Search results

This study aims to investigate the effects of workplace cyberbullying on creativity directly and through psychological distress. Furthermore, this study proposes that psychological capital (PsyCap) buffers the harmful effects of workplace cyberbullying on psychological distress and creativity.

The data were collected in two waves from 329 nurses working in four large public hospitals located in a metropolitan city of Pakistan. The data were analyzed through PROCESS (Model 8) using SPSS.

The results demonstrate that cyberbullying negatively affects creativity through increased psychological distress. The findings also explicate that PsyCap moderates the effects of cyberbullying on psychological distress such that the link was weak (vs strong) for those (victims) who had high (vs low) PsyCap.

This study recommends management to develop and promote PsyCap among employees because these positive resources help them to regulate their emotions and cognition to overcome negative consequences of cyberbullying and other workplace stressors.

Psychological distress as an underlying mechanism between cyberbullying and creativity as well as buffering effect of PsyCap is the novelty of the study.

The American public greatly esteems their First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but generally understands poorly its true ambit. Unfortunately, this defect in understanding permeates American educational institutions, from the lowest grades to higher education and even professional schools. Students’ pervasive ability to engage in technological speech and expression further complicates the issue, especially when inappropriate or offensive speech originating outside school crosses the geographic boundary and enters school. School administrators at all levels, challenged with maintaining atmospheres of safety and security conducive to learning, are being asked to respond to such student speech, but they fear to exceed the limits of their authority. Cyberbullying and harassing communications continue to distract victims and educators and detract from the quality of education at all institutions. The legal system and judiciary provide little guidance, and what guidance there is suffers from lack of consistent definitions and conflicting analyses. This chapter will review the jurisprudence pertaining to the First Amendment as applied to the school setting. The emphasis will be on legislative, judicial, and societal responses to cyberbullying and cyber harassment in the school setting, from the elementary level to higher education. Finally, recommendations for policies and procedures for dealing with cyberbullying and cyber harassment in schools will be presented.

In this chapter, we explore an actual incident of cyberbullying that occurred at a large Canadian university. In our analysis, we frame cyberbullying as part of the more general phenomena of classroom incivility. We focus on the sociocultural context and demonstrate how the structures and processes within the classroom environment can enable incivility as well as cyberbullying.

This study presents findings leading to the conclusion that cyberbullying in massively multiplayer online (MMO) games can be conceptualized, measured and at least partially explained as a normative phenomenon, similar to Latane & Darley's (1970) bystander inaction hypothesis. An overall sample of N=372 respondents to an online survey provided information on their daily amount of Internet use and daily amount of time engaged in playing in MMO games. Scales for the assessment of both cyberbullying victimization and bullying itself were developed. Victims of cyberbullying appear more sensitive to bullying incidents albeit no more likely than game players who have engaged in bullying to intervene in preventing it. Perpetrators of cyberbullying, however, also appear to be heavily invested in both Internet use and MMO game play and that could amplify an individual's aggressiveness as a player in turn making it more likely they will engage in cyberbullying. The study concludes with a qualitative examination of MMO game player narrative self-explanations for nonintervention in cyberbullying that parallels Latane and Darley's explanation of bystander nonintervention in face-to-face threatening or emergency contexts.

On September 22, 2010, a young man stood in distress on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge not far from his home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, looking 600ft below at the Hudson River. He was ready to act on the decision he had announced just minutes before on Facebook. His first semester at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, located 27 miles southwest of New York City, had brought an unexpected challenge: his roommate had streamed two live Internet videos of his intimate encounters with another man. These were very private moments, and it was simply too much to bear. Tyler Clementi jumped to his death, leaving behind broken-hearted friends and family members, and shocking an entire nation with his tragic story (Kolowich, 2010; Foderaro, 2010).

Tyler probably had no idea how his death would shed light on a serious college issue – cyberbullying. In this chapter, the authors address this issue in detail. This is done first by providing a review of relevant literature that defines cyberbullying, explaining its presence in higher education, and describing various factors that should be considered when dealing with it. The literature review includes discussion regarding key electronic resources that college students use to cyber bully, as well as various legal and judicial issues that relate to this cultural phenomenon. Following the literature review, cyberbullying is examined through a research study at Ohio University, a large public institution located in southeastern Ohio. This is accomplished by setting forth research questions and hypotheses, describing the research instrument and design, and explaining the findings from an Ohio University undergraduate student survey. The chapter concludes with suggestions that practitioners might consider implementing on campus, as well as recommendations for future research on this topic.

