Attending to Bullying: A Psychophysical Approach to Understanding Peer Aggression and Victimization

Abstract

Intervention and prevention programs for peer aggression in schools have largely been constructed with the assumption that aggressive children will pay more attention to aggressive stimuli in their social environment. However, this hypothesis has never been tested with direct measures of attention. Thus, my honours thesis project is investigating how participants with a history of peer aggression involvement as a perpetrator or victim direct their attention in photographs depicting scenarios of peer aggression. Based on answers in a questionnaire, participants were divided into three groups: (1) those with a history of perpetrating peer aggression, (2) those with a history of being victimized by peer aggression and (3) those with no history of peer aggression involvement. The experimental study was conducted on an eyetracker, which measured where participants were looking as they viewed 48 photographs. The photographs depicted preadolescent children in scenes of group or peer‐to‐peer interactions that were either aggressive or non‐aggressive. I predict that those with a history of aggression will pay more attention to the aggressors in the scenes more often than those with a history of victimization or the control group. This investigation will give direct evidence regarding how attention in social scenes is affected by a history of peer aggression involvement. A better understanding of how attentional processes are affected by a history of peer aggression involvement will allow for the development of more effective intervention and prevention programs for peer aggression in schools.