Examining the Bullying Nature in Preverbal and Verbal Children

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective to my science fair project is to find if preverbal infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and adolescents show sympathetic responses for the #Bullying Victims#. Methods/Materials I will be using children ages 10 months to the age of 14. I am using children from this age group because they are learning more and more about emotions everyday. I plan to test the subject at a time when they are least distracted, for example after a nap, or after feeding. I will then show the subject the video and have my assistant time how long it takes the child to watch them video and pick an object shown in the video. Some children have to be shown the video more than once, due to distractions around them. Usually if the younger infants laughed during the video, he/she is more likely to ended up choosing the #Bully# in them videos. Results After testing my theory on if a certain age group would show more sympathetic responses for others in distress, I found that the younger the child, the more sympathy, and the older the child, the less sympathy, and the more the results were 50/50. My original hypothesis stated that the youngest group of kids would show less sympathy for others who are in distress. During my experiment, I noticed that as the age group got older the more the results were 50/50, there was one age group that has results that were very different than all the other groups. The students in the Early Elementary stages were the most aggressive, 70% of the subjects picked the victim and 30% picked #the victim.# Conclusions/Discussion I have learned that my hypothesis for if younger children would show the least sympathy for #the victim# is incorrect. I now have a better understanding of children their emotions and aggression, and also a better understanding of how children will react when they come across problem with bullying in the future. I believe mid elementary students and late middle school students had a 50/50 because there is a program we have been doing since 1st grade called Olweus (a program designed for students to be prepared for a bullying situation), which helped the student feel sympathy for the victim .

Awards (1)

• Honorable Mention

Competition history

• CSEF 2016 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0410

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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