NCJ Number
227391
Journal
Child Abuse & Neglect Volume: 33 Issue: 5 Dated: May 2009 Pages: 307-311
Date Published
May 2009
Length
5 pages
Annotation
This study tested whether victims of bullying generally are more deficient in their ability to recognize emotions compared to bullies and "neutral" children, who are not involved in bullying or bullying victimization.
Abstract
The study found that victims who had been physically bullied were not more deficient in their ability to recognize emotions compared to bullies and neutral children; however, some support was found for the hypothesis that victims of "relational bullying" (friendship withdrawal, untrue rumors, and social exclusion) would have poor emotion-recognition abilities. This was especially true for the recognition of anger and fear in facial expressions; however, the effect sizes for differences in emotion-recognition abilities were small. Relational victims' poor emotion-recognition abilities may be one of the factors that explains why they are repeated targets of bullying victimization by their peers at school. These findings provide some initial support for the Social Information Processing Theory, which posits a detailed six-stage model of how children process and interpret cues in social situations in adopting competent behavior. A total of 373 primary school children, ages 9-11, from 11 schools in Hertfordshire, England, participated in this study. Using a time frame of the previous 6 months, children were asked to identify up to six children in their class whom they believed had physically bullied other children, as well as up to six children whom they believed had been physically bullied. The same procedure was used for relational bullying. In order to measure emotion-recognition ability, all of the children were administered the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy, which asks children to assess the emotions displayed in faces depicted on a computer screen. Four emotions were available for selection for each facial expression: happy, sad, angry, and fearful. 1 table and 18 references