In 2019, three researchers studied the way teenagers’ brains react to angry and fearful facial expressions. The teens were also asked to self-report if they bullied others or if they were victimized. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the teens’ brain activity in response to emotional facial expressions and thereby discovered insights into what occurs in the brains of those who may resort to bullying or who may be on the receiving end of it. The researchers were looking specifically at amygdala activity.
The amygdala is often recognized for its role in threat detection, but as part of the limbic network, it also plays a part in behaviour, emotional regulation, and learning. In this study, the researchers found “higher amygdala activity to angry faces,” which was linked to bullying. We might interpret this as the amygdala recognizing someone’s anger as a threat and responding with aggressive, threatening behaviour.
With teens who were reactive to angry faces, the study revealed that they also showed “lower amygdala activity to fearful faces” and they found this brain response was also a marker of more bullying behaviour. Those who bully are frequently categorized in research as being “callous unempathic” and this fMRI study appears to support this assessment. When a brain responds with empathy, it registers another’s fear, rather than lacks an emotive response. The teens who self-reported that they bully others also had lower brain reaction to another’s fear.
The study also found that those teens who had lower amygdala activity in response to both angry and fearful faces reported that they were less likely to be targeted for “relational victimization.” Another way to understand this discovery is to note that if teens feel intensely threatened by others who show anger and fear, it may well make them vulnerable to bullying in social-relational ways. It may cause them to be victimized.
What this brain study shows is that teaching teens what is going on in their brains—as they try to read and navigate facial expressions conveying how another person or people are feeling—is a useful strategy to see bullying as a neurological-emotional-social process. Far too often, people who are victims will say “I was bullied because...” and then insert whatever rationalization they have come up with to comprehend why they were targeted.
This research changes the narrative from the usual "the bully has a power imbalance" over the victim into a different way of thinking. It is the bully who in fact feels threatened. The one bullying has a brain that is being activated by what looks like a threat of anger. The one bullying has a brain that is ignoring or is not activating a response to someone else’s fear. The target is not at fault, and there’s nothing powerless about the target.
Dr. Laura Crawshaw’s expertise is in managers who bully employees, and what she’s learned in decades of coaching these “bullies” is that they behave in harmful ways because they feel threatened. Her work as the “boss whisperer” is not to exonerate or excuse the often terrible treatment these individuals mete out. No. Her work is to make them fully accountable for their own stressed-out responses. She makes them hear from those they bully what it’s like. In brain terms, this is like rewiring the part of the brain that is so frantic, so threatened, it’s not registering others’ fear or suffering.
Dr. Crawshaw makes these bullying managers recognize that their brains are overreacting to what they anticipate will be anger and shaming when they cannot get their work done perfectly, on time, and untouchable. In other words, she’s rewiring their brains to not read facial expressions as purely “angry” and threatening. She’s training them to stay calm, not become defensive, and build their team’s work ethic rather than attacking them.
Neuroscientist Dr. Frances Jensen explains why it’s harder for teens and 20-somethings to train their brains to better manage their responses to angry and fearful faces. Research into adolescent brains shows that they tend to interpret emotional faces through the amygdala, whereas a mature, adult brain is more likely to interpret facial expressions through the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Up until the age of around 25, adolescents’ brains are maturing with the PFC being the last brain component to be fully integrated and accessible.
Despite their maturing brains, teens can greatly benefit from understanding bullying as indicative of a threatened brain, not a powerful one. Rather than feeling afraid, bystanders can be encouraged to intervene not only for the victims but also for the stressed, defensive, threatened one bullying.
Whether at the workplace or school, whether teenagers or adults, the more we learn to self-regulate our own brain’s emotional responses, and the more we train our facial expressions to remain neutral at times when bullying is in the cards, the better. The more we recognize that when we’re targeted it says little about us and a great deal about the dysregulation of the one who is bullying, the better.
Brain science questions why we treat those who use bullying as if they are powerful or dominant. Brain scanners cast doubt on how activated they are by the mere threat of a facial expression and how tuned out their response is to others’ fear. This is a classic “identify with the aggressor” response that suggests the one bullying may have been exposed to scenarios in which they were truly under threat and had little power, and they know that aligning with the fearful one is dangerous.
We rarely put teen bullying and adult abuse side by side, but this research should make us question why a child's brain becomes hypersensitive to threat and has a lowered activation to fear. What kind of relationship to all powerful adults in their lives might have sculpted teen brains to respond this way and become those who resort to bullying?
References
Laura Crawshaw. Grow Your Spine & Manage Abrasive Leadership Behavior: A Guide for Those Who Manage Bosses Who Bully. 2023.
Frances E. Jensen, Amy Ellis Nutt. The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults. Harper Paperbacks. 2016.
Swartz, J., Carranza, A., & Knodt, A. (2019). "Amygdala Activity to Angry and Fearful Faces Relates to Bullying and Victimization in Adolescents."
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Vol. 14. 10: 1027–1035. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsz084
Bullying as a Brain Response to Anger and Fear
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08.02.2024
In 2019, three researchers studied the way teenagers’ brains react to angry and fearful facial expressions. The teens were also asked to self-report if they bullied others or if they were victimized. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the teens’ brain activity in response to emotional facial expressions and thereby discovered insights into what occurs in the brains of those who may resort to bullying or who may be on the receiving end of it. The researchers were looking specifically at amygdala activity.
The amygdala is often recognized for its role in threat detection, but as part of the limbic network, it also plays a part in behaviour, emotional regulation, and learning. In this study, the researchers found “higher amygdala activity to angry faces,” which was linked to bullying. We might interpret this as the amygdala recognizing someone’s anger as a threat and responding with aggressive, threatening behaviour.
With teens who were reactive to angry faces, the study revealed that they also showed “lower amygdala activity to fearful faces” and they found this brain response was also a marker of more bullying behaviour. Those who bully are frequently categorized in research as being “callous unempathic” and this fMRI study appears to support this assessment. When a brain responds with empathy, it registers another’s fear, rather than lacks an emotive response. The teens who self-reported that they bully others also had lower brain reaction to another’s fear.
The study also found that those teens who had lower amygdala activity in response to both........
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