found some subtle differences regarding emotion recognition. Victims misjudged neutral as angry faces. This suggests a hostile attribution bias which might help explain victims’ interpersonal problems as well as their increased risk for mental health problems.

The Influence of Bullying on Positive Emotions and Their Effect as Mediators between Controllable Attributions of Success and Academic Performance

“…Some studies investigating PE, such as pride and hope, obtain results that confirm the increased perception of academic success [ 49 , 50 ]. According to Fredrickson [ 51 ], EPs enhance the acquisition of more personal resources for complex tasks that are present in teaching–learning processes [ 50 ]. The activation of these emotions allows students to perceive successful task performance, as opposed to negative emotions that are related to perceptions of failure [ 21 ].…”

“…The highest scores in PE were observed in the non-victim aggression category, while the victim with aggression category showed the lowest scores in PE. Other studies have more generally observed that experiences related to bullying in some way are associated with difficulties in regulating emotions, suggesting alterations in students’ emotional intelligence, which may persist into adulthood [ 50 , 51 ]. However, it should be noted that those who fell under the victim with aggression category, in addition to showing the lowest scores in PE, were those who showed the lowest AP according to a previous article with the same sample of students, where statistically significant differences were also observed with respect to the categories of bullying and AP [ 35 ].…”

Research on the influence of sports participation on school bullying among college students—Chain mediating analysis of emotional intelligence and self-esteem

“…Similarly, bullies will be less likely to bully others, thus reducing the occurrence of school bullying. At the same time, some scholars believe that ( Canas et al, 2020a , b ; Leon-del-Barco et al, 2020 ; Franzen et al, 2021 ) emotional intelligence is a protective factor of school bullying, and has a key role to play in promoting students’ emotional adjustment and understanding ability.…”

Emotional processing in bullying: an event-related potential study

“…Based on previous studies that found that negative childhood experiences that were associated with abuse situations influence the development of specific biases in emotional processing 38 , 39 , we hypothesized that there would be greater emotional reactivity over time, reflected by EPN and LPP components, in victims of bullying compared with bullies and observers.…”