(Press-News.org) Experiencing bullying and forms of aggression in late adolescence and early adulthood is linked to a marked increase in the likelihood of having daydreams or fantasies about hurting or killing people, according to a new study.
While research has shown that significant numbers of people fantasise about inflicting harm*, little is known about the processes behind such "violent ideations".
A team led by a University of Cambridge professor tracked the self-reported thoughts and experiences of 1,465 young people from schools across the Swiss city of Zurich at the ages of 15, 17 and 20.
Researchers gathered data on whether violent thoughts had occurred in the last 30 days, and the types of bullying or aggression experienced over the last 12 months.
They used questionnaires to probe the levels of aggression (humiliation, beatings, murder) and imagined targets (strangers, friends) within young people's darkest fantasies.
The team also asked about experiences of 23 forms of "victimisation", such as taunts, physical attacks and sexual harassment by peers, aggressive parenting - yelling, slapping and so on - and dating violence e.g. being pressured into sex.
While the majority of teenagers had been victimised in at least one way, experiencing a range of mistreatment was "closely associated" with a higher likelihood of thinking about killing, attacking or humiliating others.
Boys were more prone to violent thinking in general, but the effect of multiple victimisations on violent fantasies was very similar in both sexes.
Among 17-year-old boys who had not been victimised in the preceding year, the probability of violent fantasies in the last month was 56%.
With every additional type of mistreatment, the probability of violent fantasies increased by up to 8%. Those who listed five forms of victimisation had an 85% probability of having had violent fantasies; for those who listed ten it was 97%.
Among girls the same age, no victimisation experience had a violent fantasy probability of 23%, which increased to 59% in those who listed five types of mistreatment, and 73% in those who said they had suffered ten.
"One way to think about fantasies is as our brain rehearsing future scenarios," said Prof Manuel Eisner, Director of the Violence Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, and lead author of the study published in the journal Aggressive Behavior.
"The increased violent fantasies among those who experience bullying or mistreatment may be a psychological mechanism to help prepare them for violence to come," he said.
"These fantasies of hitting back at others may have roots deep in human history, from a time when societies were much more violent, and retribution - or the threat of it - was an important form of protection."
According to Eisner, the research hints at the extent of violent ideation in societies as seemingly peaceful as Switzerland - with murderous thoughts surprisingly commonplace.
"About 25% of all 17-year-old boys and 13% of girls reported having at least one fantasy of killing a person they know during the past thirty days. Close to one in five of all the study participants at that age. These thoughts may be deeply troubling to those who experience them," he said.
The team - including researchers from the University of Zurich, University of Edinburgh, University of Utrecht, University of Leiden, and Universidad de la Republica - collected and analysed a wealth of data.
As such, they were able to filter out and 'control' for other possible triggers for violent thinking in the teenagers. For example, they found that socio-economic status played little role in violent fantasy rates.
The study also shows that "adverse life events" such as financial troubles or parental separation had no significant impact. "Thoughts of killing others are triggered by experiences of interpersonal harm-doing, attacks on our personal identity, rather than noxious stimuli more generally," said Eisner.
"It's the difference between conditions that make people angry and upset, and those that make people vengeful."
By following most of the teenagers to the cusp of adulthood, researchers could track patterns over several years. Overall rates of the most extreme thoughts decreased by the age of twenty: only 14% of young men and 5.5% of women had thought about killing someone they know in the past month.
However, the effects of victimisation on violent fantasies did not lessen as they grew up, suggesting the intensity of this psychological mechanism may not fade.
"This study did not examine whether violent ideations caused by victimisation actually lead to violent behaviour. However, a consistent finding across criminology is that victims often become offenders, and vice versa," said Eisner.
"Fantasies are unrestrained, and the vengeance taken in our minds is often wildly disproportionate to the real-world event which triggered it.
"Studying the mechanisms behind violent fantasies, particularly at a young age, may help with targeted interventions that can stop obsessive rumination turning horribly real."
INFORMATION:
NOTES:
* Examples of previous research on levels of "homicidal ideation" among adults cited by the study include:
- Between 50-80% of university students report at least one fantasy of killing another person in their life;
- 14% of a community sample of adults had experienced daydreams or thoughts about physically hurting other people in the two months prior to the study.
* The research team also found a minor correlation between consumption of violent media and violent thoughts, but the effects were small. A more significant predictor was simply having reported violent fantasies at an earlier age, as well as a belief that violence can be justified, which contribute to what researchers call "trait aggressiveness".
* The study was conducted with the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood, which is mainly funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Jacobs Foundation. It is hosted by the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at the University of Zurich.
The foraging behaviour of seabirds is dramatically affected by turbulence caused by natural coastal features and manmade ocean structures, new research has shown.
