Maternal knowledge, adolescent personality, and ...

Personality and Individual Differences 104 (2017) 413–416

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Maternal knowledge, adolescent personality, and bullying Ann H. Farrell a,⁎, Daniel A. Provenzano b, Andrew V. Dane a, Zopito A. Marini b, , &, Anthony A. Volk b a b

Department of Psychology, Brock University, 1812 Sir Isaac Brock Way, St. Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada Department of Child and Youth Studies, Brock University, 1812 Sir Isaac Brock Way, St. Catharines, ON L2S 3A1, Canada

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 22 June 2016 Received in revised form 31 August 2016 Accepted 1 September 2016 Available online xxxx Keywords: Bullying Adolescents HEXACO Personality Maternal knowledge and monitoring Evolution

a b s t r a c t Bullying may be adaptive for adolescents under the right combination of internal and external factors. The purpose of this study was to determine whether maternal knowledge and monitoring moderate the association between adolescent personality and bullying perpetration. A sample of 222 adolescents (120 boys, Mage = 14.07, SD = 1.54) completed measures on the HEXACO model of personality, bullying, and maternal knowledge and monitoring. As expected, mother knowledge (but not monitoring) moderated the association between bullying perpetration and Honesty-Humility, but not Emotionality and Agreeableness, even though a main effect was found for Agreeableness. Findings support bullying may be an evolutionary adaptation for adolescents who are lower in Honesty-Humility and face lower costs from mothers who lack knowledge about their activities. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

1.1. Bullying and personality

Bullying is an important social problem that involves millions of adolescents worldwide (Volk, Craig, Boyce, & King, 2006). Bullying is hypothesized to be, at least in part, an adaptive behavior that harms weaker individuals in order to obtain at least three goals: resources (e.g., money), reputation (e.g., perceived popularity), and reproduction (dates or sex; Volk, Dane, & Marini, 2014). The ubiquitous cross-cultural prevalence of bullying (Elgar et al., 2013; Volk, Camilleri, Dane, & Marini, 2012), behavior-genetic evidence that bullying varies in accordance with genetic relatedness (Ball et al., 2008), and positive associations of bullying with resources (Turnbull, 1972), reputation (Vaillancourt, Hymel, & McDougall, 2003), and reproduction (Volk, Dane, Marini, & Vaillancourt, 2015) all provide evidence for bullying being adaptive. Bullying may be more or less adaptive for adolescents under certain internal (e.g., physical strength) and/or external (e.g., punitive adult sanctions) ecological conditions that alter the costs and benefits of bullying (Volk et al., 2012). One such internal factor appears to be personality, which may predispose some adolescents to engage in bullying (Book, Volk, & Hosker, 2012).

The HEXACO is a six-factor, evolutionarily-inspired, measure of personality in which half of the factors (Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, and Agreeableness) combine to create a measure of altruistic versus antisocial behaviors, while the other half of the factors of eXtraversion (sociability, liveliness), Conscientiousness (organized, achievement motivation), and Openness to Experience (aesthetic appreciation, curiosity) combine to create a measure of effort applied to various endeavors (Ashton & Lee, 2007). Lower Honesty-Humility is characterized by the tendency to exploit and manipulate others for self-gain, lower Emotionality includes lower attachment and empathy toward others, and Agreeableness contrasts a predisposition toward forgiveness and cooperation with angry and resentful responses to mistreatment (Lee & Ashton, 2004). Research shows that lower Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness, and Emotionality were significant univariate correlates of bullying, although Honesty-Humility is the strongest multivariate predictor (Book et al., 2012; Farrell, Della Cioppa, Volk, & Book, 2014). Although lower Honesty-Humility may be the primary trait that predisposes adolescents to bullying, the expression of personality traits is influenced by environmental factors (McAdams & Pals, 2006), such as the parenting that one receives. However, to our knowledge, no researchers have explored how HEXACO personality traits interact with external social factors, such as parenting, to affect bullying. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate which HEXACO personality factors interact with parenting to predict bullying perpetration.

⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A.H. Farrell), [email protected] (D.A. Provenzano), [email protected] (A.V. Dane), [email protected] (Z.A. Marini), [email protected] (A.A. Volk).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.09.001 0191-8869/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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A.H. Farrell et al. / Personality and Individual Differences 104 (2017) 413–416

1.2. Bullying and parenting Parental monitoring and parental knowledge may affect whether bullying is more or less adaptive. Monitoring includes actively asking about or tracking a child's whereabouts, activities, and peers, while knowledge pertains to the accuracy of the parents' information of the same (Stattin & Kerr, 2000). However, monitoring may not necessarily translate into accurate knowledge about their child (Stattin & Kerr, 2000). Actual knowledge, but not monitoring, was a significant predictor of adolescent delinquent behavior and bullying (Laird, Pettit, Bates, & Dodge, 2003; Marini, Dane, Bosacki, & CURA, 2006). Moreover, knowledge was associated with closer parent–child relationships, and there is a positive association between parent–child relationships and lower bullying (e.g., Gómez-Ortiz, Del Rey, Casas, & Ortega-Ruiz, 2014). High parental knowledge may moderate the relation between facilitative factors like low Honesty-Humility and bullying, increasing the costs of engaging in antisocial behavior (Oxford, Cavell, & Hughes, 2003) by exposing the child to more consistent discipline while limiting exposure to antisocial peers (Dishion & McMahon, 1998). 1.3. Current study Considering that bullying is an aggressive goal-oriented behavior that involves harming others to achieve personal gain (Volk et al., 2014), we would expect a higher frequency of bullying by adolescents with personality traits that predispose an individual to antisocial behavior (Ashton & Lee, 2007), including low levels of Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness, and Emotionality. In light of literature supporting parenting as a potential moderator of adolescent personality and antisocial behavior (e.g., Oxford et al., 2003), we hypothesized that knowledge, but not monitoring, would moderate the links between the personality traits of Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness, and Emotionality and bullying. 2. Material and methods 2.1. Participants Adolescents (N = 222; 120 boys, Mage = 14.07, SDage = 1.54) were recruited from randomly selected sports teams, youth groups, and extracurricular clubs across Southern Ontario. Participants were primarily middle-class (70.3%) and Caucasian (63.1%). Additional ethnicities included Asian (3.6%), Hispanic (2.2%), African Canadian (2.2%), and Indigenous (1.8%), with remaining participants reporting “Other” (15.8%) or no ethnicity (10.4%). 2.2. Measures 2.2.1. Bullying Participants completed a five-item bullying questionnaire that asked how often in the last school term they had engaged in physical, verbal, social, racial, and sexual bullying rated on a five-point scale (1 = that hasn't happened to 5 = several times a week; α = 0.73; Volk & Lagzdins, 2009). A sample item for verbal bullying includes, “In school, how often have you threatened, yelled at, or verbally insulted someone weaker or less popular last term?” An average was computed for a total bullying perpetration score. 2.2.2. Personality Personality was assessed through the 100-item HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised self-report rated on a five-point scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree; HEXACO PI-R; Lee & Ashton, 2004; α = 0.73 to 0.78 for the factors). Each factor was computed using typical scoring methods that calculate an average for each factor. A sample item for Honesty-Humility includes, “I wouldn't pretend to like someone just to get that person to do favors for me.”

2.2.3. Parenting Participants completed three items to measure parental monitoring and three items to measure parental knowledge adapted from Stattin and Kerr (2000; α = 0.82 to 0.83), an item for monitoring includes “How much does your mother ask you about where you are most afternoons after school?” Items were rated on a four-point scale (1 = she never asks to 4 = she always asks). An item for mother knowledge includes, “How much does your mother REALLY know where you are most afternoons after school?” Items were rated on a four-point scale (1 = she never knows to 4 = she always knows). 2.3. Procedure Coaches and group leaders of sports teams, youth groups, and extracurricular clubs were contacted via telephone and email about having the members of their organization participate in this study. Written permission was obtained from coaches and group leaders to attend a club meeting to speak to adolescents. Adolescents interested in participating were given a package with parent consent and assent forms, and questionnaires presented in random order to complete in private at home. Approximately one week later, the researchers returned to the club meeting to collect completed packages, verbally debrief participants, and provide $20 in compensation. A university ethics board cleared all procedures. 3. Results 3.1. Preliminary analyses Analyses were conducted on SPSS 22. The four parenting variables had missing values with a maximum of 5.9% missing completely at random (x2 (30) = 36.94, p = 0.179), which did not change the pattern of results. The data showed slight violations of multivariate normality, but did not change the pattern of results. In order to reduce the impact of violations, all subsequent analyses were conducted using bootstrapping with bias-corrected confidence intervals using 1000 samples (Field, 2013). 3.2. Correlations Effect sizes of correlations were small to large. Bullying perpetration was significantly correlated with being a boy and being older (see Table 1). Bullying was also significantly negatively correlated with HonestyHumility, Agreeableness, and mother knowledge. Honesty-Humility was significantly correlated with being a girl, all remaining personality factors, and mother knowledge. Emotionality was significantly correlated with being older, being a girl, and higher mother knowledge. Agreeableness was significantly correlated with being younger and mother knowledge. Mother knowledge was significantly correlated with being younger and with mother monitoring. 3.3. Moderation analyses To test our hypotheses that parental knowledge moderated the association between Honesty-Humility and adolescent bullying perpetration, moderation analyses were conducted using PROCESS v2.13, a program that tests moderation analyses by indicating which variables are the independent variable, dependent variable, moderator, and covariates. We standardized all variables before entering them into PROCESS. PROCESS mean centers the independent variables and tests their simple effects at one standard deviation above and below the mean of the moderator (Field, 2013). Personality factors were the independent variables, bullying was the dependent variable, parenting variables were the moderators, and age, sex, and SES were covariates. Mother knowledge was the only significant moderator for Honesty-Humility and bullying. The interaction accounted for 2.81% of the total 27.7%


