Associations between facial emotion recognition and young adolescents\u2019 behaviors in bullying

This study investigated whether different behaviors young adolescents can act during bullying episodes were associated with their ability to recognize morphed facial expressions of the six basic emotions, expressed at high and low intensity. The sample included 117 middle-school students (45.3% girls; mean age = 12.4 years) who filled in a peer nomination questionnaire and individually performed a computerized emotion recognition task. Bayesian generalized mixed-effects models showed a complex picture, in which type and intensity of emotions, students\u2019 behavior and gender interacted in explaining recognition accuracy. Results were discussed with a particular focus on negative emotions and suggesting a \u201cneutral\u201d nature of emotion recognition ability, which does not necessarily lead to moral behavior but can also be used for pursuing immoral goals

Unique and interactive effects of moral emotions and moral disengagement on bullying and defending among school children

The first aim of the present study was to examine in a single model how moral disengagement and moral emotions were related to bullying and defending behavior among schoolchildren. The second aim was to test whether the two moral dimensions interacted with each other to explain behavior in bullying situations. Data were collected from 561 Swedish students. Moral disengagement was positively associated with bullying and negatively associated with defending, whereas moral emotions score was negatively associated with bullying and positively associated with defending. Moreover, students who scored high in moral emotions did not tend to bully other students, irrespective of their levels of moral disengagement, whereas when the moral emotions score was low bullying behavior increased with increasing levels of moral disengagement. In contrast, moral disengagement was negatively related to defending behavior at low levels of moral emotions, but not when moral emotions were high

SAI, a Sensible Artificial Intelligence that plays Go

We propose a multiple-komi modification of the AlphaGo Zero/Leela Zero paradigm. The winrate as a function of the komi is modeled with a two-parameters sigmoid function, so that the neural network must predict just one more variable to assess the winrate for all komi values. A second novel feature is that training is based on self-play games that occasionally branch -- with changed komi -- when the position is uneven. With this setting, reinforcement learning is showed to work on 7x7 Go, obtaining very strong playing agents. As a useful byproduct, the sigmoid parameters given by the network allow to estimate the score difference on the board, and to evaluate how much the game is decided.Comment: Updated for IJCNN 2019 conferenc

Associations between students bystander behavior and individual and classroom collective moral disengagement

This study examined whether students' bystander behaviours in peer victimisation were associated with individual (IMD) and classroom collective moral disengagement (CMD). Self-report survey data we..

Unfair teachers, unhappy students: longitudinal associations of perceived teacher relational unfairness with adolescent peer aggression and school satisfaction

IntroductionTeacher relational unfairness is a significant risk factor for students’ physical and mental well-being, especially during adolescence. However, school psychology research has not yet fully analyzed the links between teacher unfairness and important indicators of school experience and wellbeing, including peer aggression and school satisfaction. Even less evidence does exist with longitudinal, multilevel data.MethodsThe present study tested the prospective relations between Fall perceived teacher unfairness and Spring reactive and proactive aggression, and school satisfaction. At T1, participants were 1,299 students (48.3% girls, mean age = 13.6 years, SD = 1.1) attending 67 classrooms in Italian public schools, whereas 1,227 students participated in the second wave 6 months later.ResultsMultilevel regressions showed that, at the individual level, T1 perceived teacher unfairness positively predicted T2 reactive and proactive aggression, and negatively predicted school satisfaction. At the class-level, T1 class teacher unfairness explained between-class variability in T2 school satisfaction, but not variability in peer aggression.DiscussionThe findings expand current knowledge about the role of teacher unfairness with the classroom and have implications for interventions at school

Collective moral disengagement and its associations with bullying perpetration and victimization in students

The aim of the current study was to examine whether collective moral disengagement in the classroom was associated with bullying perpetration and victimisation. One-thousand-and-fifty-four students..

Social media features, perceived group norms, and adolescents’ active social media use matter for perceived friendship quality

Introduction: Developmental researchers are becoming increasingly interested in the role of social media in adolescents’ experiences with their peers; however, to date, few studies have investigated the association between youngsters’ interactions with friends online and the perceived quality of their friendship relationships. Methods: Thus, the current study aims to test the associations between three social media features, as perceived by adolescents, (i.e., availability, quantifiability, visualness) and the quality of adolescents’ friendships (in terms of perceived validation, intimacy, companionship), considering participants’ frequency of active social media use (i.e., self-oriented and other-oriented social media use), and the role of perceived group norms about social media use. Moreover, we tested potential differences across gender groups. Participants were 751 adolescents (Mage = 16.2, SD = 1.5). Results: A SEM analysis showed that, among the perceived social media features, availability was positively associated with perceived friendship quality–both directly and indirectly. Furthermore, friends who participated more in other-oriented social media use reported being more satisfied with their friendship relationships and the results showed that peer influence processes were also active on social media. Discussion: Taken together, these results emphasize the study of social media as a social context for a better understanding of contemporary peer experiences during adolescence. Specifically, novel behaviors (e.g., liking or commenting on posts or content of peers), which characterize interactions between friends, may support relational functioning and well-being purposes in both the offline and online context

A short-term longitudinal study on the development of moral disengagement among schoolchildren: the role of collective moral disengagement, authoritative teaching, and student-teacher relationship quality

The aim of this study was to examine whether collective moral disengagement and authoritative teaching at the classroom level, and student-teacher relationship quality at the individual level, predicted individual moral disengagement among pre-adolescent students 1 year later. In this short-term longitudinal study, 1,373 students from 108 classrooms answered a web-based questionnaire on tablets during school, once in fifth grade (T1) and once in sixth grade (T2). The results showed, after controlling for T1 moral disengagement, gender, and immigrant background, that students with better student-teacher relationship quality at T1 were more inclined to score lower on moral disengagement at T2, whereas students in classrooms with higher levels of collective moral disengagement at T1 were more inclined to score higher on moral disengagement at T2. In addition, both collective moral disengagement and authoritative teaching were found to moderate the associations between student-teacher relationship quality at T1 and moral disengagement at T2. These findings underscore the importance of fostering positive relationships between students and teachers, as well as minimizing collective moral disengagement in classrooms. These measures may prevent the potential escalation of moral disengagement in a negative direction