Cyberbullying is willful and repeated harm inflicted through the medium of electronic text. Computer software was developed to detect the presence of cyberbullying in online chat conversations. Rules based on a dictionary of key words are used to classify a window of posts. A truth set of MySpace threads was created. The software was found to correctly identify windows containing cyberbullying ...

With increasing reliance on computer-mediated communication, emergencies and negative communication will also increase. Nearly one-fifth of adolescents report being cyberbullied, and over 25% of those report multiple occurrences. Though important gains have been made to understand the adverse effects and possible risk factors of cyberbullying for victims and cyberbullies, most individuals (70%;...

It is hard to imagine a world without mobile phones, PDAs, and wireless/Broadband access on PCs. With the prevalence of electronic communication tools, people (including students) are finding it harder to live without them. Not surprisingly, these electronic communication tools provide benefits that enrich students’ scholarly and social experiences. However, evidence also shows that the usage o...

While school bullying has been shown to be associated with depression and suicidality among teens, the relationship between these outcomes and cyberbullying has not been studied in nationally representative samples. Data came from the 2011 CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), a nationally representative sample of high-school students (N=15,425). We calculated weighted estimates representative...

The automatic monitoring of cyberbullying on social networking sites has potential for signalling harmful messages, preventing these messages from remaining online and providing timely responses. Although technological advancements are made to optimise automatic cyberbullying detection systems, little is known about its desirability and requirements. Experts in the field of cyberbullying, as ex...

As children gain access to electronic communication devices at increasingly younger ages, bullying is no longer restricted to the traditional “schoolyard” setting. The present study investigates a) the prevalence of cyberbullying in a sample of fourth and fifth graders and b) the role of hostile attribution bias (HAB) in children’s interpretations of ambiguous cyber provocation scenarios and in...

Cyberbullying or electronic aggression has already been designated as a serious public health threat. Cyberbullying should also be considered as a cause for new onset psychological symptoms, somatic symptoms of unclear etiology or a drop in academic performance. Pediatricians should be trained to play a major role in caring for and supporting the social and developmental well-being of children.

This study examined the bystander effect in cyberbullying. Using self-reported data from 257 Czech respondents who had witnessed a cyberbullying attack, we tested whether provided help decreased with increased number of other bystanders. We controlled for several individual and contextual factors, including empathy, social self-efficacy, empathic response to victimization, and relationship to t...

Meta-analyses confirm a negative relationship between aggressive behavior and empathy, that is, the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Based on theoretical considerations, it was, therefore, hypothesized that a lack of empathic responsiveness may be characteristic for cyberbullies in particular. In the present study, 2.070 students of Luxembourg secondary schools completed ...

BACKGROUND Bullying is a national public health problem affecting millions of students. With the rapid increase in electronic or online communication, bullying is no longer limited to schools. The goal of the current investigation was to examine the overlap among targets of, and the similarities between, online and in-school bullying among Internet-using adolescents. Additionally, a number of c...