Abstract
In recent years, abundant data have emerged that verify the mechanism of cyberbullying. In the current study, a total of 5,215 valid questionnaires were received and examined to determine whether upward social comparison and self-esteem functioned as mediators in the relationship between shyness and cyberbullying. The results indicated that (1) shyness positively predicted cyberbullying and (2) upward social comparison and self-esteem mediated this relationship through two mediating pathways, namely, the separate mediating effect and the sequential chain mediating effect. (3) There are also gender differences and developmental-stage differences in the mediation model. Concretely speaking, the multigroup analysis showed a significant difference in gender between cyberbullying and upward social comparison and significant differences in developmental stages from upward social comparison to self-esteem and from self-esteem to cyberbullying. These results suggest that we should pay attention to the roles of shyness, upward social comparison and self-esteem in the prevention of cyberbullying and develop different measures for individuals of different genders and in different developmental stages.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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The authors would like to thank the reviewers whose suggestions and comments greatly helped to improve and clarify this manuscript.
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This work was supported by the 2018 Shandong Graduate Education Quality Improvement Plan Project (Grant number SDYJD18020), the Fund for Projects of Shandong Social Science Planning (Grant number 18CQXJ06), and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (Grant number ZR2020MF158).
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Fengqiang Gao is the research designer. Zongxin Guo is in charge of writing and formatting. Yun Yan, Jun Wang, Xiangping Zhan, Xiaoyue Li and Yu Tian contributed equally to this study and share the first authorship. Peng Wang is the corresponding author.
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Gao, F., Guo, Z., Yan, Y. et al. Relationship between shyness and cyberbullying in different study stages: The mediating effects of upward social comparison and self-esteem. Curr Psychol 42, 22290–22300 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03316-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03316-3