Possible Connections between Bullying Behaviour, Empathy and Imitation

This paper is a position paper that speculates about a possible connection between bullying behaviour, empathy and imitation. The primary aim of our work is to provide a clearer understanding of bullying behaviour, by focusing on cognitive and emotional states that might cause bullies to show anti-social behaviour. A review of relevant research about bullying behaviour is presented followed by a brief discussion of empathy and imitation. Finally, we try to bring together these different lines of research and present the hypothesis that bullies possess well developed automatic as well as cognitive empathy, and that bullying behaviour is caused by an overemphasis of goal-directed processes of controlled empathy that work towards nonempathy. We conclude by speculating on a possible role of imitation in bullying intervention programmes.

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