Bystander reactions to cyberbullying and cyberaggression: individual, contextual, and social factors

Examining the mediating effect of real and cyber self-control on cyberbullying and health risk behaviors among secondary vocational students in China: a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND

Cyberbullying and health risk behaviors are pervasive issues for secondary vocational students that not only detrimentally impact their academic achievement but also pose a significant threat to overall health. The purpose of this study was to understand the current situation of cyberbullying and health risk behaviors among secondary vocational students in China and to explore the relationships among cyberbullying, self-control, self-control over internet usage, and health risk behaviors through a mediation model.

METHODS

This was a cross-sectional study. From March to April 2023, a self-administered questionnaire was completed by a cluster sample of 1184 students from grades 1 to 3 at three secondary vocational schools in Jilin Province. The researchers utilized a sociodemographic questionnaire, the Cyberbullying and Cybervictimization Scale (CAV), the Adolescent Health Related Risky Behavior Inventory (AHRBI), the Self-Control Scale (SCS), and the Internet Usage Self-Control Scale (IUSCS-CS) to assess the prevalence and impact of cyberbullying and health risk behaviors. Descriptive statistics, spearman correlation analyses. Finally, the Process plug-in V2.16.3 was used to analyze a mediation model for the data.

RESULTS

Among secondary vocational students, 839 individuals (70.86%) experienced cyberbullying and 1036 individuals (87.50%) had one or more health risk behaviors. A chi-square test showed that the differences in cyberbullying incidence were statistically significant (P < 0.05) for being children, type of accommodation, residence, ethnicity, purpose of using the internet, and family composition. Statistically significant differences in health risk behaviors were observed based on gender, type of accommodation, residence, ethnicity, academic achievement, classmate relationships, purpose of using the internet, and family composition (P < 0.05). Health risk behaviors and cyberbullying were correlated (r = 0.60), health risk behaviors and self-control and internet usage self-control were negatively correlated (r = -0.42, -0.50). Mediation analysis indicated that self-control (0.02, 0.08) and internet usage self-control (0.08, 0.17) partially mediated the association between cyberbullying and health risk behaviors.

CONCLUSIONS

Secondary vocational students exhibit a high prevalence of cyberbullying and health risk behaviors. The study confirmed that self-control and internet usage self-control has an important role in mediating cybeibullying and health risk behaviors. Adolescent health promoters should develop targeted strategies to enhance the self-control of secondary vocational school students to mitigate their engagement in health risk behaviors.

Collisions and Perceptions of Cyberbullying: Comparison of Intergenerational Experiences

With regard to negative consequences, cyberbullying is recognized as one of the most traumatic types of cyber aggression. The aim is to study the specific features of adolescents and youth's cyberbullying experience in the role of an aggressor, victim or bystander, as well as awareness on the part of parents of adolescents. A total of 3395 adolescents, youth and parents filled out specially designed questionnaires. Older adolescents turned out to be at higher risk of cyberbullying. In two-thirds of cases, cyberbullying is related to real-life incidents. Aggressors are motivated by domination and entertainment, primarily employing strategies of social exclusion, harassment and denigration. As victims of cyberbullying, younger adolescents turn to their parents and friends for social support, whereas older adolescents and young adults are more likely turn to their peers. In the role of a bystander, almost half of younger adolescents and about a third of older adolescents and young adults choose the prosocial strategy of protecting a victim. The parents often underestimate the experience of encountering cyberbullying or find it difficult to assess such experience. The identified risk groups and strategies and the lack of parents' awareness are important to take into account when drawing up cyberbullying prevention programs.

Reactions of adolescent cyber bystanders toward different victims of cyberbullying: the role of parental rearing behaviors

BACKGROUND

Group-based situations are common settings for cyberbullying, making bystander responses crucial in combating this issue. This study investigated how adolescent bystanders respond to various victims, including family members, friends, teachers, and celebrities. This study also examined how different parenting styles influenced children's cyber bystander involvement.

METHODS

This study employed data from a cross-sectional school survey covering 1,716 adolescents aged 13-18 years from public and vocational schools in China collected in 2022. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to measure demographic characteristics, cyberbullying experiences, and parental rearing behaviors in predicting bystander reactions.

RESULTS

The findings showed that middle school students preferred to "ask for help" while high school students tended to choose "call the police" when witnessing cyberbullying incidents. Bystanders growing up with parental rejection and overprotection, having previous cyberbullying victimization experiences, where the victims were disliked by them, exhibited fewer defensive reactions.

CONCLUSIONS

This study has implications for future research and practices involving parental involvement in cyber bystander interventions, which could provide implications for future practice in designing specific intervention programs for cyberbullying bystander behavior. Future research and interventions against cyberbullying may provide individualized training including parents' positive parenting skills and parent-child interactions.

