About the project

For decades, research has explored why some children and adolescents engage in bullying. Yet, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the personal characteristics, motives, and social cognitions that drive different types of bullies. The SHADES Project aims to fill these gaps by examining the psychological, social, behavioral, and genetic factors underlying bullying perpetration, as well as the long-term psychosocial adjustment of perpetrators, with a focus on heterogeneity and persistence.

Key Objectives:

• Identifying Different Bully Subtypes
  Not all bullies are the same—some are motivated by peer influence, others seek social dominance, and some struggle with their own victimization. SHADES explores how personality traits, attitudes, motives, and social cognitions shape these differences.
• Understanding Persistent Bullying
  While most school age bullying perpetrators stop bullying over time, others continue despite adult interventions. SHADES investigates individual differences behind persisten bullying via different definitions of persistence—across time, contexts, and in response to adult interventions—to better inform prevention efforts.
• Exploring Genetic Contributions
  Genetic influences play a role in bullying, but prior studies have overlooked how polygenic risk factors relate to different bully subtypes or persistent bullying. SHADES adopts a nuanced genetic approach to understand these links.
• Long-Term Outcomes of Bullying
  The consequences of bullying perpetration in school extend into adulthood, but not all perpetrators experience the same outcomes. SHADES examines how different bully subtypes and persistence patterns shape psychosocial adjustment later in life.

SHADES is an ambitious project that collects new, multi-method data through middle school (self-reports, peer-reports, experimental data), as well as combines existing datasets into a new longitudinal dataset that is unique in the world and enables to examine genetic correlates of bullying behavior among heterogeneous adolescents who bully and follow different types of school age perpetrators into adulthood. By integrating psychological, social, behavioral, and genetic perspectives, and a longitudinal study design, SHADES provides a more complete picture of bullying, offering insights to improve interventions and policies.