21st “Workshop on Aggression”: Socio-Emotional Programs – Preventing Aggression

The “Workshop on Aggression”, a small to medium sized conference for aggression research, has a history that dates back to 1997 and has until now only been hosted by colleagues and institutions from German speaking countries. Keeping with the tradition of previous meetings, the “Workshop on Aggression” aims to bring together international scholars from different disciplines involved in aggression research and provides a forum to present current research from all areas of basic and applied – including developmental – aggression research, making this Workshop an ideal place for scientific exchange between international researchers of aggression.

In November 2016, the 21st “Workshop on Aggression”¹, hosted by the Department of Psychology, University of Oradea, and held in Baile Felix, Romania, focused on the main topic “Socio-Emotional Programs – Preventing Aggression”. In her conference report, Simona Trip (2017) gives an overview of the entire 21st “Workshop on Aggression” followed by four articles. The Workshop inspired this inaugural special issue of – hopefully – a long series of forthcoming special issues. With this editorial, we welcome our readers to this new series of special issues each of which gives insight into the respective “Workshop on Aggression”.

Stephanie Pieschl and Torsten Porsch (2017) investigated the relationship between cyberbullying and trust, using a two-cross-sectional-study approach. In Study 1 (N = 224) the authors show that negative experiences of family problems and cyber-perpetration predicted low generalized trust. In Study 2 (N = 196) they show that there is no significant direct relationship, however, trust was related to low online privacy concerns and the willingness to self-disclose online was positively related to cyber-victimization and cyber-perpetration. These studies provide the first empirical pieces of evidence with regard to the relationship between cyberbullying and trust.

Olga Solomontos-Kountouri, Konstantinos Tsagkaridis, Petra Gradinger, and Dagmar Strohmeier (2017) investigated a sample of 2,329 students (M_age = 13.08, SD = 0.86) from 120 classes, grade 7 to 9, from six Cypriot schools, and utilized both a variable-oriented and a person-oriented approach for data analyses. On the basis of a variable-oriented approach, the authors investigated whether traditional bullying, traditional victimization, cyberbullying, and cybervictimization could be predicted by the same or different academic (i.e., learning interest, self-efficacy, learning, goal), socio-emotional (i.e., emotional problems, affective empathy, and cognitive empathy), and demographic (i.e., gender, grade, immigrant status, SES, parents’ marital status, father’s education, and mother’s education) characteristics. On the basis of a person-oriented approach, they investigated the size of the traditional, cyber- and mixed bully, victim and bully-victim groups to check whether adolescents who were classified in one of these groups differ regarding their academic, socio-emotional, and demographic characteristics from uninvolved adolescents.

Elisabeth Stefanek, Dagmar Strohmeier, and Takuya Yanagida (2017) investigated 1,451 adolescents (12–15 years) and compared different groups of bullies and victims regarding depression, peer relationships, and academic variables; the authors explored whether the associations between depression and these variables differ in groups of bullies and victims. They conducted Latent Profile Analyses which yielded a five-group solution: non-involved adolescents, bullies, moderate victims, severe victims, and bully-victims, with individual patterns of depression symptoms, school liking/academic variables, number of friends, and popularity. Additionally, authors identified moderate and severe victims and demonstrated that victims are not one homogenous group.

Finally, Stephanie Pieschl, Penka Kourteva, and Leonie Stauf (2017) close the special issue presenting results from two case studies, investigating challenges in the evaluation of the cyberbullying prevention program Surf-Fair. Based on their results, authors discuss general challenges of cyberbullying prevention research.

The collection of four papers in this special issue represents innovative and international research in (cyber-)bullying, the prevention of (cyber-)bullying respectively, taking into account different methodological approaches. Hopefully, this collection of articles will serve not only as a tribute to the “Workshop on Aggression”, but also as a framework out of which this journal can grow.