Big Bad Bully

How kids—and parents—can wrestle with a bully. Eventually, the one most hurt by bullying is the bully himself.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on September 01, 1995 - last reviewed on October 10, 2009

Then there are those bullies who are sometimes aggressors, sometimes victims: "reactive bullies" ,"ineffectual aggressors" or, in Olweus's lexicon, "provocative" victims. Regardless of who starts a fight, these kids prolong the battle, says David Perry, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. They get angry easily and escalate conflict into aggression, but end up losing. Their behavior is motivated by perceived provocation.

Perry claims that half of all bullies are hotheads. Any way the bully pie is sliced, these highly reactive aggressors are the worst off. They engage in the highest levels of conflict—they give it and they get it. And they place great value on controlling their adversaries. But their emotional make-up is distinct: They are easily emotionally aroused and can't handle conflict. "Peers are good at describing their characteristics," Perry reports. "They get emotionally upset, they show distress easily, they are quick to become oppositional and defiant. They are quick to cry. And they are named most likely to lose fights amid exaggerated cries of frustration and distress."

And they are the least liked. Of all children, they are the most rejected in the peer group—which puts them at risk of developing the kinds of externalizing, antisocial problems bullies develop, as well as the internalizing problems, like anxiety and depression, that are common to victims. Whether these bullies have the most trouble in life isn't clear, but they do have the fewest friends.

Why do they keep at it, when they always lose? Most of all, says Perry, they have problems of emotional regulation; they have low thresholds of arousal in the first place, and they can't calm themselves down once conflict starts. They get invested in their fights. Their high level of arousal keeps them from recognizing it's time to get up and walk away when they are clearly losing." Their emotions may be preempting their cognitions, or arousal may be distorting their cognition," Perry says.

Most of all, they are targets because they're fun for other bullies to pick on; they provide lots of theatrical value. They get provoked because they react in ways that are rewarding to bullies—they get a response. Getting a response is the bully's ultimate reward.

These hotheads, says Perry, seem to have a low threshold of irritability. "They seem to exist in a mood state of readiness." They frequently take an oppositional stance in situations.

The ineffectual bullies bear an uncanny resemblance to psychobiologist Gary W. Kraemer's monkeys. Kraemer, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, and a researcher at the famed Harlow Primate Laboratory, is working with two of the lab's populations of rhesus monkeys. One group is reared from birth by their monkey mothers. The other is nurtured by lab workers for the first month after birth, then reared with their monkey peers.

Human "mothers", Kraemer finds, do a swell job of raising physically robust monkeys. But only the monkey moms raise socially competent ones. The human-reared monkeys are either impulsively aggressive or inordinately reclusive—their behavior varies unpredictably. They have a collage of changes in the way they see the world, deficits in cognitive problem-solving that endure no matter how much social interaction with their peers the monkeys later get.

"Peer-reared monkeys can't anticipate what is going to happen next in social interactions," says Kraemer. "They look like a wild cannon. Something will set them off. And they have no 'off' button. Once in agonistic encounters, they have a hard time stopping." These monkeys not only display unregulated aggression and antisocial behavior, they contribute to the instability of the whole group. They just don't "get" the rhythms of relationships.

In addition to behaving like reactive bullies, they have an array of enduring neurochemical changes in the brain. There is chaos in specific neurotransmitter systems—the serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine pathways. "The norepinephrine system is not developed at all," says Kraemer. "The serotonin system is strange" To Kraemer, these monkeys are proof that social relations—specifically the early care-giver-infant attachment process, the dance of mother and child—actually structures the developing nervous system. It gets incorporated within, becoming the prototype for all social behavior. In the connection between mother and infant lies the pattern and desire for connecting with others.

"To the degree that caregivers are unpredictable, random, and asynchronous, then social behavior is not likely to be internally regulated," Kraemer says. "Social activity is not an accessory in life; it's reproduced in your brain." That's one reason, he believes, that aggression begins early and winds up such a durable approach to life.

Of the human-reared monkeys, he says, "You can give them all the Prozac in the world but you can never get them back on the usual trajectory. It will reduce the duration and frequency of repetitive behaviors, but it doesn't increase the proportion of social behavior. The entire system is dysregulated. You can make a symptom go away, but that doesn't restore normalcy."

In the normal course of events, says Kraemer, human children develop dominance hierarchies, although they are not very rigid. But in bullies, the process becomes supervening. Even when failure is evident, they continue. "There is certainly a dysregulation of something. Bullies and victims are breaking the normal harmony. Theirs is a different dance."

If his studies suggest that aggression begins in the early caregiver-child interaction, there's an arsenal of human research making the very same case.