The Influence of Bully’s Psychopathic Tendency on the Level of Empathy in Middle & High School: Focusing on the Change after Exclusive Experience

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of psychopathy on empathy levels among the adolescent-bully group. In particular, we highlighted whether the exclusion experience changed the empathy levels of participants. The study data was collected from a self-reported questionnaire conducted by 1,794 adolescents. The data was divided into three groups: The bully-psychopathy group, bully-non psychopathy group and normal group. During this experiment, subjects participated in the Cyberball Game. The exclusion experience was manipulated by the game, and the empathy levels regarding the exclusive scenarios were measured before and after of Cyberball Game. As a result, before subjects were excluded from the Cyberball Game, both the bully-psychopathy and bully-non psychopathy groups did not demonstrate any significant differences in the empathy level of victims. After the exclusion experience, both groups showed meaningful differences with respect to the change of empathy level. Although the bully-psychopathy group did not show any drastic change of the empathy level before and after the exclusion experience, the bully-non psychopathy group showed a significant increase in the empathy level. Herein, the significance and limitation of this study are discussed and a future research direction is proposed.