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Introduction: The topics of bullying, school anxiety and school absenteeism are of steady interest for the scientific community in recent decades. However, it seems surprising that investigations into the combination of these constructs are rare, especially considering their interconnectedness. Due to the lack of joint investigation of these factors, it is hardly possible to compare results of these related, yet distinct factors across other studies, let alone the predictive power of specific factors. The goal of the current study is to investigate how bullying, school anxiety and school absenteeism are related, considering the variables gender and grade level.
Methods: For this purpose, N = 195 secondary school children in the 7th–9th grades in northern Germany were surveyed via self-report questionnaires and additionally collecting their school records. We present complex descriptive analyses with scales and subscales of bullying, anxiety and absenteeism. Further, a structural equation modelling (SEM) approach is utilized to discover the interconnectedness of the constructs.
Results: On the one hand, the descriptive statistics show significant gender and grade level differences regarding bullying and anxiety. On the other hand, the SEM reveals that high values on the bullying victim scale are accompanied by significantly higher school displeasure (anxiety). School displeasure—as well as high bullying offender values—are associated with significantly more days of absence from school.
Discussion: We discuss how school environment improvement through specific interventions such as the cognitive-behavioral approach, could aid to ameliorate this issue.
Dense sensor event-related brain potentials were measured in participants with spider phobia, high anxiety sensitive individuals and non-fearful controls during viewing of medical emergency, spider and standard emotional (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral) pictures. Compared to non-fearful controls spider phobia participants showed a significantly enlarged late positive potential (LPP) during the encoding of phobia-relevant pictures whereas high anxiety sensitive individuals showed a significantly greater Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) during the encoding of medical emergency pictures and a significantly greater Late Positive Potential (LPP) during the encoding of highly arousing unpleasant visual material. Moreover, within group comparisons of the spider phobia group revealed comparable LPP evoked by spider pictures and emotional (unpleasant and pleasant) picture contents indicating that at the level of early stimulus evaluation, the effects of selective attention seem to be related to emotional relevance of the stimulus rather than reflecting a fear-specific response.