Elisabetta Crocetti

University of Bologna | UNIBO · Department of Psychology PSI

Ethnic prejudice has negative effects on the well-being of ethnic minorities. However, less is known about the consequences of holding negative attitudes toward diversity for ethnic majority youth in current multicultural societies. Across two studies, the current research examined the medium-term (Study I) and day-to-day (Study II) reciprocal asso...

During adolescence, opportunities for interethnic interactions can shape future attitudes toward diversity. However, it is unclear how family can influence adolescents' quality of contact in different life contexts. This study aims to fill this gap. A sample of 702 Italian adolescents ( M age = 15.61, SD age = 1.11, 48.58% girls) and their parents...

European identity formation is a component of political identity and linked to the support of European institutions and values. To understand how it develops, we examined three processes of identity formation (commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment) on a short- and mid-term time scale, and their interrelations. A total...

Although identity research has predominantly focused on college-bound adolescents, it has largely neglected vocational high school students who enter the job market immediately after graduation. Furthermore, most studies have concentrated on personal identity and have overlooked the concurrent development of social identity. This study examined the...

Ethnic prejudice poses great challenges to adolescents' adjustment to multicultural societies. However, little is known about the role of the media in influencing attitudes in adolescence. Combining information environment and ecological development theories, the current study examined the longitudinal associations between the quantity, valence (i....

This study aimed to examine the processes of intergenerational transmission of attitudes toward migrant integration policies in families with adolescents. Participants included 809 adolescents (Mage = 15.61, range: 13.87–20.04 years), 545 fathers (Mage = 51.19, range: 38–77 years), and 716 mothers (Mage = 48.11, range: 33–68 years) involved in a lo...

Although there have been numerous studies on the relations between group identification and ethnic prejudice, it is less clear whether their associations reflect stable individual tendencies or rather situational or temporal fluctuations. This longitudinal multilevel study aimed to fill this gap by examining the between‐ and within‐person associati...

The family and classroom are important contexts that can contribute to the socialization of ethnic prejudice. However, less is known about their unique, relative, and synergic contributions in influencing youth's affective and cognitive prejudice. The current longitudinal study examined these processes and possible moderators among 688 Italian yout...

Within Europe, European identity formation is considered is important, as it is linked to EU support. To understand whether and how adolescents identify with Europe, we examined three processes of identity formation commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment) on a short- and mid-term time scale, and their interrelations. A...

Objective This review aimed to summarize longitudinal research about the interplay between sleep, mental health, and positive well-being in adolescents. Method Multiple search strategies were applied until 28th January 2023 to identify relevant research published in peer-reviewed journal articles or available grey literature. A final set of 63 stu...

Adolescents’ identity processes and their levels of well-being are likely to be intertwined. On the one hand, how adolescents cope with the core developmental task of forming their identity has important implications for their well-being. On the other hand, experiencing a condition of well-being can help adolescents consolidate their identity. This...

Personal identity and social identification processes can be challenging for adolescents belonging to an ethnic minority, who have to cope with the acculturation task of navigating several (and often conflictual) alternatives put forth by their cultural heritage community and destination society. Because identity and acculturation tasks are embedde...

The increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of contemporary societies has raised the importance of integration policies for people with a migrant background. Tools like the Migrant Integration Policy Index have been developed to evaluate different countries’ integration approaches. If, on the one hand, focusing on what governments are doing to pro...

This study aims to tackle positive and negative intergroup contact in school and out-of-school contexts to test whether a spillover effect (i.e., the extent to which experiences that individuals have in one context spill over into another) applies to intergroup contact. Participants were 984 adolescents (Mage = 14.66; 62.7% female; 24.8% ethnic min...

Introduction Ethnic prejudice poses a great challenge to the cohesion of current multicultural societies. Prior research has found that media portrayals of immigration‐related issues might skew individual attitudes and feelings toward ethnic minorities. While these studies have focused on negative representations of ethnic minorities, less is known...

Although identity development is crucial in individuals’ psychological adjustment from adolescence to adulthood, little is known about its impact in the transition to tertiary education or work. This study examined whether identity development during high school predicts career choices and adjustment (i.e., engagement) and maladjustment (i.e., burn...

