How children’s victimization relates to distorted versus sensitive social cognition: Perception, mood, and need fulfillment in response to Cyberball inclusion and exclusion

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Highlights

  • Whether victimization relates to biased or sensitive social cognition is examined using a Cyberball paradigm.

  • Self- and peer-reported victimization have a different social cognition profile.

  • Self-reported victimization is associated with a negativity bias regarding perception and well-being.

  • Peer-reported victimization is associated with increased sensitivity regarding well-being.

  • The results have implications for social cognition interventions aimed at victims.

Abstract

This study examined whether victimization is associated with negatively distorted social cognition (bias), or with a specific increased sensitivity to social negative cues, by assessing the perception of social exclusion and the consequences for psychological well-being (moods and fundamental needs). Both self-reported and peer-reported victimization of 564 participants (Mage = 9.9 years, SD = 1.04; 49.1% girls) were measured, and social exclusion was manipulated through inclusion versus exclusion in a virtual ball-tossing game (Cyberball). Children’s perceptions and psychological well-being were in general more negative after exclusion than after inclusion. Moreover, self-reported—but not peer-reported—victimization was associated with the perception of being excluded more and receiving the ball less, as well as more negative moods and less fulfillment of fundamental needs, regardless of being excluded or included during the Cyberball game. In contrast, peer-reported victimization was associated with more negative mood and lower need fulfillment in the exclusion condition only. Together, these results suggest that children who themselves indicate being victimized have negatively distorted social cognition, whereas children who are being victimized according to their peers experience increased sensitivity to negative social situations. The results stress the importance of distinguishing between self-reported and peer-reported victimization and have implications for interventions aimed at victimized children’s social cognition.

Introduction

The experience of victimization through bullying—being intentionally attacked, humiliated, and/or excluded by a relatively powerful person repeatedly and over time (Olweus, 2010)—can have detrimental consequences for children’s physical and mental health (e.g., Ttofi & Farrington, 2008). Peer victimization, for example, is associated with the development of internalizing and externalizing behavior problems (Ladd, 2006), school disengagement and low school achievement (Buhs, Ladd, & Herald, 2006), and poor physical health (Gruber & Fineran, 2008). Understanding how victimization may be associated with a more negative way of seeing and experiencing social situations could help to explain the poor health outcomes associated with victimization. Moreover, it could benefit the further development and improvement of bullying prevention and intervention programs aimed at improving victimized children’s well-being and mental health. Therefore, the current study examined how children’s victimization is associated with their perceptions and emotional responses in experimentally manipulated social situations.

Because victimization has been linked to altered social information processing and a hostile attribution bias more specifically (e.g., Camodeca and Goossens, 2005, Hoglund and Leadbeater, 2007, Perren et al., 2013, Schwartz et al., 1998), the current study examined the association between victimization and information processing. We know that victimization is associated with negatively interpreting others’ intentions in ambiguous situations. However, we do not know whether victimization is also associated with general negative interpretation and experience tendencies in social situations. The current study, therefore, examined whether victimization is associated with a general negativity bias in which all social situations are interpreted and experienced more negatively or, rather, with a specific increased sensitivity to a negative social event in which only negative social situations are experienced negatively.

In examining this question, we distinguished between self-reported and peer-reported victimization because there generally is only low to moderate correspondence between these two indicators of victimization and they are differentially associated with negative outcomes (Scholte, Burk, & Overbeek, 2013). Moreover, we examined this question in a late childhood sample because a meta-analysis has shown that the association between a hostile bias and aggressive behavior is strongest among 8- to 12-year-olds (de Castro, Veerman, Koops, Bosch, & Monshouwer, 2002), demonstrating the impact of hostile bias in this age group.

A process that may contribute to the poor well-being and problematic behavior associated with victimization is a tendency to negatively interpret social information. According to the social information processing model (e.g., Crick & Dodge, 1994), a sequence of information-processing steps determine behavioral responses to social situations. Previous social experiences such as being involved in conflict situations can affect expectations and response options in a child’s “database”, which in turn can result in an altered perception and interpretation of future social situations. Many studies based on the social information processing model have focused on the second step of the model: the interpretation of cues. Children’s attributions of others’ intent in hypothetical ambiguous situations in particular have been studied extensively in the light of the social information processing model (e.g., see the meta-analysis by de Castro et al., 2002). The tendency to interpret others’ intentions as malicious is often referred to as a “hostile attribution bias”.

