Victims of their own cognitions: Implicit social cognitions, emotional distress, and peer victimization

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2007.02.001Get rights and content

Abstract

This study investigated the relation between victimization and victimization-related distress and implicit social–cognitive processing. Eighty-seven 9–13 year old children completed measures of victimization experience and social cognitive processing tasks, including the emotional Stroop task and the self-concept Implicit Association Test (IAT). Participants also related narratives of personal victimization experiences. Results showed that children who experienced more frequent victimization and expressed more distress when discussing their victimization demonstrated increased implicit association of themselves as victims and greater use of emotionally dysregulated preemptive processing. This study represents the first evidence of a relation between distinct implicit processing patterns and chronic peer victimization among children.

Introduction

Max stared at the ground, his heart beating fast as the other kids stammered and stumbled to name foods that started with the same letter as their name. Max hated playing “the name game.” Everyone was going to laugh at him. He was going to say something stupid, and all the other kids would laugh. He would forget and say a food that started with the wrong letter, or they would make fun of him and call him “macaroni Max” or “meatball Max.” Everyone was already laughing at him. Chris had already made fun of his big ears, and all the kids had laughed. Max tried to will himself smaller, tried to sink into the ground to avoid the humiliation. He pushed his chin to his chest and wrapped blades of grass around his sweaty fingers.

The above paragraph, although fictional, presents an all-too-real portrait of the peer interactions of some children. Chronically teased, bullied, and harassed, these children may come to expect victimization, to identify themselves as victims, and to become distressed in even the most innocuous of peer environments. Peer victimization is a serious problem of childhood that has been shown to lead to depression, social withdrawal, lowered self-esteem, school avoidance, and increased suicidal ideation (Hodges and Perry, 1999, Kochenderfer and Ladd, 1996a, Kochenderfer and Ladd, 1996b), and has been cited in a recent American Psychological Association resolution as a major public health concern (American Psychological Association, 2004). The last 25 years have seen a tremendous upsurge in research on victimization, as studies have documented factors contributing to victimization, behavioral patterns of chronic victims, distinctions between different types of victimization and victim response patterns, and outcomes of victimization (e.g., Juvonen & Graham, 2001). However, there has been a dearth of research examining the cognitive and emotional processing patterns of chronic victims. The present study aims to provide an initial examination of the implicit cognitive and emotional processing styles of children with differing histories of experiencing victimization at the hands of their peers.

Rosen, Milich, and Harris (2007) proposed a model suggesting that victimization experiences interact with children's social–cognitive and socioemotional processing through development of an easily accessible “victim schema” (Perry, Hodges, & Egan, 2001). Relational schemas have been defined as “cognitive structures representing regularities in patterns of interpersonal relatedness” that develop out of repeated patterns of interaction and that serve as guides for the individual's expectations, cognitions, emotion, and behavior (Baldwin, 1992, p. 461). Baldwin (1992) states that schemas become more accessible through more frequent activation, and that more easily accessible schemas (i.e. victimization) will be more likely to activate in response to ambiguous situations (e.g., ambiguous threats), as ambiguous interactions are interpreted as being congruent with more accessible schemas.

These schemas are relied upon as guides for social interactions, as described in Crick and Dodge's (1994) reformulated social-information-processing model of children's social behavior. Crick and Dodge (1994) outlined how implicit cognitive and emotional mechanisms can inform and guide children's “on-line” social processing by influencing selective attention and encoding, attributions, and emotional arousal. Additionally, several researchers have suggested that emotional arousal may inhibit accurate information-processing (Costanzo and Dix, 1983, Crick and Dodge, 1994, Lemerise and Arsenio, 2000), by overriding or restricting the typical mechanisms used in social-information-processing. Rosen et al.'s (2007) victim schema model thus integrates elements of Crick and Dodge's (1994) reformulated social-information-processing model of aggression and Baldwin's (1992) relational schema theory to propose several distinct mechanisms by which accessibility of the victim schema interacts with children's social-information-processing to put children at risk for victimization.

Rosen et al.'s (2007) model proposed that an easily accessible victim schema would inform and guide children's on-line social processing in ways that would increase the children's risks of being victimized by peers (Crick & Dodge, 1994). First, the model proposes that children with more easily accessible victim schemas will likely be hypervigilant for threatening cues and more likely to attend to threatening than non-threatening cues in social interactions, as individuals often attend to and incorporate environmental information that is congruent with more easily accessible social schemas (Baldwin, 1992, Baldwin and Dandeneau, 2005, Crick and Dodge, 1994). Second, the model proposes that this attentional bias will likely influence children's patterns of attributions of peer behavior, as children who more selectively attend to hostile and threatening social cues will be more apt to attribute peer behaviors to hostile intent.

