School Psychology International 2014 Farina 475 84

School Psychology International

2014, Vol. 35(5) 475484

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DOI: 10.1177/0143034313511011

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Article

The relationship betweenemotional competenceand hostile/prosocialbehavior in Albanianpreschoolers: Anexploratory study

Eleonora FarinaUniversity of Milan-Bicocca, Italy

Carmen BelacchiUniversity of Urbino, Italy

Abstract

We explored the relationship between the ascribed tendency of Albanian preschoolers

to take on prosocial and/or hostile roles and their empathy and emotion comprehen-

sion. Participants were 63 preschoolers (3- to 6-years-old) and six teachers. Pupils

empathy and hostile/prosocial roles were assessed via teacher reports and their emo-

tional comprehension through a non-verbal test. The results confirmed the pattern of

relationships previously found in Italian preschoolers (Belacchi & Farina, 2010, 2012)

among childrens roles in bullying, developmental stage of emotion comprehension, and

empathic disposition. Differences emerged regarding Albanian teachers attributions of

roles and empathic disposition as a function of gender; they also perceived children

displaying hostile behavior as having strong perspective-taking abilities. This evaluation

style may be culture-specific and related to the values of a society-in-transition such as

Albania.

Keywords

Albania, emotional competence, hostile/prosocial behavior, preschoolers

Corresponding author:

Eleonora Farina, University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Human Science for Education, R. Massa, Piazza

Ateneo Nuovo, 120126 Milan, Italy.

Email: [email protected]

Bullying and socio-emotional competence in different cultures

Starting from the seminal work of Olweus (1993), interest in bullying, particularlyin school-aged children, has seen exponential growth throughout the world (e.g.Stassen Berger, 2007). The Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC)survey 2005/06 provided data about bullying in a large multinational sample ofschool-aged children (11-, 13- and 15-years-old), composed of 202,056 individualsfrom 40 countries in Europe, North-America, and Israel. Craig and colleagues(2009) found that the involvement of boys in bullying episodes ranged from8.6% in Sweden to 45.2% in Lithuania, whereas that of girls varied from 4.8%in Sweden to 35.8% in Lithuania. Generally speaking, a lower occurrence of bully-ing and victimization was reported in North-Western Europe, and a higher inci-dence in Eastern European countries. Furthermore, gender dierence was moremarked in Northern Europe (e.g. the rate of bullying in Sweden was low overall,but the male rate was twice that of females, whereas in Lithuania rates of bullyingwere higher in general but with a relatively lower gap between males and females).These discrepancies may be explained by broad cultural and social dierences(Smith, Cowie, Olafsson, & Liefooghe, 2002)especially stereotypes aboutgender behaviorsas well as by the implementation of national prevention pro-grams. The bullying phenomenon in Eastern Europe is widespread but little inves-tigated, particularly in relation to its link with socio-emotional competence. It istherefore critically important to explore the mediating role of culture in the devel-opment of aggression.

Prosocial and hostile behavior in Albanian children

Albania is a country in transition following 45 years of communist dictatorshipcharacterized by autocracy, repression, and isolation from the world economic andpolitical communityto the gradual building of a market-based society with ademocratic system of governance. Compulsory education is a strategic priorityfor new Albania, but results have fallen short of targets. Spending per studenthas fallen, weakening the system and its quality year-on-year, and negatively inu-encing perceptions of the value of education, especially for families experiencingpoverty, with a consequent increase in the numbers of children dropping out ofschool (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2002).Furthermore, there is a critical lack of mental health services and trained profes-sionals for children and adolescents, especially considering that Albania has one ofthe youngest populations in Europe and that young people suer lack of recogni-tion and care of mental disorders, as well as displaying violent and antisocialbehavior (De Lucia, 2008).

The educational system was traditionally authoritarian, characterized bytotal domination by adults over children. After 1991, the economic andsocial changes favored a complete turnaround in adult-child relationships, whichled to either abusive or neglectful attitudes towards children (Kamani, Mato, &

476 School Psychology International 35(5)

Cangonji, 1997). Furthermore, the prevalent patriarchal mentality generatedgender-based discriminations: Women are still considered inferior to men and vio-lence is still a widespread means of obtaining power and respect (INSTAT Centerfor Social Research, 2007). Today, discipline is mainly ensured by physical andpsychological violence, both at home and in schools (Multidisciplinary Centre forthe Management of Child Maltreatment, 2000; UNICEF and the HumanDevelopment Centre, 2006).

In light of the general lack of research on bullying roles in Eastern Europeancountries, in this study we sought to initiate investigation into preschoolers pro-social and hostile behaviours in relation to their socio-emotional competences inthe Albanian cultural context.