In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists from the UK and Germany used drones to provide a synchronised bird's eye view of what seabirds see and how their behaviour changes depending on the movement of tidal flows beneath them.
The research focused on the wake of a tidal turbine structure set in a tidal channel - Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland - that has previously been identified as a foraging hotspot for terns.
Through a combination of drone tracking and advanced statistical modelling, it showed that terns were more likely to actively forage over ...
One in four people experience mild, short lived systemic side effects after receiving either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccine, with headache, fatigue and tenderness the most common symptoms. Most side effects peaked within the first 24 hours following vaccination and usually lasted 1-2 days.
The study published today in the Lancet Infectious Diseases is the first large scale study to compare the two vaccines and investigate the prevalence of mild side effects of the UK's vaccination programme.
The analysis by researchers from King's College London of data from ...
For the first time, researchers have systematically analysed social and clinical factors associated with psychiatric hospital admission of children and adolescents, finding nearly one-quarter (23.6%) were admitted involuntarily. The study was published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal.
Researchers also found that children and adolescents who were involuntarily hospitalised were nearly three times more likely to belong to a Black rather than a white ethnic group than those hospitalised voluntarily and more likely to have a diagnosis of psychosis, substance misuse, or intellectual disability.
Involuntary hospitalisation is a legal procedure used to compel an individual to ...
Neurons result from a highly complex and unique series of cell divisions. For example, in fruit flies, the process starts with stem cells that divide into mother cells (progenitor cells), that then divide into precursor cells that eventually become neurons.
A team of the University of Michigan (U-M), spearheaded by Nigel Michki, a graduate student, and Assistant Professor Dawen Cai in the departments of Biophysics (LS&A) and Cell and Developmental Biology at the Medical School, identified many genes that are important in fruit flies' neuron development, and that had never been described before in that context.
Since many genes are conserved across species such as between fruit flies (Drosophila), mice, and humans, what is learnt in flies can also serve as a model to better ...
DALLAS - April 27, 2021 - Researchers with the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern have identified a new protein implicated in cell death that provides a potential therapeutic target that could prevent or delay the progress of neurodegenerative diseases following a stroke.
Scientists from the departments of pathology, neurology, biochemistry, and pharmacology at UTSW have identified and named AIF3, an alternate form of the apoptosis-inducing factor (AIF), a protein that is critical for maintaining normal mitochondrial function. Once released from mitochondria, AIF triggers processes that induce a type of programmed cell death.
In a END ...
Isaac Newton may have met his match.
For centuries, engineers have relied on physical laws -- developed by Newton and others -- to understand the stresses and strains on the materials they work with. But solving those equations can be a computational slog, especially for complex materials.
MIT researchers have developed a technique to quickly determine certain properties of a material, like stress and strain, based on an image of the material showing its internal structure. The approach could one day eliminate the need for arduous physics-based calculations, instead relying on computer vision and machine learning to generate estimates in real time.
The researchers say the advance could enable faster design prototyping and material ...
Des Plaines, IL - In a randomized, double-blind trial of patients with acute undifferentiated agitation in the emergency department, droperidol was more effective for sedation and was associated with fewer episodes of respiratory depression than lorazepam or either dose of ziprasidone. This is the conclusion of END ...
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Having grown up poor in a rural village in Zimbabwe, Wilson Majee saw firsthand as a child the lack of educational opportunities that were easily accessible and how that impacted the youth in his village.
Now an associate professor in the University of Missouri School of Health Professions, Majee researches the challenges facing disadvantaged, rural youth. He found in a recent study that young people who are disengaged from their communities are much more likely to participate in risky behaviors such as substance abuse, particularly in rural areas that lack educational opportunities.
For the study, Majee spoke with youth in rural South Africa about the factors contributing to drug abuse for the NEET population, which stands ...
A promising new concept published by an interdisciplinary research team in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS) paves the way for major advances in the field of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Their new technique could significantly simplify hyperpolarized MRI, which developed around 20 years ago for observing metabolic processes in the body. The proposal involves the hyperpolarization of the metabolic product fumarate using parahydrogen and the subsequent purification of the metabolite. "This technique would not only be simpler, but also much cheaper than the previous procedure," said leader of the project Dr. James Eills, a member of the research team of Professor Dmitry Budker at Johannes Gutenberg ...
African waters have been contributing to the global supply of fish for years, with three of the four most productive marine ecosystems in the world near the continent. African countries' Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) contributed over 6 million metric tons of fish to the world's food supply, supporting food security and livelihood in the continent, while generating $15 billion to the African gross domestic product in 2011. Every sovereign state has an EEZ, an area of ocean adjacent to their shores in which they have special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources.
Industrial fleets from countries around the world have been increasingly fishing in African waters, but with climate change ...
