قربانیان ترس و زورگویان بی باک؟ واکنش ذهنی به صحنه تصویرسازی احساسی کودکان درگیر در پرخاشگری مدرسه

Being aggressive has been related to fearlessness, low empathy and premeditated antisocial behaviors. The current study examined how school bullies and victims respond to affective situations presented through imagery. It was hypothesized that victims would perceive fear imagery as more fearful than bullies, demonstrating their proneness to fear and high behavioral inhibition. Bullies were expected to perceive fear imagery as less fearful and experience less negative affect, based on their callous-unemotional characteristics. Children participated in a tone-cued imagery experiment during which they imagined for 8 s twelve pre-normed scripts describing fear, anger, joy and pleasant relaxation. Children rated their experienced emotions of fear, anger, joy and sadness for each scene. Bullies responded with low levels of fear to fear imagery and across emotion types and reported overall higher positive affect, even during provocative anger scenes. In contrast, victims responded with higher fear, anger and sadness. The varied emotional responses appeared to be partly explained by group differences in behavioral inhibition, which was high in victims. Results are discussed in light of aggression theories and potential interventions.

School bullying involves repeated physical (hitting, kicking) and non-physical (isolating, gossiping; Karatzias, Power, & Swanson, 2002) aggression toward children who are perceived as weaker and less dominant, with negative consequences for both perpetrators and victims (Ttofi, Farrington, & Lösel, 2012). Individual differences on how children encode and process emotionally evocative situations during social interactions, interpret and respond to the behaviors of others, and their motivation toward obtaining rewards and avoiding punishment play a significant role in school aggression (e.g., Crick & Dodge, 1996). Aggressive children tend to be hyper-vigilant to hostile cues and attribute hostile intentions to others (Dodge, Price, Bachorowski, & Newman, 1990). Differences in emotions, in addition to interpretations, are also important, as some children feel positive after engaging in aggression (Arsenio & Lemerise, 2001), which may relate to their poor emotional empathy towards the pain of others and difficulty in recognizing expressions of fear and sadness (Blair, 1999). Motivationally, aggressors show resting hypo-arousal, documented by heart rate and skin conductance measures (Raine, 2002 and Scarpa et al., 2008), and may engage in aggression for sensation and arousal seeking purposes (Wilson & Scarpa, 2011). Aggressive children also demonstrate little fear for negative consequences to self and others, and low sensitivity to punishment (Dierckx et al., 2014). Emotion processing and regulation difficulties characterize both children who display aggression (Beauchaine et al., 2007 and Fanti and Panayiotou, 0000) and children with internalizing difficulties (Beauchaine, 2001) who are often their victims. For example, victims show more sadness in unpleasant situations (e.g., Boulton & Underwood, 1992) but it is unclear if this is a cause or an outcome of victimization (Camodeca & Goossens, 2005). To the extent that emotional responses represent action dispositions (Lang, 1979), understanding the emotions of bullies and victims in specific contexts can elucidate the processes involved in bullying, the aim of this investigation. As a form of aggression, bullying is one of the DSM-5 criteria for conduct disorder. For this reason, research on children and adolescents displaying conduct problems (CP) is relevant to bullying. A subgroup of these youth are characterized by high levels of Callous-Unemotional (CU) traits, which include lack of remorse and empathy, callous use of others, shallow emotions (Fanti, 2013 and Moffitt et al., 2008) and are considered precursors of adult psychopathy (Essau, Sasagawa, & Frick, 2006). CP children high on CU-traits tend to be fearless and insensitive to punishment (e.g., Frick & Morris, 2004) and may have been poorly socialized because of their insensitivity to the distress of others (Frick & Viding, 2009). They are calculated and premeditated in their aggression to receive particular rewards (Roose, Bijttebier, Claes, & Lilienfeld, 2011) rather than angry and reactive to provocation (e.g., Hughes, Moore, Morris, & Corr, 2012). CP children without CU-traits tend to be anxious, with intense, uncontrolled emotions. Their aggression is mostly reactive, hot-tempered and impulsive ( Frick & Viding, 2009). These two profiles of aggressive children, which reflect the new specifier in the DSM-5 criteria for Conduct Disorder, i.e., with or without Low Prosocial Emotions, seem to reflect the characteristics of children involved in bullying: bullies typically hold a positive attitude towards violence and are low in anxiety and fear, resembling CP + CU youth, whereas victimized children who become bullies themselves (bully/victims) are disruptive and impulsive, with intense emotional reactions that may be reinforcing to their perpetrators, resembling CP-only youth (Kokkinos and Panayiotou, 2004 and Schwartz, 2000). Bully/victims tend to have symptoms of internalizing pathology and high distress, display impulsive and retaliatory aggression, and demonstrate poor emotional regulation (O’Brennan et al., 2009 and Schwartz, 2000). On the other hand, victims are passive, submissive, anxious and insecure (Salmon, James, & Smith, 1998). Like bully/victims, they show increased reactivity to threat and high amygdala activation (McCrory et al., 2011 and Pollak, 2008) and are prone to anxiety and depression (Idsoe et al., 2012 and Meltzer et al., 2011). Therefore, prior evidence indicates that traits related to fear, anxiety, behavioral inhibition (e.g., McNaughton & Gray, 2000) and callousness may relate to the behavior of bullies, victims and bully/victims, affecting how they perceive, interpret and respond to emotional situations. These differences, in combination with other risk factors including genetics and socialization (Ball et al., 2008 and Schwartz et al., 1997), may predict the different roles children adopt in the bullying phenomenon.

Table 1 shows correlations between bullying and victimization, treated as continuous variables, CU-traits, BIS and emotional reactions. Bullying was positively correlated with CU-traits and negatively with BIS; victimization was positively correlated with BIS. Bullying was positively related to greater joy in anger and marginally (p = .06) with joy across situations. Both bullying and victimization were associated with more anger in Pleasant Relaxation while victimization was related to greater overall anger and anger during Joy and Pleasant Relaxation scenaria. Victimization was associated with greater overall fear and fear to Anger and Joy scenes, and with greater overall sadness and sadness during Joy and Pleasant Relaxation.