Aggression
Some scholars believe that behaviors like aggression may be partially learned by watching and imitating people's behavior, while other researchers have concluded that the media may have some small effects on aggression. There is also research questioning this view. For instance, a long-term outcome study of youth found no long-term relationship between playing violent video games and youth violence or bullying. One study suggested there is a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression than has been found with television violence on aggression. This effect is positively associated with type of game violence and negatively associated to time spent playing the games. The author concluded that insufficient evidence exists to link video game violence with aggression. However, another study suggested links to aggressive behavior.
Bullying and emotional intelligence
Bullying is the most prevalent form of violence in schools and has lasting consequences into adulthood. Increased concern regarding school bullying has been raised in part due to publicized suicides of childhood victims. Around 40% of middle school children are directly involved in bullying at least once a week according to the National Center of Education Statistics. Pre-adolescent research confirms such a negative relationship between trait EI and bullying behavior; bullying behavior is negatively associated with total empathy and more specifically, the EI dimension of cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand or take on the emotional experiences and perspectives of others. It was found that adolescent bullying peer relations are also significantly negatively correlated with the dimension of EI that was conceptualized by Lomas et al. (2012) as Understanding the Emotions of Others. While the term naming the dimension varies within the research, the dimension of EI that appears to have the strongest inverse relationship with enacting bullying behavior throughout the literature is one’s ability to understand the emotional experience of other people. Because bullying behavior in school-aged children is related to lower levels of understanding of other’s emotions, one theory is that children who exhibit bullying behaviors are not able to fully understand the impact that they have on their victims. Indeed, when differentiating between the different components of empathy, it is the cognitive component that bullies seem to have the most deficit in. In addition to the inability to relate to the emotions of others, research also suggests that those who engage in bullying behavior may also lack proper skills in dealing with their own emotions, another aspect of EI often referred to as emotional facilitation or self-efficacy. The poor use of emotions is found to be significant in predicting problem behavior among adolescents, such as aggression, which can be characteristic in bullying behavior. In this way, the ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions may play an important role in preventing children from engaging in bullying behavior. For example, in a study among adolescent girls, it was found that better management of stress could prevent the perpetuation of aggression and violence.