This perception of threat is proposed to lead to activation of the victim schema for children with easily accessible victim schemas through an implicit self-association of oneself with victimization in conflict interactions and a subsequent expectation of victimization in response to threatening social cues. Children who frequently experienced victimization in conflict situations will be more likely to have developed an association of threat with victimization (Baldwin, 1992, Greenwald et al., 2002, Rosen et al., 2007). Activation of the victim schema is proposed to produce a dyscontrolled emotional arousal due to an expectation of victimization that may inhibit children's ability to flexibly process social-information and generate response behaviors. Rather, a victimization schema will lead children to engage in rigidly schematic “preemptive” processing (Crick and Dodge, 1994, Lemerise and Arsenio, 2000, Rosen et al., 2007). Finally, the activated victim schema and subsequent dyscontrolled arousal are proposed to direct goal setting and response generation toward behaviors aimed at reducing arousal by avoiding or eliminating threat, leading children to engage in response behaviors that contribute to their risk of victimization (e.g., submission, inappropriate aggression; Schwartz et al., 1993, Schwartz et al., 2001).

Numerous studies have examined the attribution styles of children who are frequently involved in conflict with peers, supporting the notion that children who have more experience with aggression as either aggressors or victims are more likely to attribute hostile intent to behaviors of others than are children who have less substantial experience with aggression and conflict (e.g., Crick and Dodge, 1994, Crick and Dodge, 1996, Schwartz et al., 1998). Additionally, there has been a wealth of research demonstrating that chronically victimized children show inappropriate and ineffective reactions to threat. This holds for both children who are more prone to submissive or anxious behavior (“passive victims;” e.g., Olweus, 1978, Schwartz et al., 1993) and children who are prone to “reactive” aggression and anger in response to perceived threats (“provocative victims;” e.g., Crick and Dodge, 1996, Schwartz et al., 2001). Few studies, however, have examined how these attribution biases may affect children's social–cognitive and social–emotional processing of threat, leading them to engage in maladaptive response patterns. The present study thus focuses on attempting to illustrate a pattern of implicit association of victimization and emotionally dysregulated processing in the presence of threat. It is predicted that children who experience more frequent victimization will have a stronger concurrent implicit association of themselves as victims in response to social threats and be more likely to engage in emotionally dysregulated “pre-emptive” processing of threatening social stimuli.

Children who experience frequent conflict with peers may develop strong associations between their internal representations of “conflict” and their concepts of “self” such that they associate themselves with conflict in peer interactions (Dodge & Coie, 1987). When the experience of conflict frequently results in victimization, children may implicitly link themselves to victimization as well as conflict (Greenwald et al., 1998). Studies have supported the notion that frequent experience in a particular social role can lead an individual to develop strong implicit associations between the social experience and their self-concept (Greenwald et al., 2002, Greenwald and Farnham, 2000), and these studies indicate that this implicit self-association may guide the child's expectations and behavior (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000). The self-concept Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) offers a unique opportunity to directly assess the presence of an implicit link between victimization and self-concept in chronically victimized children. The self-concept IAT uses reaction time latencies to assess which of two categories of stimuli individuals are better able to associate with themselves (i.e., “me”) versus another label (i.e., “not me”; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000). Children who more frequently experience victimization should associate victimization-related stimuli with themselves more quickly than non-victims, as they are more likely to have an implicit self-association of themselves with the victimization role. The IAT has been demonstrated to be effective at assessing implicit attitudes in a sample of similar-aged children (Baron & Banaji, 2006).

Crick and Dodge's (1994) model describes a process whereby children integrate external information and internal cues to guide social behavior. However, theory and studies have indicated that emotional arousal may inhibit social problem solving, such that children who experience strong negative emotional arousal may be unable to accurately attend to and process external cues (Lemerise and Arsenio, 2000, Rieder and Cicchetti, 1989). Very little research has addressed preemptive cognitive processing styles in chronic peer victims. However, studies with other populations have demonstrated evidence of a cognitively defensive processing style in adults and children that inhibited their ability to attend to and process threatening external information.

Schippell, Vasey, Cravens-Brown, and Bretveld (2003) demonstrated that reactive aggression in children was related to suppressed attention to socially threatening cues on a construct-interference task. Children who were high in reactive aggression had shorter response time latencies for socially threatening words on a probe-detection task than did children who were low in reactive aggression, indicating that they were attending less to the social threat words than were other children despite the greater emotional salience. Schippell et al. (2003) interpreted this finding to indicate that reactively aggressive children were using rapidly and automatically activated preemptive cognitive processing that caused them to suppress their attention to threatening emotion-laden stimuli and interrupted the typical “on-line” processing of social-information (Crick & Dodge, 1994). This finding has particular relevance for victimized children, as numerous studies have indicated that at least a subset of victimized children are likely to be high in reactive aggression (e.g. Schwartz et al., 2001).

