Social-Behavioral Correlates of Cyberbullying in a German Student Sample

Abstract

With almost all German households owning mobile phones (99%), personal or laptop computers (99%), and having Internet access (96%) (MPFS, 2008), electronic media play a central role in children’s and adolescents’ lives in Germany and also pose a new venue for potentially harmful behavior and experiences such as cyberbullying. Beside first prevalence studies on cyberbullying (Katzer, 2009), there is a lack of studies on risk and protective factors. Impulses for research on this issue can be gained from research on traditional bullying which has shown low scores on empathy to be associated with the status of bully (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006). Empathy is viewed as the combination of two functionally different aspects: cognitive and affective empathy, with cognitive empathy being the ability to understand another person’s emotions (perspective taking) and affective empathy being the affective response to someone else’s emotions (Hoffman, 1977). Sutton, Smith, and Swettenham (1999) hypothesized that (traditional) bullies are able to process social information very accurately and can use it to their advantage rather than