Examining cognitive & neural mechanisms associated with online harmful behaviours: development of an intervention to reduce cyberbullying and trolling

Advancements in technology have seen an increase in the number of people engaging in online harmful behaviours, such as cyberbullying and trolling, where cyberbullying involves sending hurtful, threatening, or offensive messages, and trolling involves behaving in a destructive and disruptive manner through posting malicious messages online. Victims of these behaviours are reported as suffering from a variety of mental health problems, ranging from social anxiety to suicide. The theoretical background suggests moral disengagement (the process of justifying immoral behaviour) allows individuals to believe their cyberbullying and trolling behaviours are morally acceptable. This project aims to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the processing of moral and emotional scenarios relating to online behaviour, and how these mechanisms may be influenced by certain personality traits that have been associated with engaging in online harmful behaviours. A further aim is to develop an intervention to prevent people from becoming cyberbullies and trolls.

This project aims to expand our understanding of the links between personality traits with online harmful behaviours by using more implicit methods, such as monitoring participants' eye movements and electrical brain activity, to examine the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the processing of textbased scenarios describing harmful online acts. Eye-tracking enables the researcher to examine the moment-to-moment cognitive processes underlying reading. Examining
electrical brain activity using event-related potentials (ERPs) provides a direct indication of the neural mechanisms involved in language comprehension. Therefore these methodologies would allow us to examine why people with certain personality traits are more likely to engage in online harmful behaviour (e.g., due to deficits in processing moral or emotion-related information).