[Emotion understanding of victimized and bullying children in kindergarten--starting points for a prevention?].

Being victimized by peers is one of the most negative social experiences of childhood and adolescence. Emotions play a central role in these kinds of interaction. Surprisingly however, socio-affective skills of victimized and bullying children have only rarely been the subject of investigation. In this study, the emotion understanding of Swiss kindergarten children between the ages of four and seven years was probed with the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) and an emotion recognition task. Individual scores in victimization and bullying behavior were determined using teacher ratings. Ordinal regression analyses showed that problems in recognizing mimic emotions (specifically anger, sadness and fear), understanding external causes of emotions and understanding the possibility of hiding emotions were predictive of more victimization. Likewise, problems in understanding external causes of emotions were related to more bullying behavior. Implications of these results for the prevention of bullying are discussed.