Attention Bias Towards Interpersonal Information In Traditional Bullied College Students:The Evidence From Behavior And Eye Movements

Traditional bullying victimization refers to the experience that one is deliberately and repeatedly attacked by others offline,and the individual cannot protect himself.It is popular on campus,accompanied by serious harm.However,mainly researches focus on the emotional problems of traditional bullying victimization,there are few pieces of research on the cognitive mechanism.Attentional bias refers to the selective attention produced by individuals to certain stimuli.Excessive attentional bias will lead to maladaptation.According to the Rejection Sensitivity Model,the damage from social interaction makes individuals more sensitive to social rejection information,then individuals will try to protect themselves by avoiding social rejection cues.On the contrary,the Social Reconstruction Hypothesis proposes that damage from social interaction makes individuals more sensitive to acceptance information,then individuals will try to compensate for their need to belong by being alert to social acceptance cues.Similar studies in the past have not drawn consistent conclusions.And empirical studies on the attentional bias of traditional bullying victimization are limited,the specific components of attentional bias have not been further distinguished.Therefore,this study aimed to explore whether traditionally bullied college students have an attentional bias to social information from a dynamic perspective and try to distinguish the specific components of their attentional bias in the time course with eye movement devices.The result helps provide new evidence and reference for the study of bullying victimization and future intervention.To this end,three progressive experiments were designed in this study.Firstly,a questionnaire survey was conducted on the situation of college students being bullied.The results showed that the incidence of being bullied was 12.04%in this sample.Three progressive experiments were then carried out.In Experiment 1,we used the emotion Stroop paradigm,a preliminary investigation was conducted to explore the attentional bias of different types of subjects.The results showed that the main effect of the type of subjects was significant.In particular,the RT attentional bias of traditional bullied college students to social information was significantly greater than that of non-traditional bullied college students.Hence,traditional bullied college students have attention bias towards social information.In Experiment 2,the point detection paradigm combined with eye movement device was used to further discuss the attention bias components of traditionally bullied college students by analyzing reaction time and eye movement indexes.Behavioral data analysis showed that the attentional orientation index of traditional bullied college students’ social acceptance words was significantly higher than that of social rejection words,which indicated that traditional bullied college students had a significant attentional bias towards social acceptance words,mainly due to the acceleration of attentional orientation.Eye movement data analysis showed that the first fixation duration time of traditional bullied college students was significantly longer than that of non-traditional bullied college students,which verified the conclusion of Experiment 1 from a dynamic perspective,and specifically pointed out that the attention bias mainly occurred in the early stage.However,the results of behavior and eye movement did not find the attentional bias to social rejection information at any stage.The results of Experiment 2 were consistent with the Social Reconstruction Hypothesis,suggesting that the traditional bullying victimization would enhance individuals’ motivation for social interaction and their vigilance to social acceptance cues.In Experiment 3,the relationship between self-compassion and attentional bias of traditional bullied college students was explored by using the self-compassion-induced task of Leary et al.(2007).However,no significant difference was observed between the experimental group and the control group in the level of self-compassion,so no subsequent analysis of variance was conducted.The high homogeneity of the subjects and the restriction of the experimental paradigm may be the possible reasons.Further study is needed in the future.Using different experimental paradigms combined with eye movement devices,this study found that the attention of traditional bullied college students to social acceptance information was accelerated,which mainly occurred in the early stage.These results extend previous studies from a dynamic perspective and provide some reference for attention training of traditional bullied individuals.