Cyberbullying and traditional bullying in relation with adolescents’ perception of parenting

This study investigates the relation between parenting and involvement in cyberbullying. We predicted that cyberbullies and cyberbully-victims report less responsiveness and de manding reactions from their parents than victims and youthswho are not involved in cyberbullying. Furthermore, we predicted that youths with neglectful parents cyberbully the most often and youth with authoritative parents cyberbully the least. The same differences were predicted for traditional bullying. behavio and for youth involved in both forms of bullying behavior. Participants were made up to 1200 youths from 10-14 years old. They responded to a survey measuring cyberbullying and traditional bullying with questions based on the sub-scales from the Bully?Victim Questionnaire, and parenting with an adjusated version of the Parenting Style Questionnaire. Most results confirm out predictions. Results on authoritative, autoritarian, permissive and neglectful parenting styles suggest that for bullies, demanding actions are an important dimension of thier behavior and for victims, responsiveness is an important dimension of their behavior

Low- and intermediate-temperature ammonia/hydrogen oxidation in a flow reactor: Experiments and a wide-range kinetic modeling

Understanding the chemistry behind the oxidation of ammonia/hydrogen mixtures is crucial for ensuring the flexible use of such mixtures in several applications, related to propulsion systems and power generation. In this work, the oxidation of ammonia/hydrogen blends was investigated through an experimental and kinetic-modeling study, where the low- and intermediate-temperature conditions were considered. An experimental campaign was performed in a flow reactor, at stoichiometric conditions and near-atmospheric pressure (126.7 kPa). The mole fraction of fuels, oxidizer and final products was measured. At the same time, a comprehensive kinetic model was set up, following a modular and hierarchical approach, and implementing the recently-available elementary rates. Such a model was used to interpret the experimental results, and to extend the analysis to literature data, covering several oxidation features. The reactivity boost provided by H2 addition was found to be approximately linear with its mole fraction in both flow- and jet-stirred-reactor conditions (except for the smallest H2 amounts in the flow reactor), in contrast with the more-than-linear increase in the laminar flame speed. The key role of HO2 in regulating fuel conversion and autoignition at low temperature was confirmed for binary mixtures, with H2NO being the bottleneck to the low-temperature oxidation of NH3-rich blends. On the other hand, the nitrogen fate was found to be mostly regulated by NHx + NO propagation and termination channels

Emotion-Focused Coping Worsens Depressive Feelings and Health Complaints in Cyberbullied Children

Coping may explain why being cyberbullied affects children’s well-being differently, though previous studies are inconclusive. This survey among 325 children focused on the role coping strategies may play in the relationship between cyberbullying and depressive feelings and health complaints. Being cyberbullied was measured with the Cyberbullying Questionnaire, general coping with the Utrecht Coping List, and cyberbullying-specific coping with a questionnaire developed for this study. Health complaints were measured with the Short Questionnaire for Experienced Health and depressive feelings with the shortened Children’s Depression Inventory. The results showed that 18.8% of the children were bullied by mobile phone and 24.1% through the internet. Correlation analyses showed strong relationships between victimization, coping, depressive feelings, and health complaints. In the regression analyses conducted in all children, victimization, general emotion-focused, and problem-focused copings had main effects on depressive feelings and health complaints; emotion-focused coping interacted with victimization in health complaints. Simple slope analyses of children with high scores on emotion-focused general coping showed a stronger positive relationship between victimization and health complaints. Regression analyses of only cyberbullied children showed that only emotion-focused cyber-specific coping was associated with more health complaints and depressive feelings

The Mitigating Role of Ecological Health Assets in Adolescent Cyberbullying Victimization

Over the last decade cyberbullying has emerged as a public health concern among young people. Cyberbullying refers to intentional harmful behaviours and communication carried out repeatedly using electronic media. Considerable research has demonstrated the detrimental and long-lasting effects of cyberbullying involvement. This paper draws on a social-ecological perspective to identify protective health assets from across the multiple environmental domains of the adolescent that may mitigate against experiencing cyberbullying. Data were collected from 5335 students aged 11, 13 and 15 years who participated in the 2014 World Health Organization Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Study for England. Protective health assets were identified at the family (family communication), school (school sense of belonging and teacher support) and neighbourhood (neighbourhood sense of belonging) levels. In particular the findings draw attention to the protective role fathers can play in supporting young people

