From the emotional and personal costs of bullying to the upheaval of changing schools \u2014 sometimes only to encounter new bullies and start the cycle again \u2014 Rachel Christopher has seen up close how bullying affects people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n
The Brock University Master of Arts (MA) student in the Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience stream of the graduate program in Psychology says that seeing the impact of bullying in her life and the lives of people she cares about drives her interest in the field of bullying research.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has motivated me to want to learn more,\u201d says Christopher, who has long held an interest in research into antisocial behaviour. \u201cWhy is this happening? What different variables are working together in order to create this atmosphere or this persona that allows people to be able to do this to each other?\u201d<\/p>\n
Christopher was Brock\u2019s first recipient of the D\u2019Ont Poke The Bear graduate student entrance award sponsored by D\u2019Ont Poke The Bear Wines and Craft Cider, which runs an anti-bullying charity funded by proceeds from their products. She was also the recipient of an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.<\/p>\n
Having completed her course work in the first year of her MA, she is now preparing to undertake a new study to examine how personality traits and power imbalances affect economic games, where subjects are asked to distribute money using points.<\/p>\n
\u201cResearchers have looked at antisocial behaviour, economic games and power manipulations, but they\u2019ve all been looked at separately,\u201d she says. \u201cCombining them is interesting, because in the real world, it\u2019s never just \u2018a\u2019 and \u2018b\u2019 \u2014 there are numerous variables at play, so it just makes sense to add these variables together and see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n
The work builds on a previous study by Assistant Professor Ann Farrell in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, who found in 2018 that the personality traits of honesty and humility related to economic or ultimatum games.<\/p>\n
Under the supervision of Professor Anthony Volk, Christopher will add power imbalance into the mix for her study. Participants will be required to allocate points, and though some will have all of the power over how many points to share with a recipient, some may find that their recipient has the power to change the distribution or even reject it and take over the distribution themselves.<\/p>\n
Christopher expects the research will replicate Farrell\u2019s findings related to personality and build off of them by adding the power component.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m very interested in looking at the effects of power and how it changes behaviours when you\u2019re faced with different economic games,\u201d says Christopher. \u201cI want to see how personality comes in \u2014 we know that bullying is present when there is an imbalance of power between two individuals or more, so that power variable is very important, too. I want to see how exactly everything is interconnected and how they all work together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anthony Volk in the Departments of Child and Youth Studies and Psychology is supervising the study.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis exciting new line of sponsored research will help us understand the influence of one of the most important, but hardest to capture, dimensions of bullying \u2014 power,\u201d says Volk. \u201cThe abuse of power lies at the heart of bullying and is the reason why bullying is so relevant in schools and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n
As soon as her research proposal is approved by the Research Ethics Board, Christopher will begin recruiting Brock student participants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the emotional and personal costs of bullying to the upheaval of changing schools \u2014 sometimes only to encounter new bullies and start the cycle again \u2014 Rachel Christopher has seen up close how bullying affects people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":82048,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,188,55,1,5,38],"tags":[4640,606,45,607,522,29,12194],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82047"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82047"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82083,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82047\/revisions\/82083"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}