The Emotional Mechanism And Visual Processing Characteristics Of Willingness To Help Others In Bullying Situations

School bullying is one of the problematic behaviors that influence primary and middle school safety.Exploring how to correctly identify and effectively intervene in school bullying situations is significant to children’s well-being and school safety.Theoretical research shows that bystander intervention is often effective in stopping bullying,and its process is accompanied by complex cognitive and emotional processes.As a basic emotional process,emotional regulation refers to the process of adapting to the social environment by influencing the intensity or experience of emotional states.What is the current situation of school bullying among primary and middle school children in China? How does emotional response affect helping willingness?This thesis concludes three studies,aiming to explore 1)the bullying status,2)the emotional mechanism of helping willingness in bullying situations,3)the effects of dynamic stimulus processing and emotional types on the willingness to help in the laboratory.This study consists of three parts.Research 1 investigated the current situation of primary and middle school children using questionnaires.The prevalence and basic characteristics of their bullying behaviors were summarized and evaluated in this research.Research 2 adopted the questionnaire method and the vignette method.Firstly,a vignette was applied to investigate the willingness to help others and their emotional reactions in different situations.Secondly,based on the perspective of empathy and emotional regulation,the mechanism of helping willingness in the context of bullying at the emotional level was discussed in this research.Research 3applied the method of eye-tracking technology in the bullying situation to explore the influence of dynamic stimulation processing and the type of emotion in different situations on helping willingness,which further enhanced the ecological validity of the study.It was found that:(1)The prevalence and major characteristics of school bullying among primary and middle school: there was still a serious school bullying problem in primary and middle school.26.3% of children have been bullied,while 6.6% of children were bullying,and 5.2% of children were both bullying and being bullied.In general,the proportion of children who were involved in school bullying declined as grade increases.(2)Specific manifestations of willingness to help in different bullying situations: willingness to help others in the physical bullying situation was significantly lower than that in verbal bullying situations.In no-bystander situation,willingness to help others was significantly lower than in bystander situations.In terms of behavioral response to bullying vignette,compared with verbal bullying situations,participants in physical bullying situations were more likely to ignore or stay out of the situation,leave the area and tell the adult.Compared with bystander situations,participants in no-bystander situations were more likely to ignore or stay out of the situation,comfort the person being bullied,and less likely to stop the bully.(3)The mediating model of affective trait predicting the helping intention: empathy can not only directly predicted the helping willingness,but also indirectly and negatively predicted the helping willingness through personal pain or indirectly and positively predicted the helping willingness through sympathy.That is,personal pain and sympathy played a dual mediating role in the influence of empathy on the helping willingness.Furthermore,in addition to directly predicting the helping willingness,emotional regulation can also indirectly improve the helping willingness by predicting sympathy,which played a partial mediating role between emotional regulation and helping willingness.(4)The influence of emotional response on willingness to help others and information processing: In bullying cases,the willingness to help others was the highest when anger activated the first stage dynamic stimulation processing process,and the overall dynamic stimulation processing process under the happy activation process had different degrees of influence on the willingness to help others.The willingness to help under the activation of anger emotion was significantly higher than that under the activation of happy emotion.In the case of one bully,an individual’s willingness to help and eye movement indexes in the no-bystander situations were significantly higher than in the bystander situations.However,in the case of multiple bullies,an individual’s willingness and eye movement indexes in no-bystander situations were significantly lower than in the bystander situations.In summary,the results showed that school bullying in primary and middle school was still serious.In the case of relatively severe bullying situations,people tended to have a greater emotional response and a lower willingness to help.The bystander effect was also found in different bullying situations.Besides,empathy,effective emotional regulation,and sympathy had significant positive effects on the willingness to help others.Finally,in the process of dynamic stimulation,the willingness to help in anger was significantly higher than that in happiness.This paper promoted the study of helping intentions in bullying incidents,and added new research for the behavioral development of primary and middle school children.Furthermore,this paper provided the theoretical basis and practical results for motivating students to help others and regulating their emotions in school bullying incidents.