The period between childhood and adulthood is a turbulent time of life (Hollenstein & Lougheed, 2013). While there is a solid body of research on youth social, biological, and psychological development (Sawyer et al., 2018; Steinberg & Morris, 2001), surprisingly little is known about personality processes and individual differences in them during...

Sleep is fundamental for adolescents' healthy development but undergoes dramatic changes in quantity and quality due to the conflict between biological and social rhythms. Insufficient sleep has been associated with worse physical health status and irregular eating behaviors in adolescents. This review aims to systematically synthesize the longitud...

To what extent do individuals from different generations hold positive attitudes toward policies aimed at promoting the integration of migrants? Results highlight that adolescents reported more positive attitudes towards integration compared to their parents but not to their teachers.

(1) Background: Adolescent well-being is a multifaceted construct embedded in family, school, and peer socialization contexts. By adopting a social-psychological perspective we test the association between three sources of support (parents, teachers, peers) and specific components of subjective well-being (cognitive, affective, global-and-domain-sp...

The aim of this study was to examine the external validity of the reduced Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaires for Children and Adolescents, using circadian motor activity, assessed through actigraphy, as an external criterion. Overall, 458 participants (269 females), with a mean (standard deviation) age of 15.75 (1.16) years, took part in this s...

This systematic review with meta-analysis aims to examine the relation between different aspects of digital media use and sleep health patterns. Eligible studies had to be longitudinal and with adolescents' sample. Multiple search strategies were applied until January 28, 2023 in order to identify relevant research published in peer-reviewed journa...

Adolescents spend most of their daily time in school and performing school-related activities. Different aspects of their school experiences, such as school performance, psychological factors related to school, and structural factors, consistently impact adolescents’ health and are likely to be intertwined with their sleep (i.e., quantity and quali...

Family is one of the primary socialization contexts influencing adolescents’ psychological health. In this regard, a crucial indicator of adolescents’ health is their sleep quality. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how multiple family factors (i.e., demographic and relational) are intertwined with adolescents’ sleep quality. For this reason, this...

The ways in which youth reach a stable identity, a core developmental task of emerging adulthood, are intertwined with their perceptions of the past, present, and future. Additionally, these dynamics are embedded in and are strongly influenced by the socio‐historical context and concurrent events, such as COVID‐19. This study examines how different...

Dramatic changes in sleep duration, schedules, and quality put adolescents at higher risk of negative outcomes, such as poorer physical and psychosocial adjustment. While significant attention has been paid to the role of proximal contexts (e.g., family), less is known about the longitudinal interplay between exo- (e.g., neighborhood characteristic...

In adolescence, peer relationships become crucial since youths start to rely on their peers for support. Thus, multiple facets of adolescents’ well-being are affected by their peer relationships. In this vein, one of the central well-being aspects that could be affected by the peer relationships of adolescents is sleep quality. Nevertheless, it is...

Adolescents’ school experience can be developmentally related to adolescents’ sleep. This study aimed to understand how sleep patterns (i.e., sleep duration and sleep-schedule) and weekend sleep-recovery strategies (i.e., social jetlag and weekend catch-up sleep) are associated with adolescents’ school experience (i.e., educational identity and sch...

Given that adolescents from migrant families live within at least two cultural contexts (i.e., the heritage and the destination cultures), they generally must negotiate and construct ethnic and national identities. Accordingly, the present three-wave longitudinal study was designed to identify distinct developmental trajectories of ethnic and natio...

In the present contribution, we aimed to test the psychometric properties of the Intergroup Contact Interactions Scale (ICIS). The ICIS is a tool that can easily be administered to assess ethnic minority and majority adolescents’ positive and negative intergroup contact in both school and out-of-school contexts. Study I included 169 adolescents in...

The aim of this study was to explore the potentially different associations between two common aspects of adolescents’ life, namely social jetlag and weekend catch-up sleep, with well-being and physical health, according to the actual sleep duration, i.e., <7 h and ≥7 h. To this end, 504 participants (42.1% males), with a mean age of 16.17 (standar...

Regulatory emotional self-efficacy beliefs (RESE) in managing negative emotions and in expressing positive emotions are believed to play an important role in different spheres of psychological functioning. However, the literature does not offer a quantitative synthesis of the degree of the relation between RESE and indices of (mal)adjustment. The p...

