Bullying can be considered as a subcategory of interpersonal conflicts characterized by willfulness, repetition, and power asymmetry. These three strange features identified in Olweus’ pioneering work in Omnibus’s Olweus Bullying Prevention Program led to the publication of violence that differentiates bullying from other means. Anger is a powerful emotional component of bullying and can have two values in some cases. Researcher Rieffe and his team conducted a study comparing a group of children with autism spectrum disorders to a group of typically developing children in an attempt to explore the emotional aspects of relational dynamics related to bullying situations. The emotions most associated with bullying are anger and guilt in both groups. While victimization behaviors are associated with a sense of fear in children with typical development, feelings of anger are also detected in children with autism.
Garner and Hinton found a negative relationship between emotional self-control and the experiences of bullying for both the bully and the victim, and it turned out that the most prevalent emotions in these dynamics were anger and sadness. Parallel to this, Menesini and his team emphasized the role that the moral separation mechanisms proposed by Bandura can have. In fact, acts of bullying are often seen by the class group as something unfair and wrong. Despite this, the bully allows him to justify himself and partially override moral control over his actions. However, thanks to these mechanisms, he is an individual who manages to protect himself from feelings of worthlessness, guilt and shame. In practice, people involved in acts of bullying show that they cannot manage and adjust their emotions on the one hand, and on the other hand, ignore the negative consequences of their actions (especially with regard to bullies).
When cyberbullying incidents occur, it is the existence of the same peculiar features of more classic forms of bullying (deliberate, repetition, and power asymmetry), even if a different environment is used. In fact, cyberbullying occurs on the Internet, on mobile phones, and through all electronic devices that explicitly or implicitly allow sending messages, emails, pictures or videos for the purpose of harming someone. What’s more, it is definitely more complex to maintain cyberbullying within strict limits. It can be processed 24 hours a day, a much wider audience can be reached, and the attacker has the possibility to remain anonymous. The fact that it is not always possible to identify who is the perpetrator supports individualization and disempowerment on the one hand, and on the other hand increases the feelings of anxiety, anger and fear in the victim.
Just as with bullying, even when dealing with cyberbullying, it seems impossible to talk about the role emotions and emotional regulation play. There is a recent transnational study by Ortega and his team. It has shown that victims of different types of bullying, including classical and cyberbullying, experience very similar emotional responses, which in most cases include feelings of anger. Spielberger et al., While examining the emotion of anger, pushed it to distinguish between anger as a feature and situation. When it corresponds to a predisposition of the individual, it speaks of the property and its state instead. Based on this distinction, Lonigro et al. Conducted a study to understand whether cyberbullying is a feature or is associated with anger, understood as a situation. And he discovered that in most cases of cyberbullying, victims and attackers experience anger as a situation, and therefore temporarily, in reverse.
It occurs with physical bullying, face-to-face, when anger is identified as a true characteristic of the person’s personality. The concept of emotional intelligence, pioneering from Salovey to Mayer, was defined as the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to distinguish them, to use this information to guide and completely overthrow one’s thoughts and actions. Galimberti and Pacchin defined emotional ignorance, which is one of the main causes of today’s tendency to aggression and violence (verbal and otherwise) and finds satisfaction on the web and especially in social networks.
Galimberti, in particular, describes it as that emotional indifference in which there is no emotional resonance to facts witnessed or gestures made. To correct this alarming trend, Goleman offers genuine emotional literacy programs to be implemented in schools, reinventing and popularizing the concept of emotional intelligence. Consequently, this overview of the negative consequences of anger can lead to the social exclusion of children and young people in their reference context before moving on to the preventive tools that can be applied. It is helpful to address the issue of antisocial behavior, as several researchers have identified an important determinant in this area.
When Vulnerability Turns into Crime
Rutter categorizes a range of risk factors for crime and violence (among social factors) for which it is interesting to highlight aggression, impulsivity, and low self-control (among individual factors), low social competence, and lack of empathy. These categories are then combined with family, school and ecological factors. These are elements that become relevant in the antisocial initiation in some cases, in the continuation of a criminal career in other cases, and in the process of escalation and exacerbation in others. Many criminal theories of the past have associated the onset of criminal behavior with factors of social disorder and subcultural values that are present in the social context of the reference. However, recent scientific research has focused on theories focusing on stress factors (stress theories).
If this happens at an early age, it can lead to antisocial behavior and the commission of crimes in an attempt to relieve this tension. People can then take criminal activity to react negatively to the stress and emotions created by certain factors. For example, stealing to relieve tension caused by lack of money, running away from home to relieve the stress of violent parents, sometimes take revenge on the source of stress or seek goals for it. In addition, Agnew, who studied and reviewed the main Strain Theories, concluded that the tension referred to in all theories can be explained as anger accumulation and frustration. It is more intolerable and therefore forcing the individual to alternative escape routes and crime becomes one of these escape routes.
Based on Agnew’s work, other researchers have investigated this aspect. Brezina and her team applied scholastic bonding and found this by looking for a positive correlation between students’ anger levels and peer conflicts. In their research, students with a higher level of anger and therefore a higher level of tension proved to be the most involved in the arguments and conflicts that arose at school. Mazerolle et al. Investigated further and wondered whether the anger referred to in these theories was a situational anger (a condition related to a particular situation) or a dispositional anger (a specific part of the individual’s personality). The results showed that both anger and situational anger can become stressful factors and cause tension, but always follow two different processes and therefore different cognitive mechanisms.
It is interesting to note that the most common social reaction against perpetrators is punitive response. Hence, imprisonment is ineffective in terms of education, up to anger management, a feeling that plays a central role in the formation of conflicts, prejudices, and antisocial behavior. Heseltine et al. Conducted a study showing the ineffectiveness of an anger-fighting intervention program against detainees. He compared the group using the program with the group on the waiting list. In terms of theoretical knowledge, significant differences were found in terms of anger, but the differences in terms of the manifestation of anger through experienced anger levels and aggressive behavior are almost negligible.