In line with the social information processing model (Crick & Dodge, 1994), it can be expected that victims’ repeated experience with harassment may lead to the expectation and easily accessible interpretation of being harassed again in future social situations. Indeed, a recent review broadly defining victimization showed that victimization is associated with a more negative interpretation of cues (van Reemst, Fischer, & Zwirs, 2016). More specifically, research using ambiguous vignettes has shown that victimization in children is associated with a tendency to interpret others’ intentions as malicious (Calvete and Orue, 2011, Camodeca and Goossens, 2005, Hoglund and Leadbeater, 2007, Perren et al., 2013, Schwartz et al., 1998). The tendency to perceive and interpret social encounters with peers more negatively is likely to be a risk factor for the development of a more general negative view about oneself and/or one’s peers, with chronically experiencing negative feelings and displaying undesired (aggressive) behavior as a potential consequence.

Research has also shown that victimization is related to social cognition in that it is linked to how potentially threatening situations are experienced and to how children feel and think about themselves (Camodeca and Goossens, 2005, Camodeca et al., 2003, Graham and Juvonen, 1998, Perren et al., 2013). For example, victims were found to experience more anger and sadness than noninvolved children when confronted with an ambiguous situation that has a negative outcome for them when the intentions of the perpetrator are unclear (Camodeca & Goossens, 2005). These findings demonstrate that victimization is associated with an emotional negative “bias” with regard to ambiguous social situations. Repeatedly experiencing more negative affect after social encounters with peers is likely to be a risk factor for the development of chronic poor well-being.

Whereas the responses to hypothetical vignette stories with unclear intentions of a perpetrator have provided us with very valuable insights into the social information processing of aggressive children (e.g., de Castro et al., 2002), victimized children (Camodeca & Goossens, 2005), and prosocial children (Nelson & Crick, 1999), this paradigm is less suitable to examine whether a negative interpretation of a situation would be warranted or not. The word “bias” in the label “hostile attribution bias” has a normative connotation that is not necessarily appropriate (Trachtenberg & Viken, 1994) and seems to assume that children have an inaccurate distorted perception of the social situation. However, when there is no objective criterion for whether the situation or intention was indeed malicious, the attributions measured in these ambiguous situations merely represent a negative information processing tendency rather than a bias. Comparing responses to situations that are objectively negative with responses to situations that objectively lack negativity makes it possible to test whether children’s responses are indeed distorted or not. We can then test whether children are seeing and experiencing negativity in the absence of objective negativity (distortion) or whether they are perceiving more accurately and experiencing negativity more intensely when negativity is objectively present (sensitivity).

It is important to be able to disentangle these two types of altered information processing because children with distorted social cognition may benefit from other types of interventions compared with children who accurately perceive the social world. Children with distorted social cognition may benefit from a social information processing-focused training program such as Stay Cool Kids (Stoltz et al., 2013), which focuses on the accuracy of the attribution of malicious versus benign intent in ambiguous situations and accurate representation of other children’s emotions. However, if one would be sending out a message to children with sensitive social cognition that they are seeing negativity when it is absent, and that they are not skilled at judging social situations, this might cause these children to distrust their own (accurate) judgment. These children who easily pick up actual negativity and thus more intensely experience negative mood after a negative encounter with peers may benefit more from guidance in coping with this negativity and finding ways to improve their social situation.

In theory, self-reports and peer-reports should assess the same construct, with the only difference being the source of information. However, there is a general finding of a low to moderate correspondence between self-reported and peer-reported victimization (De Los Reyes and Prinstein, 2004, Ladd and Kochenderfer-Ladd, 2002, Scholte et al., 2013). This indicates that the two sources have different perspectives on who is victimized or not. Children may feel victimized, whereas this is not recognized by their peers, but it may also be the other way around; peers may report children being victimized, whereas these children do not perceive it this way. These different perspectives are reflected in the different predictive power with regard to the negative outcomes associated with peer victimization. For example, Scholte et al. (2013) showed that self-identified victims showed lower levels of emotional adjustment but no social adjustment problems, whereas peer-identified victims were at risk for social maladjustment but not emotional maladjustment. This is in line with previous studies showing that self-reported victimization is indicative of emotional problems (Crick and Bigbee, 1998, Graham and Juvonen, 1998, Gromann et al., 2013), whereas peer-reported victimization is more indicative of social problems such as low peer acceptance and rejection (Crick and Bigbee, 1998, Graham and Juvonen, 1998). We expect self-reported and peer-reported victimization to be related to social cognition differently; therefore, we examined how self-reported victimization, on the one hand, and peer-reported victimization, on the other, are associated with perception, moods, and need fulfillment in the context of social inclusion versus exclusion.

