By Daniel Nault
Did you know that up to 25% of teenagers in Canada report being bullied by their peers at least twice per week? These rates are alarming given what we know about how bullying can lead to negative mental health outcomes and academic challenges. In efforts to reduce bullying, researchers have identified some of the ways that teenagers respond to bullying episodes. When asked what they would do in made-up situations involving bullying, teenagers often report either responding aggressively (e.g., by calling the person a mean name), asserting their needs (e.g., by telling the person that they don’t like what they’re doing), or withdrawing from the situation (e.g., by walking away and saying/doing nothing about it). While we know that some responses (e.g., assertion) might be more effective than others at stopping bullying (e.g., aggression), not all responses work equally well for all teens. We don’t know very much about why that is. In this study, we tested one possible reason for why some responses might be more effective for some students than others: because of how a response is said with the voice.
Imagine the following scenario: after being shoved by another kid, Caleb tells them to “stop doing that”. Usually, that would be considered an assertive response. But, it may not work to solve the problem if Caleb said that response with a timid and tentative-sounding voice. We set out to test whether the tone of voice someone uses when responding to bullying influenced how that response was perceived by other teens.
To do this, we first asked a group of 39 teenagers (SPEAKERS) to fill out a questionnaire about how they would respond to made-up situations involving bullying. Their choices were broken down into the 3 main ways of responding that have been identified in previous research: (1) aggression, (2) assertion, and (3) withdrawal. We also took audio recordings of them saying responses to bullying. Speakers listened to some made-up situations involving bullying and were asked to tell us how they would say the following sentences if those situations happened to them: (1) “I didn’t know that” and (2) “Why are you saying that?”. We used speech analysis to get information about the pitch (highness/lowness), intensity (volume), and speech rate (speed) of their voice when saying these sentences. These acoustic cues allow us to quantify each speaker’s tone of voice when speaking.
Next, we recruited a separate group of 133 teenagers (LISTENERS) to listen to the audio recordings of the speakers saying their responses to bullying. They listened to each recording and were asked how mean/friendly each response sounded to them on a scale from (1) Mean to (7) Friendly.
When we analyzed the data, we found that there was a relationship between speakers’ responses on the self-report questionnaire and listeners’ meanness/friendliness ratings of speakers’ vocal responses. Speakers who were more likely to say they would respond to bullying episodes using aggressive strategies tended to say their responses to bullying in ways that listeners rated as sounding meaner. We also found that speakers who said their responses with a faster speech rate were rated by listeners as sounding friendlier.
The findings from our study shed light on the importance of paying attention not only to what youth say and/or do when responding to bullying, but also to how they say it. Bullying prevention programs mostly teach teenagers what to say and/or do to stop bullying, but often pay little or no attention to teaching teenagers how to say and/or do it. Our study found some evidence that talking faster when responding to bullying sounds friendlier to other teens… and might help to de-escalate peer conflict.