This study examined the prevalence of cyber-aggression in Spanish adolescent couples as well as the common and differential predictors for cyber-aggression and psychological aggression using a short-term longitudinal study. Over a 6-month period, six hundred and thirty-two (632) Spanish adolescents with romantic relationship experience from seven schools were randomly selected to participate in the study (51% male; average age= 15.03). The results revealed a prevalence of cyber-aggression of 13% and that 68.3% of adolescents engaged in psychological aggression. Girls were significantly more involved than boys in both forms. The analysis of predictors for cyber and psychological aggression showed that these two forms of aggression shared a common factor, negative couple quality. Furthermore, cognitive empathy predicted cyber-aggression whereas anger regulation and jealousy predicted psychological aggression. These results highlighted the need to consider the particular characteristics of each setting, face-to-face and online, for designing future prevention programs.

Introduction

Cyber-aggression among adolescents has become a public health problem (Patton et al., 2014; David-Ferdon & Hertz, 2007) with serious implications for young people’s adjustment and health (Sargent et al., 2016). A subtype of this cyber-aggression is the kind that occurs among young dating couples, defined as the intentional use of new technologies to harass, monitor, humiliate, threaten and/or isolate the other partner (Álvarez, 2012; Wick et al., 2017). Some authors have argued that cyber-aggression among couples is a subtype of psychological aggression that takes place via social media, given that both forms of aggression include the same intentional aggressive behaviors and coercive tactics aimed to threaten, humiliate and control partner behavior and social relationships, but displayed in different contexts (Bennett et al., 2011; Korchmaros et al., 2013). On the contrary, other authors have proposed that the context-specific characteristics make cyber dating aggression a unique phenomenon (Peskin et al., 2017). In light of this debate, more work needs to be done to understand the nature of cyber dating abuse.