A child’s temperament, sex and the type of bullying they experience all influence whether the child subsequently becomes depressed or more aggressive after being victimized, indicates a study by graduate student Niwako Sugimura, left, and psychology Karen D. Rudolph.
CHAMPAIGN, lll. -- Girls with poor self-control become as physically aggressive as the average boy when they’re bullied, suggests a new study by psychologists at the University of Illinois.
Whether victims become more aggressive or mired in self-blame and despair after being victimized is influenced by their temperament, gender and the type of bullying they experience. Intervention programs need to be sensitive to these differences and provide resources and strategies tailored to victims’ individual needs, said the study’s co-authors, graduate student Niwako Sugimura and Karen D. Rudolph, a professor in the department of psychology.
The researchers tracked 283 second-graders’ psychological adjustment for a year, examining how temperament and sex influenced bullying victims’ subsequent development of aggression or depression. The children and their teachers were surveyed about the children’s victimization by peers, and their overt and relationally aggressive behaviors toward others. Overt bullying includes physical assaults and verbal taunts or threats; relational bullying is intentionally excluding a child from a group or spreading rumors about them.
Parents also completed questionnaires about their children’s moods and feelings that corresponded with depressive symptoms and reported on two traits pertaining to their children’s temperaments - inhibitory control and negative emotionality.
“Inhibitory control is like self-control,” Sugimura said. “Kids with poor inhibitory control have trouble stopping themselves from doing something too quickly or they don’t think before they act. Negative emotionality refers to how easily kids become angry, frustrated or sad. Children with high negative emotionality not only become angry or sad easily, they also stay upset longer.”
Not all children with high negative emotionality are depressed, although they may be more likely to become depressed than other children when they face a severe problem such as bullying, Rudolph said.
In the study, girls with high negative emotionality who had been bullied overtly or relationally were more likely to show depressive symptoms a year later. However, boys with high negative emotionality showed more depressive symptoms regardless of the amount of bullying they experienced, while boys with low negative emotionality showed depressive symptoms only in response to relational bullying.
“We know that there is a genetic component to some of these traits, so it might be that boys with high negative emotionality are predisposed to depression,” Rudolph said. “And it doesn’t matter what their experiences are; they’re just more likely to be depressed. However, boys with low negative emotionality were not predisposed to depression, so they were more reactive when they were bullied and became depressed.”
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