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Emotion recognition abilities and empathy of victims of bullying

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Participants

Overall, 373 primary school children from 11 schools in Hertfordshire, UK participated in the study, aged 9–11 years (M = 9.94, SD = 0.45). Of the 373 children, 200 children had full datasets (i.e., bullying nominations, DANVA and Empathy Questionnaire). Sixteen schools were approached via telephone to take part in the study (69% overall participation). The average school size was 192 (range: 100–240 pupils). A total of 9% of children came from ethnic minority groups. If a school was interested in

Incidence of peer-nominated bullying roles

Of those children involved in some form of bullying behaviour (n = 141), 30.5% were classified as physical and relational victims, followed by 24.1% as physical and relational bullies. Pure bullying roles were less frequent with 15.6% of children classified as physical victims only, 12.8% as relational victims only, 9.2% as physical bullies only, and 7.8% as relational bullies only. A Kappa coefficient (Kappa = 0.64, p < .001), indicated a significant amount of overlap between physical and relational

Discussion

The hypothesis that victims, in general, would have poorer emotion recognition abilities could not be accepted as physical victims were not found to have poorer abilities compared to neutrals and bullies. In contrast, some support was generated for the hypothesis that relational victims would have poor emotion recognition abilities. Relational victims and in some instances “overlap” victims (both relational and physical victims) were not as adept as others at recognising emotions overall, and

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the VICTEC team members for making this study possible. Special thanks also to all the schools in Hertfordshire that took part.

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    Furthermore, the present study provides evidence that being a victim of bullying is a prominent risk factor for social, emotional, and mental-health problems. This is consistent with findings in previous studies in which bullying victims are more likely to demonstrate social emotional problems (Woods et al., 2009; Arseneault et al., 2010), internalizing behavior problems (Benjet et al. 2010), and depressive symptoms in their later life (Copeland et al., 2013; Reijntjes et al., 2010; Winsper et al., 2012). Along with the immediate effects on behavioral problems in middle childhood, peer victimization was found to have long-term negative consequences (i.e., depressive symptoms) in adolescence.

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This research was conducted as part of the VICTEC project (IST-2001-33310) (www.victec.org), part-funded by the European Community Framework V Program.

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