Victims Become Covert Aggressors: Gender Differences in the Mediating Effects of Rumination on Anger and Sadness

Childhood bullying victimization, emotion regulation, rumination, distress tolerance, and depressive symptoms: A cross-national examination among young adults in seven countries

Existing research suggests a robust association between childhood bullying victimization and depressive symptoms in adulthood, but less is known about potential mediators of this link. Furthermore, there is limited cross-national research evaluating similarities and differences in bullying victimization and its associations with mental health. The current study addressed gaps in the literature by evaluating cognitive and affective responses to stress (i.e., emotion regulation, rumination, and distress tolerance) as potential mediators of the link between recalled bullying victimization and current depressive symptoms among 5909 (70.6% female) college students from seven countries. Results revealed specific indirect associations of bullying victimization through distress tolerance and three out of four facets of rumination, as well as a persistent direct association of childhood bullying on adulthood depression. Emotion regulation strategies were not significantly associated with bullying victimization and did not mediate its association with depressive symptoms. Constrained multigroup models indicated that results were invariant across country and gender. Findings provide evidence of statistical mediation in a cross-sectional sample and await replication in prospective studies. Rumination and distress tolerance may be promising targets for resilience-promoting interventions among children experiencing peer victimization. Ongoing research is needed to clarify cross-national patterns in childhood bullying, identify additional mediators accounting for the remaining direct association, and evaluate emotion regulation as a potential moderator of associations between bullying victimization and adult mental health.

Hooked on a thought: Associations between rumination and neural responses to social rejection in adolescent girls

Rumination is a significant risk factor for psychopathology in adolescent girls and is associated with heightened and prolonged physiological arousal following social rejection. However, no study has examined how rumination relates to neural responses to social rejection in adolescent girls; thus, the current study aimed to address this gap. Adolescent girls (N = 116; ages 16.95-19.09) self-reported on their rumination tendency and completed a social evaluation fMRI task where they received fictitious feedback (acceptance, rejection) from peers they liked or disliked. Rejection-related neural activity and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) connectivity were regressed on rumination, controlling for rejection sensitivity and depressive symptoms. Rumination was associated with distinctive neural responses following rejection from liked peers including increased neural activity in the precuneus, inferior parietal gyrus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and supplementary motor area (SMA) and reduced sgACC connectivity with multiple regions including medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Greater precuneus and SMA activity mediated the effect of rumination on slower response time to report emotional state after receiving rejection from liked peers. These findings provide clues for distinctive cognitive processes (e.g., mentalizing, conflict processing, memory encoding) following the receipt of rejection in girls with high levels of rumination.

Exploring the longitudinal relationship between anger rumination and peer victimization when controlling for sadness rumination

Anger rumination is an unconstructive cognitive-emotion regulation strategy that bears negative adjustment outcomes in youth. Anger rumination is mostly examined as an outcome of prior peer victimization. Unidirectional links between maladaptive anger regulation and later peer difficulties have also been reported. Surprisingly, whether anger rumination and peer victimization are mutually related and reinforcing is poorly explored. The present study tested reciprocal associations between anger rumination and peer victimization in 367 5th graders (Mage = 10.53, SE = 0.16; 54.2% girls). To increase precision of findings sadness rumination was treated as a confounder. Self-reported data were obtained at two times, spaced 1 year. Cross-lagged analyses showed that peer victimization predicted increases in anger rumination but not vice versa, after controlling for sadness rumination. Victimized boys were found to be more at risk for endorsing anger rumination over time as compared to victimized girls. Directions for future research and implications for practice are discussed.

The Roles of Clique Status Hierarchy and Aggression Norms in Victimized Adolescents' Aggressive Behavior

The healthy context paradox indicates that in "healthy" contexts, with lower bullying or victimization norms, victimization experiences would unexpectedly exacerbate adolescents' adjustment difficulties, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, particularly from the clique perspective. The current 2-year longitudinal multilevel study attempts to examine the conditional effects of both clique structure (i.e., status hierarchy) and clique norms (i.e., aggression norms) on the relationship between individual victimization and aggressive behavior. The sample consisted of 691 Chinese junior high school students (M_age = 12.74, SD = 0.43; 55.6% boys), who were identified to belong to 153 cliques with sizes varying from 3 to 12 students (M_size = 5.08, SD = 1.89), according to the social cognitive map. Participants completed peer-nominated measures at two time points, two years apart. The multilevel models revealed that it was in less hierarchical cliques with lower aggression that victimized adolescents would exhibit more relational forms of aggression (rather than overt forms) two years later. More intriguingly, contrary results were found in all-girls cliques and all-boys cliques. Specifically, victimized girls' overt and relational aggression was higher in cliques with less hierarchy and lower aggression, whereas, in cliques with more hierarchy and higher aggression, victimized boys' relational aggression was higher, which conforms to the healthy context paradox and the peer contagion hypothesis, respectively. These findings highlight that egalitarian cliques with low aggression would promote aggressive behavior of victimized adolescents, especially for girls rather than for boys, which in turn has crucial implications for anti-bullying interventions.