Automatic Detection of Cyberbullying in Social Media Text

While social media offer great communication opportunities, they also increase the vulnerability of young people to threatening situations online. Recent studies report that cyberbullying constitutes a growing problem among youngsters. Successful prevention depends on the adequate detection of potentially harmful messages and the information overload on the Web requires intelligent systems to identify potential risks automatically. The focus of this paper is on automatic cyberbullying detection in social media text by modelling posts written by bullies, victims, and bystanders of online bullying. We describe the collection and fine-grained annotation of a training corpus for English and Dutch and perform a series of binary classification experiments to determine the feasibility of automatic cyberbullying detection. We make use of linear support vector machines exploiting a rich feature set and investigate which information sources contribute the most for this particular task. Experiments on a holdout test set reveal promising results for the detection of cyberbullying-related posts. After optimisation of the hyperparameters, the classifier yields an F1-score of 64% and 61% for English and Dutch respectively, and considerably outperforms baseline systems based on keywords and word unigrams.Comment: 21 pages, 9 tables, under revie

Adolescents' involvement in cyber bullying and perceptions of school: the importance of perceived peer acceptance for female adolescents

Young people are spending increasing amounts of time using digital technology and, as such, are at great risk of being involved in cyber bullying as a victim, bully, or bully/victim. Despite cyber bullying typically occurring outside the school environment, the impact of being involved in cyber bullying is likely to spill over to school. Fully 285 11- to 15-year-olds (125 male and 160 female, M age = 12.19 years, SD = 1.03) completed measures of cyber bullying involvement, self-esteem, trust, perceived peer acceptance, and perceptions of the value of learning and the importance of school. For young women, involvement in cyber bullying as a victim, bully, or bully/victim negatively predicted perceptions of learning and school, and perceived peer acceptance mediated this relationship. The results indicated that involvement in cyber bullying negatively predicted perceived peer acceptance which, in turn, positively predicted perceptions of learning and school. For young men, fulfilling the bully/victim role negatively predicted perceptions of learning and school. Consequently, for young women in particular, involvement in cyber bullying spills over to impact perceptions of learning. The findings of the current study highlight how stressors external to the school environment can adversely impact young women's perceptions of school and also have implications for the development of interventions designed to ameliorate the effects of cyber bullying

The Future of Psychopharmacological Enhancements: Expectations and Policies

The hopes and fears expressed in the debate on human enhancement are not always based on a realistic assessment of the expected possibilities. Discussions about extreme scenarios may at times obscure the ethical and policy issues that are relevant today. This paper aims to contribute to an adequate and ethically sound societal response to actual current developments. After a brief outline of the ethical debate concerning neuro-enhancement, it describes the current state of the art in psychopharmacological science and current uses of psychopharmacological enhancement, as well as the prospects for the near future. It then identifies ethical issues regarding psychopharmacological enhancements that require attention from policymakers, both on the professional and on the governmental level. These concern enhancement research, the gradual expansion of medical categories, off-label prescription and responsibility of doctors, and accessibility of enhancers on the Internet. It is concluded that further discussion on the advantages and drawbacks of enhancers on a collective social level is still needed

Bullying at work:The relation with physical health complaints and the influence of social support

Dit survey onder Belgische werknemers (N = 497) onderzoekt, uitgaande van het Michigan stressmodel, het verband tussen hoeveelheid sociale steun en tevredenheid daarmee, pesterijen op het werk en lichamelijke gezondheidsklachten. Uit hiërarchische regressieanalyses bleek dat zowel persoonsgerichte als werkgerelateerde pesterijen een negatieve invloed op de ervaren gezondheid hebben. Ook neemt voor werknemers, die een tekort aan sociale steun van collega’s ervaren, het aantal gezondheidsklachten toe naarmate zij vaker slachtoffer zijn van werkgerelateerde pesterijen (d.w.z. moderatie). Daarnaast bleek tevredenheid met de ontvangen sociale steun van leidinggevenden een indirect effect te hebben op de relatie tussen gepest worden en gerapporteerde gezondheidsklachten (d.w.z. mediatie). Deze effecten konden niet vastgesteld worden voor de hoeveelheid ontvangen steun. De resultaten benadrukken de noodzaak van toekomstige studies waarin extra aandacht wordt besteed aan de mate waarin een gepeste werknemer tevreden is met de ontvangen sociale steun. This survey among Belgian employees (N = 497) investigated, starting from the Michigan Stress Model, the relationships among the amount of and satisfaction with social support, being bullied in the workplace, and physical health complaints. Hierarchical regression analyses confirmed that both person-related and work-related bullying influenced perceived health of victimized employees negatively. There was some evidence for a moderation effect of satisfaction with social support: victims of work-related bullying, who experienced a lack of social support from colleagues, reported more health problems. In addition, it was found that satisfaction with received social support from supervisors affected the relationship between being bullied and health complaints indirectly (i.e., mediation). No effects were found for the amount of received support. These results emphasize the need for future studies investigating the influence of satisfaction with received social support on victimized employees