Abstract

This study examined the differences in cognitive and affective empathy in six types of participant roles in bullying. Cognitive and affective empathy was measured using three self-report questionnaires on empathy, Korean version of EQ-C (Cha, et al., 2011), BEI (Bryant, 1982), and IRI (Davis, 1983), on a sample of 299 Korean children in the fifth and sixth grade. Based on the results of a peer nomination questionnaire on participant roles (Sutton & Smith, 1999), the children were assigned to one of six roles: "bullies," "reinforcers," "assistants," "defenders," "outsiders," and "victims." It was found that affective empathy scores were higher for defenders than for victims, outsiders, assistants, and reinforcers, whereas cognitive empathy scores were higher for defenders than for victims, but were not higher than those for outsiders, assistants, and reinforcers. The results demonstrated that defenders displayed both aspects of empathy, affective and cognitive, but victims displayed neither. In contrast, bullies displayed cognitive but not affective empathy.