This study ( N = 161 Italian adolescents attending 11 th and 12 th grade of secondary school) investigated how adolescents linguistically portray migrants. Over a year and a half, the study considered whether positive factors known to reduce social discrimination – i.e., multiple categorization of migrants and/or respondent's identification with th...

Empathic competences might help adolescents navigate current multicultural societies by supporting harmonious intergroup relations. Yet it is unclear how each component of empathy (empathic concern and perspective-taking) is associated with different dimensions (affective, cognitive, behavioral) of ethnic prejudice. The current study aims to fill t...

This study investigated the associations between cultural diversity approaches endorsed by teachers and adolescents' positive and negative intergroup contact in schools. Participants were 984 adolescents (Mage = 14.66; 62.7% female; 24.8% ethnic minority) involved in a three-wave longitudinal study between 2019 and 2020. Results highlighted that pe...

Studying how attitudes develop in the transition from late adolescence to emerging adulthood offers unique insights into future generations’ perceptions of society and of others. However, findings on ethnic prejudice during this life period are mixed. The current research aims to examine the development of affective and cognitive ethnic prejudice,...

Positive peer and romantic relationships are crucial for adolescents' positive adjustment and relationships with parents lay the foundation for these relationships. This longitudinal meta-analysis examined how parent-adolescent relationships continue into later peer and romantic relationships. Included longitudinal studies (k = 54 involving peer re...

In this contribution, we review research that uses a cross-fertilisation approach to integrate developmental and social-psychological perspectives on how identities are formed and changed over time and how identity processes are genuinely social, being embedded in social contexts and fed by social contents. First, we outline the three-factor identi...

The COVID-19 pandemic evokes high levels of post-traumatic stress (PTS) in some people as well as positive personal changes, a phenomenon known as post-traumatic growth (PTG). Experiencing an adverse event as traumatic is crucial for triggering PTG, therefore higher PTS is often associated with higher PTG. This longitudinal study examined the prote...

Introduction In adolescence, personality traits and educational identity processes are interwoven. Previous studies have shown that personality traits predict healthy identity commitment and exploration in education. However, the direction of associations between personality traits and an identity process that searches for another identity option (...

This gamification manual explains and offers best practices and examples of how the PROMIS project partners gamified contents related to social inclusion, in order to help other teachers and developers of online educational courses understand how gamification can be used as a pedagogical strategy for digital natives. This gamification manual can be...

Background Published reports on the adverse mental health impacts of the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic suggest an emerging global mental health crisis. However, the trajectories of these mental health impacts over multiple COVID-19 peaks and corresponding lockdowns are unknown. This study explored the trajectories of anxiety and depression...

Objective: Education has a strong impact on adolescent development. This study investigated the complex longitudinal associations between educational identity processes, academic achievement, and perfectionism. Method: The study used a 4-wave design (N = 744 adolescents, Mage = 15.2 years, 55% girls). Results: Results showed that self-oriented...

Purpose Given the large number of adolescents and young adults (AYAs) impacted by parental cancer and the potential for negative psychosocial outcomes in this vulnerable population, this study examined the mediating role of offspring unmet needs with regard to parental cancer and the relation between AYAs psychosocial adjustment and perceived illne...

Positive peer and romantic relationships are crucial for adolescents’ positive adjustment and relationships with parents lay the foundation for these relationships. This longitudinal meta-analysis examined how supportive and negative parent-adolescent relationships continue into later peer and romantic relationships. Multilevel meta-regressions bas...

Inspired by the Conservation of Resource theory (Hobfoll, 1989), this study investigated the role of a broad set of personal vulnerabilities, social, and work-related stressors and resources as predictors of workers’ well-being during the COVID-19 outbreak. Participants were 594 workers in Italy. Results showed that personality predispostions, such...

Online activities can provide a wide range of opportunities for young people in dealing with age-related transitions and developmental tasks, such as forming their identity. This study aimed to unravel the associations between adolescent identity formation and online activities, internet skills, and risks. Using a nationally representative sample o...

An international group of university scholars has developed this book, as a response to the “post-truth” world, where youth increasingly rely on information from unverified and often undocumented sources coming from different social media outlets. Disadvantaged and marginalized groups, like immigrants, ethnic minorities, people with low socioeconom...

