Moral Disengagement and Risk Prototypes in the Context of Adolescent Cyberbullying: Findings From Two Countries

Cyberbullying is associated with a wide range of mental health difficulties and behavioral problems in adolescents and research is needed to better understand psychological correlates of this behavior. The present study used a novel model that incorporated Social Cognitive Theory and the prototype/willingness model to identify the correlates of behavioral willingness to engage in cyberbullying in two countries. Adolescent students were randomly selected from secondary schools in Italy (n = 1710) and Greece (n = 355), and completed anonymous measures of moral disengagement, descriptive norms, risk prototype evaluations and behavioral willingness to engage in cyberbullying. Hierarchical linear regression analyses showed that willingness to engage in cyberbullying was associated with moral disengagement, prototype evaluations and descriptive social norms in Italy, and with gender, moral disengagement and descriptive social norms in Greece. Regression-based multiple mediation modeling further showed that the association between moral disengagement and cyberbullying willingness was mediated by prototype evaluations in Italy and by descriptive norms in Greece. The implications of our findings are discussed in the context of self-regulating cyberbullying perpetration in adolescents and informing school-based policies and interventions to prevent cyberbullying behavior

Childhood bullying, paranoid thinking, and the misappraisal of social threat: trouble at school

Background:Experiences of bullying predict the development of paranoia in school-age adolescents. While many instances of psychotic phenomena are transitory, maintained victimization can lead to increasingly distressing paranoid thinking. Furthermore, paranoid thinkers perceive threat in neutral social stimuli and are vigilant for environmental risk. Aims:The present paper investigated the association between different forms of bullying and paranoid thinking, and the extent to which school-age paranoid thinkers overestimate threat in interpersonal situations. Methods: Two hundred and thirty participants, aged between eleven and fourteen, were recruited from one secondary school in the UK. Participants completed a series of questionnaires hosted on the Bristol Online Survey tool. All data were collected in a classroom setting in quiet and standardized conditions. Results: A significant and positive relationship was found between experiences of bullying and paranoid thinking: greater severity of bullying predicted more distressing paranoid thinking. Further, paranoid thinking mediated the relationship between bullying and overestimation of threat in neutral social stimuli. Conclusion: Exposure to bullying is associated with distressing paranoid thinking and subsequent misappraisal of threat. As paranoid thinkers experience real and overestimated threat, the phenomena may persist

Contents

The aim of the present study was to investigate how basic moral sensitivity in bullying, moral disengagement in bullying and defender self-efficacy were related to different bystander behaviors in bullying. Therefore, we examined pathways that linked students' basic moral sensitivity, moral disengagement, and defender self-efficacy to different bystander behaviors in bullying situations. Three hundred and forty-seven teenagers completed a bullying survey. Findings indicated that compared with boys, girls expressed higher basic moral sensitivity in bullying, lower defender self-efficacy and moral disengagement in bullying. Results from the SEM showed that basic moral sensitivity in bullying was negatively related to pro-bully behavior and positively related to outsider and defender behavior, mediated by moral disengagement in bullying, which in turn was positively related to pro-bully behavior and negatively related to outsider and defender behavior. What differed in the relations between outsider and defender behaviors was the degree of defender self-efficacy

Implicit theories in perpetrators of intimate partner violence and assessment of partner violence offence supportive cognition with implicit measures of social cognition

This thesis proposes a number of Implicit Theories (ITs) for male and female perpetrators of intimate partner violence (IPV) and, guided by these ITs, develops implicit measures to assess IPV offence supportive cognition indirectly. Chapter 1 systematically reviews the empirical IPV literature and finds varying levels of empirical support for six ITs in men and women, namely, “Opposite sex is dangerous”, “Relationship entitlement”, “General entitlement”, “Normalisation of relationship violence”, “Normalisation of violence”, and “It’s not my fault”, and for one additional IT in men only, “I am the man”. Chapter 2 describes the development of seven implicit measures and their pilot testing. Chapter 3 explored the psychometric properties of these implicit measures and found them to be reasonably reliable and valid. Chapter 4 includes two studies which assessed a wide range of IPV offence supportive cognitions with both implicit and explicit measures in two UK samples: (a) partner violent and nonviolent university students, and (b) male batterers referred to treatment and community controls. In both studies the IPV groups demonstrated more explicit offence supportive cognition than the nonviolent groups but this was more prominent in the offender group. Only the offender group showed more offence supportive cognition than the control group at the implicit level. The implicit measures demonstrated very good validity, and the utility of these measures with this type of offenders was highlighted. Chapter 5 concludes this thesis and provides an overview and a general discussion of the main findings, limitations, practical implications, and future directions for research

A Preliminary Investigation Into a Range of Implicit and Explicit Offense Supportive Cognitions in Perpetrators of Physical Intimate Partner Violence

The current study assessed a wide range of offense supportive cognitions in relation to the perpetration of physical intimate partner violence (IPV). This research used both implicit and explicit measures in a UK sample of 19 male IPV perpetrators recruited from a community-based IPV intervention program and 20 men from the community with no history of IPV. The study also explored the ability of the implicit measures to differentiate between the two groups. The cognitions assessed included gender-role stereotype, attitudes condoning violence against a partner, attitudes condoning violence in general, hostile attitudes toward women, sense of entitlement in the relationship and over the intimate partner (control and dominance), and general sense of entitlement. Participants completed a number of established self-report measures and a series of computer-based reaction time tasks including two Implicit Association Tests, one Go/No-go Association Task, and four Sentence Judgment Tasks. Significant group differences emerged across all measures both at the explicit and at the implicit level. Most implicit measures had very good discriminatory power and the combination of all implicit measures showed excellent discriminatory power, equal to that of the explicit measures combined. These findings suggest that some IPV perpetrators hold offense supportive cognitions which may have become fairly well established and have started to operate at an automatic level. Implicit measures could be useful tools for risk assessment purposes and identification of treatment needs alongside already established measures