Cyberbullying and social, emotional, and moral competencies

Abstract

In the current digital society, children and adolescents have expanded the scenarios of their social, emotional, and moral life. They use many virtual social networks where they communicate, make friends, and get involved in desirable and undesirable interpersonal interactions. Such online activities provide many benefits, but online interactions also make young people vulnerable to different problem behaviours such as cyberbullying perpetration, victimization and being bystanders. Research pointed out the social, emotional and moral competencies as protective factors against cyberbullying in children and adolescents. Many school programmes against cyberbullying have been implemented in diverse educational settings and they have frequently included components of social, emotional and moral learning to increase competencies for life and decrease cyberbullying and other antisocial behaviours. In this chapter, personal protective factors against cyberbullying are described, paying special attention to the relation between social, emotional, and moral competencies and cyberbullying. This chapter also focuses on social and emotional learning against cyberbullying and highlights the need for the inclusion of this type of programmes in the mainstream educational curriculum. Recent empirical results specifically focused on social, emotional, and moral competencies including their offline and online dimensions are reviewed. Implications for policy and practice that enhance values and moral education are discussed and future research lines are suggested.