Cybervictimization and Cyberbullying: The Role of Socio-Emotional Skills

Social and emotional competences are considered to have a crucial role in cyberbullying as, e.g., difficulties concerning emotion regulation and empathy can characterize both cyberbullies and cybervictims. Although, the dynamics of socio-emotional processes underlying cyberbullying are still open for research, as e.g., there are contradicting results concerning the role of empathy in cybervictimization. Thus, the aim of our study was to explore the specific maladaptive emotion regulation strategies characterizing cybervictims and to clarify the role of empathy in cybervictimization. Furthermore, another goal was to explore whether moral disengagement characterizes cyberbullies in absence of empathic and adaptive emotion regulation skills. 524 students (214 males, aged 12–19 years) participated in our research. We used self-report questionnaires to measure cyberbullying perpetration and cybervictimization, adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, moral disengagement, affective, cognitive empathy, and intention to comfort. Our main findings show that cyberbullying is associated with difficulties in socio-emotional competences. Cyberbullies and bully-victims demonstrate less empathic responsiveness and display higher moral disengagement than noncyberbullies. On the other hand cybervictims tend to use both adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies to cope with their negative emotions. In addition, cybervictims have higher cognitive and affective empathy than cyberbullies and bully-victims. Our findings confirm and extend the research on the relationship among socio-emotional skills and cyberbullying as well as cybervictimization. Moreover, our results have important implications for prevention programs targeting emotion regulation and empathy.