Moral disengagement and empathy in cyberbullying: how they are related in reflection activities about a serious game

Cyberbullying is a complex phenomenon with multiple factors involved, both contextual and individual factors, such as moral disengagement and empathy. This study investigated how moral disengagement and empathy could be related, longitudinally in cyberbullying events. Specifically, two gamified tasks (one for empathy and other for moral disengagement) were analyzed. These tasks were developed attending to the specificities of the cyberbullying scenarios presented in a serious game. To accomplish this goal, data from gamified tasks (N = 208), from 4 different moments, were analyzed through multilevel linear modeling. Results suggested that there was a change in adolescents' moral disengagement over time. Participants with greater empathy revealed lower moral disengagement overall. Over time, adolescents with greater empathy revealed lower moral disengagement within their own growth rate. Overall, our results provide important information about the dynamic relationship between moral disengagement, empathy and cyberbullying, which informs future studies and interventions.

Cyberaggression and cybervictimisation in adolescents: Bibliometric analysis in web of science

Worldwide new trends of online cyberbullying are emerging that impact on health and are a factor in adolescent suicide. The objective of this study is to know the development of scientific production and to compare the current trends that encompass the concepts of cyberaggression in young people (CAY) and cybervictimisation in young people (CVY). The methodology used in this study was descriptive with a bibliometric analysis on CAY with 481 documents and CVY with 1087 documents, in addition to a co-word analysis of both terms from the years 2017-2021. These data were extracted from the Web of Science database and network maps were made using VOSviewer software. The results show that the terms CAY and CVY were born in 2006 and have had a different evolutionary progression in the scientific literature until 2021, in addition, the area of psychology stands out with more research on other areas, developed countries are the ones that carry out more studies of CAY and CVY and that the term "suicide" is the most prominent term since 2018 from the CVY. Finally, a discussion and conclusion of the results was made, which can serve as a turning point for future lines of research.

Characteristics and effectiveness of interventions to reduce cyberbullying: a systematic review

Background

This paper presents the results from a systematic review on the effectiveness of interventions to reduce Cyberbullying (CB) as a function of their outcomes and main characteristics; and an analysis of the level of completeness to which the characteristics of these interventions are described.

Methods

Systematic searches were conducted in PubMed, Scopus, ERIC and Psycinfo databases on February 14, 2022. In addition, relevant publications were hand searched for relevant studies. We considered interventions that provided data on CB prevalence changes in populations between primary school and college age.

Results

In total, 111 studies were retained for further screening from 3,477 results. Following rigorous screening, 43 reports including 46 studies and information from 36 different interventions were included in our systematic review. Results shows that most of the interventions measuring reductions in global CB, cyberperpetration/victimization, cybervictimization and cyberperpetration were effective or partially effective. While the interventions measuring reductions in cyber-bystanding were not effective. Multicomponent interventions showed higher effectiveness than single-component interventions. After completion of the TIDieR check-list, included interventions were considered to offer an insufficient level of detail for a number of the analyzed items in relation to "how well planned," "intervention modifications" and "tailoring."

Conclusion

Given the aforementioned, it is critical to increase the number of studies and the quality of interventions targeting CB and the level of detail of its description in order to obtain more robust outcomes about how to reduce its prevalence and facilitate the replication of the effective interventions.

Systematic review registration

https://archive.org/details/osf-registrations-wn5u4-v1, Identifer DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/WN5U4.

Bystanders' Victim Blaming and Minimizing Consequences of Weight-Based Cyberhate Attacks: The Roles of anti-Fat Attitudes, Body-Positive Online Content, and Gender

Physical appearance and, specifically, weight are common reasons for cyberhate attacks among adolescents. Using a between-subject experimental design, this study focuses on the bystanders of such attacks on Instagram. We investigate bystanders' assessments in the form of two moral disengagement (MD) mechanisms-victim blaming and minimizing consequences-and we compare the assessments of attacks that are diversified by the victim's weight (i.e., a victim who is plus-size and a victim who is thinner). We also examine the moderating roles of bystanders' prejudice against people who are plus-size in the form of the so-called anti-fat attitudes, their frequency of viewing body-positive online content, and gender. The study's data come from an online survey conducted in 2020 with a representative sample of 658 Czech adolescents, aged 13-18. We tested our hypotheses with structural equation modeling. The results show that the two MD mechanisms work differently. The victim's displayed weight affected the bystanders' tendency to victim blame: adolescents blamed the victim who is plus-size more than the victim who is thinner, but the victim's weight made no difference in minimizing the consequences of the incident. A moderating effect for anti-fat attitudes and gender was found for victim blaming. Bystanders with higher anti-fat attitudes and boys blamed the victim who is plus-size more than the victim who is thinner. On the other hand, there was no effect for the frequency of viewing body-positive online content for either of the MD mechanisms. The results are discussed with regard to the differences between the two mechanisms and the practical implications for educational and prevention programs for youth.