In this study, we aimed at examining the unique and interactive effects of peer violence in cyberspace on adolescents’ emotion regulation and socioemotional adjustment, as well as the mediational role of resilience in the link between adolescent’s pathogenic relational experiences and behavioral outcomes. Specifically, we intended to explore emotion differentiation and regulation in reaction to bullying perpetration and victimization and in terms of positive (proud, confident, good) and negative (ashamed, excited, guilty), Passive (sad, embarrassed, humiliated) and Reactive (angry, scared) emotions and how it impacted and predicted positive and negative outcomes.

A stratified convenient sample of 494 Italian students aged 13–19 years (M = 15.27, SD = 1.23) was selected to represent all different school types in Italy and the students were administered a self-report questionnaire on school bullying involvement. General Linear Models, ANOVA, and T-tests were employed to explore gender differences, the relationships between variables, and their contribution to the predictive model. A two-step Cluster analysis was used to profile adolescents based on patterns of resilience, health outcomes, and cyberbullying involvement.

Results showed significant gender differences, with females using internet and Facebook more than males and being more resilient, positive, and prosocial, but also responding to victimization with higher levels of alienation, anger, humiliation, and psychosomatic and emotional symptoms. Males perpetrated peer violence more than females, were less likely to be victimized, and were generally less emotionally impacted by it. Victimization rates (63.7%, n = 296) were higher than perpetration rates (51.7%, n = 233) and bully-victimization was prevalent (47.1%). Victims prevalently experienced passive emotions (sadness, humiliation, embarrassment) while perpetrators experienced negative ones (guilt and shame). Cluster analysis evidenced different pathways and trajectories of resilience and cyberbullying involvement: Resilient victims (RV), Healthy uninvolved (HU), Healthy Bullies (HB), Alienated Bully-Victims (ABV), and Resilient Bully-Victims (RBV). RV, HU, and HB resulted all well-adjusted, despite the different involvement in cyberbullying, and also RBV and despite the double involvement in cyberbullying, ABV were the only maladjusted and at-risk group in our sample characterized by very low Positivity, very low Resilience, and extremely high Alienation.

This study proposes a comprehensive, developmental, ecological, relational, and self-regulatory resilience approach to cyberbullying, which represents an innovative and advanced contribution to the literature with significant implication for research and practice. Fully understanding and measuring the emotional impact of cyber peer violence and resilience following cyberbullying victimization and perpetration can help in developing targeted interventions for both victims and bullies. This study highlighted the need for a self-regulatory model of resilience for modulating emotions, arousal, and behaviors across contexts, relationships, and difficulties. It also evidenced that moderate levels of resilience and positivity are sufficient to buffer youth from involvement in cyberbullying and to predict healthy adjustment and less pathological outcomes.

By profiling adolescents based on resilience levels, health outcomes, and cyberbullying involvement, we evidenced five distinct trajectories of risk evaluation for cyberbullying beyond participating roles. Our results confirmed the fundamental importance of assessing resilience and emotion regulatory resources together with peer violence involvement in identifying and targeting adolescents at risk.

The purpose of this paper is to test a moderated mediation model that links the experience of cyberbullying, perceived stress and job satisfaction among Australian employees.

A survey of 254 white collar Australian employees was conducted from a wide variety of business corporations to investigate the role of workplace cyberbullying and job outcomes. A moderated mediation analysis was conducted.

Results indicated that workplace cyberbullying resulted in perceived stress, which in turn predicted employee’s job dissatisfaction. The results further revealed that cyberbullied female employees as opposed to male employees were more likely to report greater perceived stress and to be dissatisfied in their job.

Overall, the results suggest that cyberbullying is a potential resource drain for employees and has detrimental implications in their organisational life. Importantly, male and female employees reacted to workplace cyberbullying differently suggesting the need to address the issue of workplace cyberbullying more gender sensitively.