When examining self-reported victimization, the question arises to what extent this reflects actual victimization or to what extent it reflects a tendency to see the world (including one’s own social position) negatively. Children’s tendency to see the world negatively could account for self-reported poor mood and need fulfillment as well as children identifying themselves as being victimized (Rosen, Milich, & Harris, 2007). Because this negativity tendency might partly underlie the self-report of victimization, we hypothesize self-reported victimization to be related to a negativity bias in both perception and psychological well-being. This hypothesis is not completely in line with the findings of Ruggieri, Bendixen, Gabriel, and Alsaker (2013). They compared self-reported passive victims with children not involved in bullying and found victims’ need to belong to be less fulfilled regardless of inclusion or exclusion during Cyberball but found their mood to be more negative and their need for meaningful existence to be less fulfilled after exclusion versus inclusion during Cyberball. The current study adds to the information from the study of Ruggieri et al. (2013) by examining victimization as a continuous variable rather than a categorical variable selecting only a specific type of victim. Moreover, in the current study, both self-reported and peer-reported victimization are taken into account rather than only self-reported victimization, more specific and diverse outcome variables are examined, and the research questions are examined in a much larger sample.

Peers are more likely to know that a child is being victimized when they have witnessed the harassment; therefore, peer-reports may more strongly reflect repeated and visible forms of victimization (Archer and Coyne, 2005, Björkqvist et al., 1992). Through this accumulated actual victimization experience, it is likely that these victimized children have become more sensitive to situations that are threatening or negative. Therefore, we hypothesized peer-reported victimization to be related to highly sensitive perception rather than negatively distorted perception and to a stronger negative impact on psychological well-being when being confronted with negative treatment by peers.

A useful way to examine whether victims show distorted or sensitive social information processing is by presenting children with a computerized version of the ball-tossing game called Cyberball (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000), in which children are preprogrammed to be included or excluded by the other players. This computerized paradigm has been found to be as effective as a face-to-face ball-tossing game with confederates (Williams & Nida, 2011) and is viewed as a “valuable tool” and “an adequate paradigm for research on children and adolescents” (Scheithauer, Alsaker, Wölfer, & Ruggieri, 2013, p. 5).

Cyberball is a very suitable paradigm to examine our research questions because when children scoring high on victimization perceive and experience both the exclusion condition and the inclusion condition more negatively, this would be indicative of a negative distortion of social cognition. These children would then perceive and experience more negativity in general even in situations where there are no objective signs of negativity (the inclusion condition during Cyberball). It could also be that children scoring high on victimization are in fact very good observers who are sensitive to cues that signal actual negativity. In that case, these children will perceive and experience negativity only when they have actually been presented with a negative situation (exclusion during Cyberball) but not when there are no objective signs of negativity (inclusion during Cyberball). In the current study, we expected self-reported victimization to relate to a negative distortion in both perception and psychological well-being, and we expected peer-reported victimization to relate to highly sensitive perception and psychological well-being.

Section snippets

Participants

The current study was part of a larger study (van Noorden, 2016) for which a total of 838 children from 34 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms from 11 schools in the Netherlands were recruited. Parents received a letter explaining the nature and procedure of the study and explaining that they could indicate if they did not want their children to participate. Children could refrain from participation beforehand or stop at any time during the study. This procedure was approved by the

Manipulation check: Effect of Cyberball condition

The analyses with self-reported and peer-reported victimization yielded similar results for the main effect of condition on perception, mood, and need fulfillment. In discussing these findings, therefore, we refer to the uncorrected means in Table 1.

There were main effects of condition on all outcome variables except for anxiety (see Table 2, Table 3 below). Children in the exclusion condition more often reported being excluded and reported receiving relatively fewer ball throws than children

Discussion

Victimization by peers has been linked to a hostile attribution or interpretation bias (Camodeca and Goossens, 2005, Hoglund and Leadbeater, 2007, Perren et al., 2013, Schwartz et al., 1998). The current study aimed to test whether peer victimization is indeed associated with negatively distorted social cognition in which all social situations are interpreted and experienced more negatively or, rather, with highly sensitive social cognition in which victimization is associated with a more

Conclusion

The current study took a new approach to studying (negativity) “bias” in social information processing by examining perception, mood, and need fulfillment in objectively positive and negative social situations. Using this new approach, the current study showed that both biased and sensitive social cognition can be associated with victimization, depending on the measurement of victimization. Children who indicate themselves that they are being victimized seem to have a general negativity bias

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the school administrators, teachers, parents, and students who made this research possible. Portions of this research were presented at the 2015 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia.

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    The second and third authors contributed equally to this article.

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