Additionally, studies using the emotional Stroop task, a construct-interference task that requires participants to name the colors of emotionally laden words, have demonstrated that in some instances individuals who experience more emotional arousal from threatening word content may actually experience lower levels of interference due to the use of cognitively defensive processing (Newman and McKinney, 2002, Zeijlmans van Emmichoven et al., 2003). Stimuli that were highly emotionally arousing produced a dyscontrolled arousal in some individuals that automatically directed their attention away from the content of threatening words, protecting the individual from the affective arousal caused by exposure to the threatening stimuli. This cognitively defensive processing style allowed for more efficient color-naming despite greater emotional salience, as the content of the word was not consciously processed and thus did not interfere with the color-naming task.

Newman and McKinney (2002) demonstrated that the emotional Stroop task can be used as a measure of cognitive defensiveness when used with individuals who are prone to cognitive repression of threat. They utilized idiographic threatening stimuli with groups that were high and low in defensive coping and found that individuals who were prone to utilizing defensive coping strategies experienced less interference from personally aversive stimuli on the emotional Stroop than did others. Zeijlmans van Emmichoven et al. (2003) found a similar pattern in adults who were insecurely attached.

Studies by Eisenberg et al. suggest that difficulties regulating emotional arousal may put children at increased risk for victimization by peers (see Eisenberg et al., 2000, Hanish et al., 2004, Rubin et al., 1998 for reviews). Victimization by peers undoubtedly leads to distress for all children (Hodges & Perry, 1999). However, it is likely that children who are more frequently victimized by peers experience greater negative emotional arousal when confronted with victimization-related social cues. Whereas it is very difficult to assess emotional arousal and distress at the moment of peer conflict, studies using narrative analysis have indicated that children who are more frequently victimized exhibit greater distress while recounting victimization experiences (e.g., Bollmer, Harris, & Milich, 2006). Thus, children who are more frequently victimized by peers are likely to find victimization-related stimuli strongly emotionally arousing and may thus automatically engage in defensive, preemptive processing of threatening social cues. We thus predict that children who experience frequent victimization will experience a dysregulated emotional arousal and display evidence of preemptive processing on the emotional Stroop, as indicated by faster response time latencies to victimization-related stimuli despite greater emotional interference. The emotional Stroop task is thus likely an effective measure of preemptive processing in chronic victims.

Recent research has increasingly demonstrated that chronic peer victims represent a heterogeneous population, with children differing both in the nature of their victimization (physical/direct verbal vs. relational/indirect verbal; e.g., Crick et al., 2001) and in their response patterns (passive/submissive vs. reactive/aggressive; e.g., Schwartz et al., 2001). Few studies have examined whether the antecedents and risk factors for victimization differ based on the nature of victimization. However, what little research there is seems to suggest that similar social cognitive processes underlie physically/direct verbally and relationally victimized children, but that different environmental cues activate the social cognitive processes (Crick, Grotpeter, & Bigbee, 2002). Specifically, Crick et al. (2002) found that relationally and physically aggressive children both exhibited hostile attribution biases, but that physically aggressive children only evidenced this bias in physical contexts and relationally aggressive children only evidenced this bias in relational contexts.

A similar pattern of social–cognitive processing seems to exist for passive and reactive/aggressive victims, as both groups demonstrate hypervigilance for threat and hostile attribution biases in social situations (Crick and Dodge, 1996, Schwartz et al., 1998). Additionally, Kochenderfer-Ladd (2004) indicated that emotional intensity was related to victimization for both emotions typically associated with passive/submissive victims (e.g. fear) and emotions typically associated with reactive/aggressive victims (e.g., anger). These findings indicate that it is likely that chronic victims of peer harassment engage in similar patterns of social–cognitive and emotional processing, regardless of the nature of threats or responses.

The aim of the present study is to provide an initial assessment into the implicit social cognitive and emotional processing patterns of children who experience more frequent victimization at the hands of their peers. Our major predictions are:

  • 1)

    Increased implicit association of self with victimization and preemptive processing of victimization-related stimuli will be associated with reported frequency of victimization experiences.

  • 2)

    Social–cognitive processing of victimization-related stimuli will be associated with increased expression of emotional distress relative to their victimization experiences.