Aims of the study

The aim of our research was to explore the relationships between Albanian pre-schoolers socio-emotional competence and their ascribed tendency to take on pro-social and/or hostile roles. In relation to our previous ndings with Italian children(Belacchi and Farina 2010, 2012), we expected Albanian preschoolers to displaysimilar emotion comprehension abilities (at preschool age still little inuenced bycultural norms). We also predicted that Albanian children would display a similarstructural pattern in terms of roles in bullying and socio-emotional competences.We further hypothesized that there would be dierences between Italian andAlbanian teachers perceptions of childrens empathic dispositions as a functionof gender, assuming these variables to be more aected by cultural normsand values.

Method

Participants

Participants were 63 preschoolers (55% males; mean age 4.06 years: range 36years) belonging to three age groups: Young (N 21; M 3.07 years), middle(N 19; M 4.08 years), and old (N 23; M 5.04 years), attending six mixed-age classes at four public kindergartens in Tirana (Albania), and six teachers (allwomen, one for each kindergarten class). The children came from a range of socio-economic backgrounds and none were aected by psycho-physical impairments.Parental informed consent was obtained for all participants.

Instruments and procedure

We used a direct assessment of childrens emotion comprehension and teacherratings for their roles and empathy: (1) Test of Emotion Comprehension, TEC

Farina and Belacchi 477

(Pons & Harris, 2000) in the Italian standardized version (Albanese & Molina,2008). This instrument consists of a set of cards, each with a cartoon scenariodepicted on the upper part of the card and below four possible emotional outcomesrepresented by facial expressions. (2) Participant Eight Roles Questionnaire:Teacher-report version (Belacchi & Farina, 2010), composed of 24 items, threefor each role: Bully, Assistant, Reinforcer, Outsider, Victim, Defender, Consoler,and Mediator. These eight roles may be grouped into four macro-roles: Hostile(Bully, Assistant, and Reinforcer collapsed together), Prosocial (Defender,Consoler, and Mediator collapsed together), Victim and Outsider. (3) EmpathicResponsiveness Scale, a modied version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index(Davis, 1980), with two subscales (four items each): Perspective Taking (PT) andEmpathic Concern (EC), assessing cognitive and aective empathy, respectively.These instruments were translated from their Italian versions into Albanian by aprofessional translator using a translation/back translation technique.

Children were administered the TEC individually in a quiet room at their school.Teachers completed the questionnaires unsupervised in their own time, after receiv-ing a short explanation of the conventional meaning of bullying among peers(Genta, Menesini, Fonzi, Costabile, & Smith, 1996).

Coding system

Regarding the TEC, 1 point was awarded for each correctly answered component,yielding an overall Emotion score (range 09) and three partial scores (03), one foreach of the sub-dimensions of emotion understanding: External, Mental,Reective. For the Participant Eight Roles Questionnaire and EmpathicResponsiveness Scale, teachers had to indicate how frequently they observed spe-cic behaviors in each child, using a ve-point Likert scale (never, rarely, some-times, often, always; never 1 point; always 5 points). The children received oneoverall score for each type of role. Average scores (range 15) were calculated foreach of the scales and macro-scales.

Results

Preliminary reliability analyses were conducted for the TEC, yielding a satisfactoryCronbachs a (a 0.76), in line with that obtained for the Italian version (0.79; seeAlbanese & Molina, 2008). The role scales also obtained good reliability indices:Hostile macro-role (a 0.89), Bully (a 0.85), Assistant (a 0.80), Reinforcer(a 0.75); Prosocial macro-role (a 0.83), Defender (a 0.75); Consoler(a 0.76). Almost sucient indices were found for Mediator (a 0.51) andVictim (a 0.54), while the reliability index for the Outsider was unsatisfactory(a 0.21). This could be linked to dierent cultural categorizations of abstainingbehavior in a traditionally totalitarian society. For the purposes of our analyses, wetherefore excluded the item that displayed the poorest t for the Outsider scale,obtaining a Cronbachs a of 0.63.


Childrens emotional understanding

We analysed the eects of age, gender and their interaction on childrens emotioncomprehension via an ANOVA. While none of the TEC measures were signi-cantly aected by gender (according to Albanese & Molina, 2008; Pons et al.,2004), overall emotion understanding scores increased with age (F2,60 15.470;p< 0.001; p2 0.352); as did scores on the External (F2,60 11.344; p< 0.001;p2 0.285) and Mental (F2,60 12.788; p< 0.001; p2 0.310) sub-dimensions,but not on the Reective (F2,60 2.786; p 0.070; p2 0.089) although therewas a good eect size (Cohen, 1988). Post-hoc Tukey tests showed that theyoung group performed more poorly on the TEC than middle and old groups,who displayed similar performance with regard to total score (p< 0.005) andExternal (p< 0.05) and Mental (p< 0.001) sub-dimensions. The interactionage x gender was not signicant.

