How is childhood psychological maltreatment related to adolescents’ cyberbullying perpetration? the roles of moral disengagement and empathy

Cyberbullying has gradually evolved into a wide-ranging social problem that affects the development of adolescents. Based on the social cognition theory, the current study explored the precipitating factors of cyberbullying perpetration from the perspective of adolescents’ early life experiences (childhood psychological maltreatment) and individual characteristics (moral disengagement and empathy) with a view to prevent and intervene in adolescents’ cyberbullying perpetration. Therefore, we built a moderated mediation model based on theoretical foundations and verified it with a large sample of data. Participants comprised 2348 Chinese students (mean age = 13.46 years, SD = .90) recruited from four middle schools. They provided self-reported data on demographic variables, childhood psychological maltreatment, cyberbullying perpetration, moral disengagement, and empathy. After controlling for age and gender, childhood psychological maltreatment was significantly and positively associated with cyberbullying perpetration, and moral disengagement partially mediated this relationship. Moderated mediation analysis further indicated that empathy moderated the relationship between childhood psychological maltreatment and cyberbullying perpetration as well as moral disengagement and cyberbullying perpetration. These two relationships became much weaker for adolescents with higher levels of empathy.