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Table 1 Descriptive statistics and zero-order correlations between all study variables.

1. Age 2. Sexa,c 3. SESb,c 4. Bullying 5. H 6. E 7. A 8. M Know 9. M Monit

M(SD)

n

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

14.07(1.54)

222 222 222 222 209 213 214 215 215

–

0.03 –

0.05 −0.01 –

0.27⁎⁎⁎ −0.24⁎⁎⁎ −0.02 –

−0.08 0.28⁎⁎⁎

0.18⁎⁎ 0.50⁎⁎ 0.02 −0.10 0.26⁎⁎⁎ –

−0.19⁎⁎ −0.06 −0.01 −0.25⁎⁎⁎ 0.32⁎⁎⁎ −0.02 –

−0.16⁎ 0.14⁎

0.11 0.03 0.12 0.01 −0.06 0.07 −0.02 0.36⁎⁎⁎

– – 1.30(0.49) 3.22(0.58) 3.14(0.59) 3.06(0.53) 3.18(0.77) 2.72(0.93)

−0.05 −0.36⁎⁎⁎ –

0.08 −0.25⁎⁎⁎ 0.14⁎ 0.18⁎ 0.16⁎ –

–

Note. H = Honesty-Humility; E: Emotionality; A: Agreeableness; M = Mother; Know = Knowledge, Monit = Monitoring. a Sex was coded as 1 = boy and 2 = girl. b SES was coded as 1 = less rich, 2 = about the same, and 3 = more rich. c Spearman's correlations used. ⁎ p b 0.05. ⁎⁎ p b 0.01. ⁎⁎⁎ p b 0.001.

variance in bullying (see Table 2), reflecting an average-sized interaction in the social sciences (McClelland & Judd, 1993). Simple slopes analyses for Honesty-Humility were significant at lower (one standard deviation below the mean; β = − 0.38, SE = 0.08, p b 0.001, 95% C.I. [− 0.53, − 0.22]) and moderate (β = − 0.23, SE = 0.06 b 0.001, 95% C.I. [−0.35, −0.12]) but not higher (β = −0.09, SE = 0.08, p = 0.25, 95% C.I. [− 0.24, 0.06]) levels of mother knowledge. Fig. 1 reveals that the relation between Honesty-Humility and bullying perpetration was strongest at lower levels of mother knowledge. Given the significant correlations between age, sex, and the focus variables, we conducted follow-up analyses to test three way interactions between Honesty-Humility, mother knowledge, and age, and Honesty-Humility, mother knowledge, and sex. There were no significant three-way interactions. No other parenting variables significantly moderated the associations between personality and bullying. In the moderation analysis for Emotionality, only mother knowledge was a significant predictor (β = −0.17, SE = 0.06, p = 0.01, 95% C.I. [−0.29, −0.05]). In the moderation analysis for Agreeableness, both Agreeableness (β = − 0.19, SE = 0.06, p = 0.001, 95% C.I. [−0.31, −0.08]) and mother knowledge (β = −0.15, SE = 0.06, p = 0.01, 95% C.I. [−0.53, −0.03]) were significant predictors, but the interaction was not significant. Our hypotheses were partially supported, as mother knowledge was a significant moderator for Honesty-Humility and bullying.