Attribution of participants roles

Correlational analysis (controlling for age) showed a pattern similar to that iden-tied in an earlier Italian study by Belacchi and Farina (2010): Single prosocialroles were positively interrelated, as were single Hostile roles (p< 0.001); theProsocial macro-role was negatively correlated with the Hostile macro-role(r0.306; p< 0.05), as well as with the Outsider (r0.565; p< 0.001) andthe Victim (r0.399; p< 0.005). The latter two roles were positively correlatedwith the Hostile macro-role (Outsider: r 0.496; p< 0.001; Victim: r 0.404;p< 0.005) and positively inter-correlated (r 0.540; p< 0.001).

In order to explore the inuence of age and gender and their interaction, weconducted an ANOVA on the mean scores for each of the roles. Neither Hostilenor Prosocial macro-roles were aected by gender although boys obtained highermean scores for the Hostile macro-role (2.19 versus 1.90) and girls for the Prosocialmacro-role (3.16 versus 2.93).

Age had a statistically signicant eect on the Prosocial macro role(F2,60 5.000; p< 0.01; p2 0.149): the young group obtained lower scores thanthe middle (Post hoc Tukey test: p< 0.01). The Mediator score of the middle groupwas also signicantly higher than that attributed to the old group (Mean score:2.73). The Hostile macro-role and Victim and Outsider role attributions were notaected by age. The interaction age x gender was not signicant.

Empathy attribution

A univariate ANOVA was conducted on the average scores for the Empathy meas-ures, with gender and age as independent variables. Age was found to have asignicant eect on overall Empathy (F2,60 7.397; p< 0.001; p2 0.206),Empathic ConcernEC (F2,60 5.179; p< 0.01; p2 0.154) and PerspectiveTakingPT (F2,60 3.291; p< 0.05; p2 0.104), with the middle group obtaining


signicantly higher scores than the old group (p< 0.01). Contrary to other evidencereported in the literature, gender did not have signicant eect on any of empathymeasures (Mean Scores: Empathy totalboys 3.08; Empathy totalgirl 3.12;ECboys 3.38; ECgirls 3.46; PTboys 2.91; PTgirls 2.90). The interactionage x gender was not signicant.

Childrens emotional competence and role attributions

Partial correlational analyses (controlling for age), did not highlight signicant rela-tionships between emotion understanding and the macro-prosocial role, but only aweak positive link (Cohen, 1988) with some of its subscales: Mediator (r 0.235)and Defender (r 0.216) and a negative association with the Hostile macro-role(r0.204) and Victim (r0.119). With regard to the sub-dimensions ofthe TEC, the External subscale was positively correlated with the Prosocial macrorole (r 0.243; p< 0.05), in particular with Defender (r 0.284; p< 0.025), whilethe Mental sub-dimension was positively correlated with Mediator (r 0.251;p< 0.05) and negatively with Reinforcer (r0.254; p< 0.05).

In addition, we conducted a series of regressions (controlling for age) on each ofthe four macro-roles in turn and then on each of the eight participant roles, withthe External, Mental, and Reective dimensions of emotion understanding as theindependent variables. Only the External sub-dimension had a positive eect onattribution of the Defender role (R2 0.230; B 0.252; t 2.310; p< 0.05) and amarginally negative eect on the attribution of Bully behaviour (R2 0.067;B0.220; t1.681; p 0.098).

In order to further explore the relationship between role and empathy attribu-tion, a partial correlation analysis (controlling for age) was conducted. Overallempathy was positively correlated with Prosocial macro-role (r 0.388; p< 0.01)and negatively with the Victim (r0.255; p< 0.05); Empathic Concern was posi-tively linked with the Prosocial macro-role (r 0.690; p< 0.001) and negativelywith Hostile macro-role (r0.561; p< 0.001), Victim (r0.515; p< 0.001)and Outsider (r0.686; p< 0.001) role attributions; Perspective Taking was posi-tively correlated with attribution of the Hostile macro-role (r 0.289; p< 0.05).

Discussion

Our study explored, albeit in a small sample, teacher ratings of Albanian pre-schoolers pro-social and hostile behaviour and degree of empathy in relation totheir emotion comprehension, comparing the results with evidence from othercountries and, in particular, with Italy (Belacchi & Farina, 2010, 2012) which isgeographically close to Albania but has a dierent political and socio-economichistory.