This study provides empirical evidence that workplace cyberbullying can be a gendered phenomenon. Furthermore, COR theory and gender role theory is combined to reveal the differences between men and women in terms of their vulnerability towards different stressors.

Cyber-bullying is a form of cyber-crime that has been propagated through extensive use of social networking sites (SNS). Despite the implementation of sophisticated security measures and government compliances, privacy intrusion is petrifying. Therefore, the purpose of this paper attempts to explore as follows: why cases of bullying are still snowballing year after year? Is it possible that advances in security measures are making users more vulnerable? Or, is it a social media addiction, which is making users vulnerable to cyberbullying?

The proposed research framework is grounded in the technology threat avoidance theory (TTAT). An empirical survey of 365 social media users was analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) to understand the impact of security measures, voluntary self-disclosure (VSD) and addiction on perceived vulnerability (PV) to cyber-bullying.

The findings indicate that security measures play a significant role in propelling users to disclose their personal information voluntarily, which, in turn, results in social media addiction, which further exposes users to cyberbullying. Moreover, the study unravels gender differences in perceived vulnerabilities to cyberbullying.

The findings of the current research contribute to a better understanding of gender differences in the awareness of security measures, addiction intensities, level of self-disclosures and propensity to cyberbullying victimization. Additionally, prevention and intervention efforts may benefit from using a more targeted approach to identify potential male and female victims that experience different forms of bullying on SNS.

In addition to other constructs, the current research investigates the role of user security measures (USM) and website security measures (WSM) on the PV to cyberbullying, typically, the role of these measures is to prevent the users from becoming the victims, whereas the research unravels that they could be the possible reasons for the increased number of cases in India. To the best of the knowledge, such conflicting roles of security measures have not been discussed earlier.

To analyze the emergence of cyberbullying in the news and to unveil the extent to which this new social problem is being constructed as a moral panic.

Ethnographic content analysis is conducted on a sample of 477 local and national newspaper articles published from 2004 to 2011. Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s five criteria of a moral panic – consensus, concern, hostility, disproportionality, and volatility – are used as a lens to analyze how this issue emerged in U.S. culture.

News coverage of this issue erupted within a very short time period, drawing important attention to a previously unknown social problem facing youth. Yet in the construction of cyberbullying as a new threat to social order, the news coverage sometimes inflates the magnitude and severity of the problem. In doing so, the media work to misrepresent, misinform, and oversimplify what is a more complicated and perhaps not yet fully understood issue among youth today.

Electronic aggression is something that is of growing concern to children, parents, educators, and policymakers. Evidence has begun to show that its effects may be as harmful as face-to-face bullying. Since the media play a vital role in the designation of certain issues as worthy of the public’s attention, it is pertinent that this information is presented in an accurate fashion, rather than simply promoting a moral panic around the topic.

Future research should move beyond print media to examine how TV, popular culture, and social media sites construct this problem. This should include research on the public’s understanding and interpretation of these mediated forms of communication.

In order to gain a rich understanding of the phenomenon of cyberbullying among college students, we conducted a series of focus groups on the campus of a large southwestern university. Employing a grounded theory approach to the data analysis, major themes emerged. The roles of sender, receiver, and audience member are very fluid in the cyber-environment. Misinterpretation and miscommunication can result in unintentional cyberbullying; audience comments can easily escalate a benign comment into a major incident. Focus group participants generally believed that the receiver's interpretation rather than the intent of the sender determines whether a communication constitutes cyberbullying. Because of the potential for misinterpretation of messages, anyone can be a (perhaps unintentional) cyberbully. Participants believed that the anonymity of the Internet encouraged cyberbullying, as did the desire for instant gratification and impulsivity. Students who are different in some way (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and appearance) are perceived as being more vulnerable to being victimized in cyberspace, and students with high profiles (e.g., athletes and student government officers) were also noted as likely targets. Despite being able to describe the dynamics of cyberbullying in detail and provide numerous examples of it happening in the campus community, members of the focus groups were reluctant to characterize cyberbullying as a problem at their university and uncertain whether the university should intervene. They did, however, offer many suggestions that will be useful to universities seeking to develop policies, educational programs, and intervention strategies for their campuses.