3-088 - Bullying, Personality, and Individual Differences: Integrating Findings Across Measures

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Bullying is a widespread phenomenon that has according to Google Scholar generated nearly 6000 articles in the last five years! Yet a recent meta-analysis by Mitsopoulou & Giovazolias (2015) only identified 19 articles that correlated bullying with the Big Five personality measure (11) or empathy (8). At a time when personality, temperament, and individual differences are increasingly being studying from a cohesive developmental framework (e.g., Halverson et al., 2014; Rothbart, 2007) this lack of attention to bullying and individual differences is striking. We therefore propose a series of papers that highlight different perspectives between bullying and multiple measures of personality and individual differences.

The first study by Volk et al. focuses on a lexical personality model, the HEXACO. The HEXACO is similar to the Big Five, but its novel dimension of Honesty-Humility captures exploitation and plays the largest role in predicting bullying in Volk’s data. The second study by Summers et al. takes a cognitive approach to personality by studying the strong links between self-efficacy and moral cognitions amongst bystander behaviors. The third study by Voulgaridou and Kokkinos examines two more specific individual traits associated with bullying by examining the significant links between Callous Unemotional traits, hostile attribution biases, and victimization. Finally Marini et al. present data on how different dimensions of Rothbart’s temperament scale differentially predict different forms of bullying.

Crucially, our shared discussion will focus not just on our different results and measures, but on how bullying research can best integrate data from different measures of individual differences.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Anthony Volk, Brock University

Individual Presentations

• Bullying, Social Dominance, and HEXACO Personality Traits - Presenting Author: Anthony Volk, Brock University; Daniel Provenzano, Brock University

• The Role of Moral Disengagement and Defender Self-Efficacy in Self-Reported Bystander Behavior in Social Bullying - Presenting Author: Nicole Summers, Carleton University; Tina Marie Daniels, Carleton University; Christine Polihronis, Carleton University; Danielle Quigley, Douglas College

• Relational Victimization, Callous-Unemotional Traits and Hostile Attribution Bias among Pre-Adolescents - Presenting Author: Ioanna Voulgaridou, Democritus University of Thrace; Constantinos M Kokkinos, Democritus University of Thrace

• Physical and Relational Bullying: Differential Associations with Temperament - Presenting Author: Zopito Marini, Brock University; Andrew V Dane, Brock University; Anthony Volk, Brock University