Section snippets

Participants

Forty-eight boys and 35 girls aged 9 to 13 years (M = 10.96, SD = 1.01) were recruited through newspaper advertisements in a small metropolitan area. Studies have indicated that victimization is highest in frequency during the transition to middle school and initial middle school years (5th–7th grades; see Pellegrini & Long, 2002 for a review). Additionally, studies have indicated that victimization increases in stability as children approach middle school age (see Ladd & Ladd, 2001 for a

Relations of implicit cognitions to victimization experiences

Initial bivariate correlations were computed to assess the relations of the measures of social–cognitive processing (Stroop, IAT) to the victim composite score (see Table 2). Significant positive relations were observed between frequency of victimization and IAT reaction time, r(81) = .23, p < .05. Children who experienced more frequent victimization reacted more quickly to the victim-congruent trials of the IAT relative to the victim-incongruent trials, indicating a greater implicit

Discussion

The current findings present a first step toward identifying the social cognitive processing patterns of children who experience frequent victimization. The current findings provide a “snapshot” of the processing patterns of these children and offer support for the hypothesis that victimization is linked with implicit social–cognitive processing. Results indicated that frequent victims have distinct cognitive characteristics that are associated with more frequent experiences of victimization

References (52)

  • J. Bollmer et al.

    Reactions to bullying and peer victimization: Narratives, physiological arousal, and personality

    Journal of Research in Personality

    (2006)
  • B.J. Kochenderfer et al.

    Peer victimization: Manifestations and relations to school adjustment in kindergarten

    Journal of School Psychology

    (1996)
  • American Psychological Association

    APA resolution on bullying among children and youth

    Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Newsletter

    (2004)
  • M.W. Baldwin

    Relational schemas and the processing of social information

    Psychological Bulletin

    (1992)
  • M.W. Baldwin et al.

    Understanding and modifying the relational schemas underlying insecurity

  • A.S. Baron et al.

    The development of Implicit Attitudes: Evidence of race evaluations from ages 6 and 10 and adulthood

    Psychological Science

    (2006)
  • H. Blanton et al.

    Arbitrary metrics in psychology

    American Psychologist

    (2006)
  • P.R. Costanzo et al.

    Beyond the information processed: Socialization in the development of attributional processes

  • N.R. Crick et al.

    A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children's social adjustment

    Psychological Bulletin

    (1994)
  • N.R. Crick et al.

    Social information-processing mechanisms in reactive and proactive aggression

    Child Development

    (1996)
  • N.R. Crick et al.

    Relational victimization in childhood and adolescence: I hurt you through the grapevine

  • N.R. Crick et al.

    Relationally and physically aggressive children's intent attributions and feelings of distress for relational and instrumental peer provocations

    Child Development

    (2002)
  • M.E. DeRosier

    Building friendships and combating bullying: Effectiveness of a school-based social skills group intervention

    Journal of Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychology

    (2004)
  • K.A. Dodge et al.

    Social information-processing factors in reactive and proactive aggression in children's peer groups

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1987)
  • N. Eisenberg et al.

    Dispositional emotionality and regulation: Their role in predicting quality of social functioning

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2000)
  • R.H. Fazio et al.

    Implicit measures in social cognition research: Their meaning and use

    Annual Review of Psychology

    (2003)
  • S. Graham et al.

    Self-blame and peer victimization in middle school: An attributional analysis

    Developmental Psychology

    (1998)
  • A.G. Greenwald et al.

    Using the Implicit Association Test to measure self-esteem and self-concept

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2000)
  • A.G. Greenwald et al.

    Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1998)
  • A.G. Greenwald et al.

    A unified theory of implicit attitudes, stereotypes, self-esteem, and self-concept

    Psychological Review

    (2002)
  • A.G. Greenwald et al.

    Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: An improved scoring algorithm

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2003)
  • L.D. Hanish et al.

    The expression and regulation of negative emotions: Risk factors for young children's peer victimization

    Development and Psychopathology

    (2004)
  • E.V.E. Hodges et al.

    Personal and interpersonal antecedents and consequences of victimization by peers

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (1999)
  • J.A. Hubbard

    Emotion expression processes in children's peer interaction: The role of peer rejection, aggression, and gender

    Child Development

    (2001)
  • B.J. Kochenderfer et al.

    Peer victimization: Cause or consequence of school maladjustment

    Child Development

    (1996)
  • Cited by (87)

    • Peers and psychopathology

      2023, Encyclopedia of Child and Adolescent Health, First Edition
    • Peer victimization and health among children and adolescents

      2023, Encyclopedia of Child and Adolescent Health, First Edition
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text