Thematic Section Guest Editorial: 22nd Workshop on Aggression: Contemporary Perspectives on Aggressive Behavior: Exploring Trends across the Lifespan - Part 1

In 2017, the “Workshop on Aggression”, hosted by the Department of Psychology of University of Cyprus and held in Limassol, Cyprus, focused on the main topic: “Contemporary Perspectives on Aggressive Behavior: Exploring Trends across the Lifespan”. For a short conference report see Stavrinides, Fanti, Charalampous, Demetriou, Hadjicharalambous, and Solomontos-Kountouri (2018). With this Guest Editorial, we welcome our readers to the second thematic section devoted to papers presented at the Workshop on Aggression (see Scheithauer & Trip, 2017, for the first special section devoted to the Workshop on Aggression).

The collection of two papers in this thematic section - which will be followed by additional papers to be presented in the upcoming issue of IJDS - represent innovative and international research in (cyber-)bullying, the prevention of (cyber-)bullying respectively, taking into account different methodological approaches. Pfetsch, Schultze-Krumbholz, and Füllgraf (2018) investigate whether peer norms for cyberbullying foster anti-cyberbullying norms, differentiating between individual and classroom norms. Using an experimental, pre-post control-design the authors did not find changes in individual norms following a short term intervention - although norms in general were associated with cyberbullying behavior. Solomontos-Kountouri and Strohmeier (2018) investigate how different groups of bullying involved or uninvolved adolescents in Cyprus perceive the measures of the well-established preventive intervention program ViSC. The authors report meaningful differences between these groups regarding their most and least liked program activities. Both studies have important implications for the design and implementation of preventive intervention programs against bullying and cyberbullying in schools.

This double issue of IJDS also includes two regular papers: Collette and Miller (2018) investigate children’s story preferences as a function of age (6–8 years vs. 9–12 years old) and cultural orientation, using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Investigating children of various nationalities, they find that older children preferred stories that were consistent with their cultural orientation while younger children did not. Metzler and Scheithauer (2018) investigate which kinds of adolescents’ positive self-presentation in profile pictures and status updates are associated with positive feedback in terms of Likes from the Facebook community, using a two-study approach and combining qualitative and quantitative methods.

We very much hope that this issue reaches a wide readership. Finally, we would like to thank the authors – as well as the many expert reviewers of the manuscripts – for the worth reading contributions to this Thematic Section and regular Issue of IJDS.