Longitudinal interactions between cognitive emotion regulation skills, bullying and victimization: a cross-lagged design.

Eleftheriou (Andri)¹, Ioannou (Myria)², Stavrinidis (Panayiotis)¹, Georgiou (Stelios)^1
1University of Cyprus, Nicosia
²University of Cyprus

 

Submission type

Poster only

Scheduled

Hallway, 10-07-2019, 15:30 - 17:00

Keywords

Bullying, victimization, cognitive emotion regulation

Summary

There is limited research investigating the effect of cognitive strategies on bullying and their reciprocal interactions. The aims of the study were to (a) test the extent to which adaptive and maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategies are used by adolescents who get involved in bullying incidents and (b) examine the bidirectional reciprocal effect between bullying, victimization and CER skills. 560 adolescents aged 15-18 from Cyprus participated in this longitudinal study with three time points over a year and completed among other questionnaires, the BVQ-R and the CERQ. The cross-lagged design allowed examination of the long-term reciprocal interactions between bullying, victimization and CER skills used, using Mplus 7.3. Significant differences on the use of CER skills existed only for self-blame and catastrophizing (higher for victims), as well as others-blame (higher for bully/victims). The cross-lagged longitudinal model with continuous variables showed good fit, with χ2 (230)= 885.755, p< .001, CFI= .962, TLI= .916, RMSEA= .062. Long-term victimization and bullying were consistently significantly predicted by the use of maladaptive CER skills, whereas the reverse relationship was not supported. The findings supported the unidirectional effect of maladaptive CER skills on long-term victimization and bullying, implicating support for the effectiveness of cognitive emotional training.

Auteurs