Examining empathic responses to bullying
Bullying is a widespread and serious problem existing in schools today. One means of working towards doing away with bullying is by instilling a sense of empathy at a young age. Thus the VICTEC (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters) project addressed the emotional and empathic facets of the learning process by concentrating on Personal and Social Education (PSE). New technologies were applied through a synthetic characters toolkit in order to create a virtual environment with life-like characters with which children could relate. Following this, the University of Herts conducted an evaluation exercise that examined the relationship between bullying status, empathic ability and Theory Of Mind (TOM). Data showed that both country and gender affected the results. One factor influencing the result may have to do with how much Personal and Social Education (PSE) is stressed in some countries over others. It was also found that female students had a higher affective empathy score than male students in all of the countries involved. Both pupils and teachers completed a bullying questionnaire. The results proved that physical bullying can be more easily spotted than that of relational bullying, particularly relational victimisation. This confirms the notion that relational bullying occurs behind the back of teachers and certain students. It was found that children liked interacting with the software and that they empathised with the characters despite that the character's physical appearance received a poor rating. This goes to show that children were able to infer emotions from situational cues rather that from the characters' appearance. Additionally the students preferred the interactive application over the teacher-led lesson since they found the former more private. Further results are to be expected in the future.