Developmental literature highlights that cognitive, moral, and affective development proceeds from concrete operations to more abstract ones. However, it is not known whether this fundamental developmental trajectory also characterizes the development of social identification (i.e., the feelings of belonging, affiliation, and correctness to a group...

Previous research highlighted that prejudice is already formed in early childhood, reaches a peak in middle childhood, and slightly decreases in late childhood, whereas the development of prejudice in adolescence was mostly unknown. This systematic review with meta-analysis aimed to comprehensively summarize and integrate prior longitudinal researc...

The present study examined the role of morality, competence, and attractiveness as perceived from faces in predicting hiring decisions for men and women. Results showed that for both female and male applicants, facial competence significantly predicted the hiring decision directly and indirectly, through the mediation of the overall impression. Dec...

Heterogeneity in development of imbalance between impulse control and sensation seeking has not been studied until now. The present study scrutinized this heterogeneity and the link between imbalance and adolescent risk. Seven-wave data of 7,558 youth (50.71% males; age range from 12/13 until 24/25) were used. Three developmental trajectories were...

The psychological flexibility model of behavior change underpins acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). However, the measurement of psychological flexibility over the past 20 years has mostly hinged on the use of measures with poor discriminant validity and fuzzy boundaries with distress and negative emotionality. The current study analyzed the s...

The Utrecht-Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U-MICS) is a widely applied identity measure. It is used to assess the identity processes encompassed in the three-factor identity model (commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment). The purpose of this study was to validate the Serbian version of the U-MICS in an adult...

There is a growing body of work showing the negative outcomes of parents who limit the autonomy of their emerging‐adult children. However, there has been little work examining children who limit their own autonomy in emerging adulthood by maintaining dependence on their parents. The purpose of this study was to examine the moderating role of cultur...

Friendships have important implications for adolescents’ psychological and social adjustment. However, there is still limited evidence on how different same‐ethnic and cross‐ethnic friendships are formed and regarding their role in refugee adjustment. Therefore, the present study was designed to examine the interplay of parents’ and adolescents’ sa...

Objective: This study refined the conceptualisation of youth care- giving by testing the tripartite model of youth caregiving pro- posed by Pakenham and Cox, comprising caregiving responsibilities, experiences, and tasks. We also investigated con- vergent validity of the model by examining the unique and joint contributions of the three youth careg...

Self-concept clarity reflects how confidently and clearly an individual defines the self-belief, and it is theorized to help individuals to be more resilient in the face of stressors. The present study aimed at investigating how self-concept clarity may be implicated in the stress process related to the COVID-19 outbreak, by examining its associati...

Recent developments in the acculturation literature have emphasized the importance of adopting inter-group perspectives that provide a valuable background for investigating how acculturation orientations (i.e., maintenance of the culture of origin and the adoption of the destination culture) of adolescents from migrant families are embedded in thei...

Although developmental science has always been evolving, these times of fast-paced and profound social and scientific changes easily lead to disori- enting fragmentation rather than coherent scien- tific advances. What directions should developmen- tal science pursue to meaningfully address real- world problems that impact human development through...

In this study, we tested a theoretical model with moral disengagement, a mediator, and generalized social trust (GST), a mediator and a moderator of the relationship between personality traits and rule-respecting behaviors (i.e., social distancing and stay-at-home), during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in Italy. The data were col...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the direct and indirect (via objective and subjective markers of adulthood) relations of parental trust and emerging adults’ life satisfaction in samples of Lithuanian ( N = 399, ages 18–25) and Japanese ( N = 585, ages 18–25) emerging adults. Results revealed that parental trust was associated with emer...

Introduction The Utrecht‐Management of Identity Commitments Scale (U‐MICS; Crocetti, Rubini, & Meeus, 2008) is a self‐report scale that can be applied to measure three identity processes (commitment, in‐depth exploration, and reconsideration of commitment) in specific domains. The current study was aimed at testing the applicability of the U‐MICS i...

Objective: Being a student is an important social role youth play during adolescence and how they approach this role has critical implications for their future development. This three-wave longitudinal study investigated the links between academic achievement (i.e., GPA) and personality traits, through the lens of social comparison mechanisms. Me...