Kids with symptoms of psychopathy may be more apt to use forms of indirect bullying.

What is it about?

In this study, we solicited middle and high school age behavioral-disordered participants from several school systems to determine if their were connections between the personality traits of narcissism and callous-un-emotionality and self-reported use of two types of indirect bullying (relational aggression and social aggression), as well as pro-social behavior. In this investigation, narcissism made a significant contribution to the prediction of both relational aggression and social aggression, accounting for most of the unique variance in the prediction of these indirect forms of aggression. Conversely, callous-unemotional traits—but not narcissism—made a significant contribution to the prediction of lower prosocial skills

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Why is it important?

Because physical, overt forms of bullying were much more recognized in boys, more recent research had to be conducted to show that bullying is fairly consistent between the genders. Another layer to the importance of this study is that there hasn't been as much investigation of bullying in overtly-aggressive youth, since these behaviors appeared to be less worrisome to educators or school personnel than demonstrations of physical violence, for example. However, a growing literature base suggested that these forms of aggression are just as harmful (and maybe more so) than traditional physical/verbal in situ bullying.

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