With regard to emotion comprehension, our ndings are in line with the litera-ture (Pons et al., 2004): Specically, age plays a signicant role while gender doesnot. These results point up the dominance of natural-biological factors during this


developmental phase and the cross-cultural basis of emotional competence (seeTenenbaum et al., 2004). Concerning the roles attributed to participants, the resultsconrmed the inter-relationship pattern found by Belacchi and Farina (2010); spe-cically, the Prosocial macro-role is negatively associated with Hostile, Victim, andOutsider roles, while the latter two roles are inter-related and positively linked withthe Hostile macro-role. Albanian teachers in our study do not seem to perceivebullying as a denitely male phenomenon, as it is dened in literature (Rose &Smith, 2009). Even if there is a tendency to attribute hostile roles to males, this isnot statistically signicant. Contrary to most of the evidence reported in the lit-erature, no gender dierences were found with regard to either Prosocial roles orEmpathy. That Albanian teachers do not appear to attribute dierent roles as afunction of gender may be due to cultural norms and values or to the vestiges of anauthoritarian vision of society that does not promote overt and spontaneousfriendly behaviors, especially in girls (INSTAT Center for Social Research,2007). Nevertheless this speculation is strictly limited to our small sample andwould call for further support.

Regarding the inuence of childrens age on teacher perceptions of roles, giventhat the literature does not report specic developmental trends (Monks, Smith, &Swettenham, 2003), the relatively higher scores of the middle group (4-year-oldchildren) were unexpected. This could be due either to the individual characteristicsof this childrens group or to teachers implicit expectations of specic age groups,but it may also be an artifact due to our limited sample. It is likely that teachersworking with mixed age classes view the four-year-olds as the easiest to manage,given that the youngest children are still in a settling-in phase and the oldest are lessinclined to follow rules (Saft & Pianta, 2001).

Concerning the relationships between emotion comprehension and roles, theresults of this study are generally consistent with those previously obtained byBelacchi and Farina (2010): Prosocial roles are linked to good overall emotioncomprehension, in contrast with hostile roles, associated with poorer emotionunderstanding, especially the Bully, which is negatively predicted by the Externalsub-dimension of the TEC. In line with these ndings, empathic competence wasconrmed as a key feature of prosocial roles. Furthermore, the positive relationshipfound here between Hostile roles and Perspective Taking in Albanian childrenindicates a dissociation between aective and cognitive empathy in hostile pre-schoolers: This is in line with the view of the aggressor as a cool manipulator(Jollie & Farrington, 2006; Sutton, Smith, & Swettenham, 1999) and could beinterpreted as a cultural association between aggressiveness and cleverness, viewedas appearing at an early age. Furthermore, while in the literature both prosocialroles and empathy are more frequently assigned to girls than to boys, Albanianteachers did not notice signicant gender dierences with regard to either. Thesedata are consistent with the relatively smaller dierence in the levels of bullyingbehavior of males and females found in Lithuania by Craig and colleagues (2009).Given the abovementioned historical socio-political frame, in a generally authori-tarian educational system in which the use of violence is still frequent, normal or


non-explicitly aggressive behavior by boys could be perceived as manifestation ofpro-sociality or empathy. On the other hand, the patriarchal systemwhich stillexerts an inuence on Albanians perspectivecould promote a submissive attitudein girls that limits overt proactive behavior whether hostile or pro-social.

In addition, Albanian teachers attributions of higher Perspective Taking abilityto aggressive preschoolers may express the use of dierent cultural criteria fordening and dierentiating prosocial from hostile behaviors. Above all, it couldreect a tendency to value aggressiveness as a smart way of asserting oneself or ofsolving problems.

This exploratory study shows the importance of using similar methodology toinvestigate phenomena across diverse cultural contexts in order to advance under-standing of country similarities and peculiarities in relation to aggressive behaviorand its psychological correlates (Lensford et al., 2012), starting from the earlystages of socialization.

Note

We wish to thank Dr Ermelinda Ikonomi for her help with the data collection. Interested

readers may contact the corresponding author for the data set.

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Author biographies

Eleonora Farina is a Researcher in Developmental Psychology at the University ofMilan Bicocca, Italy. Her research interests include typical and atypical socio-emotional development in children, communicative pragmatic competence in aut-istic and typical developing children, bullying, metacognition, and self-regulatedlearning.

Carmen Belacchi is Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology and Directorof the Doctorate School in Psychological Sciences at the University of UrbinoCarlo Bo, Italy. Her research interests include language development and worddenition, working memory and uid intelligence, bullying, and childrens socio-emotional competences.


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