The Severity of Cyberbullying Affects Bystander Intervention Among College Students: The Roles of Feelings of Responsibility and Empathy

Background

Bystander intervention can protect victims from harm in cyberbullying. Previous studies have found that the severity of cyberbullying incidents is one of the important factors affecting decisions to intervene. However, little is known about the mediating and moderating mechanisms underlying this effect.

Purpose

The current study explored the effect of the severity of cyberbullying incidents on bystander intention to intervene on social network sites (SNSs) among college students (Experiment 1), the mediating role of feelings of responsibility (Experiment 2) and the moderating role of empathy (Experiment 3).

Patients and Methods

We presented cyberbullying incidents with different levels of severity through scenarios including fictive Weibo news reports and comments. Participants were exposed to a fictive cyberbullying incident and asked to complete a questionnaire including measures of the variables of interest.

Results

Our results showed that the severity of incidents positively affected bystander intention to intervene through the mediation of feelings of responsibility. Empathy moderated the effect of incident severity on bystander intention to intervene.

Conclusion

The results of the current study help to understand the behavior of bystanders in cyberbullying and they provide a practical reference for intervention in cyberbullying incidents.

Aggression Detection in Social Media from Textual Data Using Deep Learning Models

It is an undeniable fact that people excessively rely on social media for effective communication. However, there is no appropriate barrier as to who becomes a part of the communication. Therefore, unknown people ruin the fundamental purpose of effective communication with irrelevant—and sometimes aggressive—messages. As its popularity increases, its impact on society also increases, from primarily being positive to negative. Cyber aggression is a negative impact; it is defined as the willful use of information technology to harm, threaten, slander, defame, or harass another person. With increasing volumes of cyber-aggressive messages, tweets, and retweets, there is a rising demand for automated filters to identify and remove these unwanted messages. However, most existing methods only consider NLP-based feature extractors, e.g., TF-IDF, Word2Vec, with a lack of consideration for emotional features, which makes these less effective for cyber aggression detection. In this work, we extracted eight novel emotional features and used a newly designed deep neural network with only three numbers of layers to identify aggressive statements. The proposed DNN model was tested on the Cyber-Troll dataset. The combination of word embedding and eight different emotional features were fed into the DNN for significant improvement in recognition while keeping the DNN design simple and computationally less demanding. When compared with the state-of-the-art models, our proposed model achieves an F1 score of 97%, surpassing the competitors by a significant margin.

Understanding the Perpetuation of Cyberbullying Victimization in Adolescents: The Role of Executive Functions

The consequences of cyberbullying victimization can lead to its perpetuation over time, initiating a vicious cycle. Thus, it is important to identify the factors that contribute to the persistence of victimization. This study aimed to examine some longitudinal mechanisms involved in the perpetuation of cyberbullying victimization in adolescents. The secondary aim was to study the protective role of executive functions (cognitive flexibility and selective attention) in this process, filling a gap in the literature. Sex differences were also studied. The sample consisted of 698 adolescents between 12 and 17 years of age (M = 14.59, SD = 1.36; 40.83% girls) from the Basque Country (Spain). Adolescents participated in a longitudinal study with three waves, in which 5–6 months elapsed between waves. The participants completed measures of executive functions in wave 1, of cyberbullying perpetration and depressive symptoms in waves 1 and 2, and of cyberbullying victimization in all three waves. The findings indicated that cyberbullying victimization was perpetuated through an increase of cyberbullying perpetration and depressive symptoms. Concerning executive functions, cognitive flexibility attenuated the impact of cyberbullying victimization on cyberbullying perpetration and depressive symptoms, and these in turn predicted lower levels of future victimization. Sex differences revealed that selective attention acted as a risk factor for cyberbullying victimization in girls and as a protective factor in boys. The results highlight the importance of considering mediating mechanisms involved in the perpetuation of cyberbullying victimization as well as the beneficial role played by cognitive flexibility in reducing the stability of cyberbullying victimization.

Bystanders to Prevent Peer Sexual Violence: Understanding Patterns of Prosocial Behavior Over Time from Early to Later Adolescence

Programs to prevent peer sexual violence that encourage positive bystander intervention are proliferating. Yet, little is known about how these prosocial behaviors unfold over time across middle to later adolescence. The current study examined helpful bystander actions over three years among students in grades 7-10 (mean age 13.7, range 12-18) at baseline (N = 2539, 53.2% girls). Surveys assessed bystander behavior, social norms, and use of alcohol. Multilevel logistic regression examined patterns of change over time, as well as how changes in attitudes and binge drinking predicted changes in taking bystander action to prevent peer violence. Positive bystander behaviors overall decreased over time, consistent with previous work on bullying. Higher positive social norms and lower denial of sexual violence as a problem were associated with more positive helping behaviors across different waves of data. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of bystander intervention training for peer sexual violence prevention may be enhanced by developing strategies to work against the observed developmental decline in helping, perhaps by social marketing campaigns that can bolster positive social norms.