4. Discussion Our study was conducted to determine whether parental knowledge but not monitoring would significantly moderate the relationship between three HEXACO personality factors and bullying. Our results partially supported our hypotheses as Honesty-Humility was significantly related to bullying perpetration at low and medium, but not high levels, of mother knowledge. In contrast, mother knowledge was not a significant moderator of the links between bullying and the Emotionality and Agreeableness traits, even though Agreeableness had a significant main effect. Furthermore, monitoring was not a significant moderator for any personality factors and bullying. The significant interaction between Honesty-Humility and parental knowledge may be a function of the exploitative traits associated with lower Honesty-Humility (Lee & Ashton, 2004) being curbed somewhat by higher levels of parental knowledge (Stattin & Kerr, 2000). It may be more adaptive for adolescents who are lower in Honesty-Humility to bully when their parents are unaware of their behavior because then potential sanctions or disapproval costs from parents are minimized

Table 2 Moderation analyses testing mother knowledge as a moderator between Honesty-Humility and adolescent bullying perpetration. Bullying perpetration Predictor Step 1 Age Sex SES H M Know Step 2 H × M Know R2 ΔR2 F n

β

SE

95% C.I.

0.24⁎⁎⁎ −0.13⁎ −0.06 −0.23⁎⁎⁎ −0.14⁎

0.06 0.06 0.06 0.06 0.06

[0.01, 0.35] [−0.24, −0.01] [−0.18, 0.05] [−0.35, −0.12] [−0.25, −0.03]

0.14⁎⁎ 0.277⁎⁎⁎ 0.028⁎⁎ 12.51 203

0.05

[0.04, 0.24]

Note. H = Honesty-Humility; SES = Socioeconomic Status; M Know = Mother Knowledge. ⁎ p b 0.05. ⁎⁎ p b 0.01. ⁎⁎⁎ p b 0.001.

Fig. 1. Mother knowledge as a moderator between Honesty-Humility and mean bullying perpetration.

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(Oxford et al., 2003), and exposure to positive reinforcement from antisocial peers may be reduced as well (Dishion & McMahon, 1998). Parental monitoring may be a protective factor against problem behaviors if it increases parental knowledge about, and costs related to, adolescents' antisocial activities and peers (Dishion & McMahon, 1998; Lippold, Greenberg, Graham & Feinberg, 2014). However, monitoring may not always lead to accurate knowledge if parents are inconsistent in their monitoring, or if youth avoid being monitored by parents (e.g., covert bullying). Thus, parental monitoring without accurate knowledge may not be sufficient for reducing bullying amongst adolescents with exploitative personality traits that predispose them to this behavior. Furthermore, given that the significant main effect for Agreeableness was not moderated, parental knowledge may not offset the risk of individuals with tendencies toward anger and retaliation being predisposed to bullying. Perhaps bullying by anger-prone individuals is more impulsive than that perpetrated by youth who are manipulative and desirous of social status (i.e., low Honesty-Humility), and thus permits less reflection about the potential costs of parental sanctions. 4.1. Implications This is the first study to show a significant empirical interaction between personality and parenting for adolescent bullying. Some adolescents (i.e., those lower in Honesty-Humility) may be more willing to use bullying as an adaptive strategy under certain environmental contexts (i.e., lower and moderate mother knowledge) as the lack of parental knowledge may lower parent-imposed costs on bullying. Our results suggest that anti-bullying interventions may benefit from the inclusion of strategies to increase parental knowledge, particularly in the context of low or medium levels of adolescent Honesty-Humility. Parent-focused programs have previously been more effective for pre-school and school-aged youth, whereas cognitive-behavioral therapy has a stronger effect for adolescents (McCart, Priester, Davies, & Azen, 2006). Therefore, educating parents with children who have behavioral difficulties about effective strategies for gaining parental knowledge, early in development, may help prevent bullying later during adolescence. Furthermore, given the reciprocal nature of parental knowledge and adolescent behavior (Lippold, Coffman, & Greenberg, 2014), helping adolescents with manipulative traits or behavioral problems improve their behavior through cognitive-behavioral strategies such as problem-solving skills may also in turn improve parental knowledge and reduce antisocial behaviors. 4.2. Limitations One limitation of the study may have been the size of the sample, but a power analysis suggested our sample size was large enough to detect a medium effect size. Another limitation was that we used self-report measures on all variables, and some measures had only moderate reliability. There may be a tendency for participants to respond in a socially desirable manner on questionnaires about antisocial behaviors (Rigby, 1987) or undesirable personality traits (Tourangeau & Yan, 2007). However, previous research has shown that self-report measures are a valid method to assess bullying (Book et al., 2012) and personality (Lee & Ashton, 2004). In addition, we did not assess mothers' evaluations of monitoring and knowledge. However, previous findings indicate that children's perceptions of parenting may be most relevant for predicting adjustment (Morris et al., 2002). Future studies may include both adolescent and parent reports of these variables in order to see consistency in responses. Furthermore, our study used a cross-sectional design, which does not allow causal hypotheses to be tested. Future studies would benefit from the use of longitudinal methods. Finally, it may be

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