Atypical social cognition in bullying: how pre-adolescents mentalize emotions

Maria Luisa Pedditzi

Primo

;Fadda Roberta

Secondo

;Tricia Striano Skoler

Ultimo

2022-01-01

---

Abstract

Mentalizing is a mental activity that allows perceiving human behavior in terms of mental states like emotions, beliefs, needs, feelings, and goals. A reduced mentalizing ability is a risk factor for a variety of psychological issues in the domain of interpersonal social relationships. Numerous studies ndicated deficits in social cognition in bullies and victims and highlighted that, aggressive children are less accurate in identifying emotions compared to control groups. However, only a few studies nvestigated mentalizing abilities related to anger and happiness in pre-adolescence. Our study tries to fill this gap in the literature, by investigating possible differences in the ability to mentalize anger and happiness in bullies and victims, compared to a control group of peers. To achieve this aim, we interviewed 100 students, aged between 13 to 14 years (M = 13.48; SD=.86), attending Italian lower secondary school, and balanced by gender. We administered the Olweus questionnaires to identify bullies and victims. We also applied a narrative approach to investigate the mental state language referred to anger and happiness. The results indicated a reduced ability to mentalize anger in bullies and victims compared to the control group. The 34.6% of bullies’ responses considered anger as a mere behavioral or physical state, compared to controls (26.3%; χ2= 15.97, α ≤ 0.05) who in turn considered anger as a mental state (38.6%). Also, victims were less likely to refer to anger as a mental state (12.5%) compared to the control group (38.6%; χ2= 30.72, α ≤ 0.05). These results highlight that both bullies and victims seem to have difficulty in defining anger and happiness as a mental state. The results of our study point to the need to define effective intervention programs to prevent bullying by promoting appropriate mentalization of emotions in pre-adolescents. We also highlight the need to train teachers and parents about the importance of awareness of emotions to be understood as a valuable "ally" of the cognitive and social processes involved in school and family education.