How do you feel? Students’ emotions after practicing bullying

Abstract

Our objective was to identify and analyze emotions generated in students involved in bullying situations as aggressors. This is a cross-sectional descriptive study, conducted with 232 students from the sixth to ninth year of middle school, who answered a self-reported questionnaire. We analyzed the data with the Statistical Analysis Software, through descriptive statistics and Fisher’s exact test. Of all students, 17.4% were identified as aggressors. Not feeling any emotion after practicing aggression against friends was prevalent for boys (36.7%) and girls (25.0%). Boys demonstrated to feel anger (26.7%) and sadness (23.3%) in smaller proportions, while girls also demonstrated to feel guilt (25.0%), sadness (16.7%) and shame (8.3%). The study indicates investigated aggressors presenting emotions that do not compete to comprehend negative effects of the practiced violence, as well as it does not collaborate to interrupt aggressions.