Ersilia Menesini

University of Florence | UNIFI · Dipartimento di Formazione Lingue Intercultura Letterature e Psicologia

Background: The daily and massive use of the Internet and social media by adolescents has led to increased interest and attention to prevalence rates, risk factors, and potential consequences of different forms of online victimization. This study aims to examine the possible associations between cybervictimization and online sexual harassment among...

Reviews and meta-analyses were conducted on universal prevention on school bullying, but no systematic scientific attention has been paid to the indicated interventions targeting those students already involved in the bullying phenomenon as victims or as bullies. This review examined 43 studies providing a qualitative and systematic synthesis of wh...

Introduction Despite recent efforts to understand the possible impact of contextual factors on adolescents’ involvement in ethnic bullying, most existing studies have focused on the effects of one context at a time. As adolescents are simultaneously exposed to the influence of multiple socialization agents, the aim of this study was to investigate...

Information and Communication Technologies have become powerful tools for adolescents, but they have enabled a huge number of online risks, such as being exposed to Online Hate Speech (OHS). High exposure to hateful content has been linked to despicable offline actions, including hate crimes. However, there is a lack of studies considering the asso...

Despite the importance of school connectedness and bullying victimization in students’ school burnout, to our knowledge, very few studies have analyzed their reciprocal associations, and most of them have used cross-sectional designs. So, the nature and directions of these relations have not been established yet. The general aim of this study was t...

The COVID-19 pandemic affected adolescents’ social interactions and mental health. However, it is still unclear how the developmental trajectories of individuals at higher risk of social exclusion and victimization changed during this challenging period. Using the Latent Growth Curve Analysis (LGCA), the present study aims to investigate whether be...

Introduction Sexual harassment is a complex behavior to study since it is characterized by various dimensions and definitions. Analyzing the characteristics and manifestations of this behavior in the online context, at such a vulnerable time as adolescence, is important to fully understand its nature, characteristics, and consequences. Aims and Me...

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted opportunities for adolescents to progress through a typical developmental trajectory of adjustment and self-regulation. Adolescents across many contexts have shown an increase in adjustment difficulties during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic levels. Utilizing data collected from 830 Italian adolescents from one...

Background: Despite a surge in research on self-injury in the last decade, a summary of research findings about the development of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI) over time in community youth samples is not yet present in the scientific literature. This study aims to summarize the empirical literature on this topic, examining both the occurrence (...

COVID-19 has altered adolescents' opportunities for developing and strengthening interpersonal skills and proficiencies. Using data from adolescents in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom, we examined the relation between internalizing symptoms assessed pre-pandemic or when pandemic-related restrictions were lifted (Time 1) and associa...

Nowadays, adolescents have extensive access to Information and Communication Technologies, which allow them to engage in social networking activities that may expose them to Online Hate Speech (OHS). While there are few cross-sectional studies about the effects of OHS Exposure on attitudes and aggressive behavior, no study aims to analyze the tende...

This study explored the profiles of Longitudinal Life Environmental Satisfaction (LLES) during the COVID-19 pandemic, evaluating their predicting role in social-emotional adjustment in children and early adolescents. 488 children (Mage = 8.54; SD = 0.63), and 129 early adolescents (Mage = 11.08, SD = 0.48) completed two questionnaires, pre-COVID-19...

For many adolescents, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a uniquely challenging period, and concerns have been raised about whether COVID-19-related stress may increase the risk for self-injurious behaviors among adolescents. This study examined the impact of pre-existing vulnerabilities on the occurrence and frequency of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NS...

The prevalence of bullying worldwide is high (UNESCO, 2018). Over the past decades, many anti-bullying interventions have been developed to remediate this problem. However, we lack insight into for whom these interventions work and what individual intervention components drive the total intervention effects. We conducted a large-scale individual pa...

The aim of the present systematic review is to investigate the role of both classroom and school ethnic diversity, a structural aspect of interethnic relationships, in relation to bullying and victimization. Several moderators of this association have been analyzed: country or area of data collection, how ethnicity is operationalized and computed,...

The Safer Internet Centre project aims to promote initiatives to make the Internet a better and more secure space for youths. Across the nation, schools were involved in activities aimed at raising awareness throughout a full school year. The first goal of this study is to analyze whether the project was effective, based on three aspects: (a) stude...

The present study focuses on understanding the online aggression in adolescent couples from a gender-sensitive perspective. Specifically, the aims were: (1) to analyze the direct relationship between online jealousy and online control among adolescent boys and girls and (2) to explore the moderating role of moral disengagement and socio-emotional c...

Objective: The study analyses which pathways to adjustment emerged at the family level during the COVID-19 containment period in Italy, during which children were locked down with their families for 56 days from March 11 to May 6. Using a longitudinal design, with data pre- and postevent, a bivariate latent change score model analyzed the covarianc...

Background Peer problems have emerged as important predictors of Non‐Suicidal Self‐Injury (NSSI) development during adolescence. However, the possibility that adolescents who engage in NSSI may, in turn, be at increased risk for experiencing difficulties with their peers has rarely been examined. This study investigated the reciprocal associations...

Nowadays, an increasing number of children and adolescents living in Europe have an immigrant background. Because ethnicity is a recognizable characteristic that may become the driver of bullying, these youths are at high risk of victimization. School interventions based on peer-led approaches, assuming all the conditions postulated in contact theo...

Given the high prevalence and dramatic impact of being bullied at school, it is crucial to get more insight into how teachers can reduce bullying. So far, few instruments have measured elementary teachers’ responses to bullying. This study investigated the validity of the student-reported Teachers’ Responses to Bullying Questionnaire. The factor st...

Research has underlined that moral disengagement processes, by which people switch off their moral values and act aggressively without experiencing guilt, are highly connected with contextual factors. However, research on situational variations in moral disengagement is limited, especially considering the associations with characteristics such as t...

In the context of the challenges prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s interesting to focus the attention on the psychological, cognitive and emotional, consequences that the experience may have left on a complex evolutionary stage characterized by multiple development tasks such as adolescence; growing up during the pandemic represents a major c...

The amount of personal information shared online every day by youths without control has raised concerns about their vulnerability to privacy disclosure. Parental mediation strategies have been considered as important aspects that can contribute to the reduction of online-related risks. However, research on this field has shown puzzling results and...

Introduction Understanding the specific risk profile for distinct forms of dating aggression (DA) is very informative to define cross-cutting interventions. The study aims to evaluate whether specific profiles of risk defined using a person-oriented approach predicted physical, sexual, and psychological DA after 6 months. Methods Eight hundred six...

Bullying among students is a prevalent problem in schools and is difficult to eradicate. Teachers can play a key role in preventing and reducing peer bullying by adequately intervening in bullying incidents. However, and surprisingly, theory and research regarding teachers’ responses to bullying are scarce to date. This special issue contributes to...

The papers in this issue address the important component of school bullying – the teacher’s response to incidents that occur – that has not been widely studied. The 10 articles approached the question from various theoretical perspectives using different research methods, informants, measures, and analytic strategies. In this concluding article, we...

Problem The consistent prevalence and occasionally severe consequences of bullying and victimization suggest the need to include a more accurate assessment of these episodes within the Emergency Departments (ED). However, the literature on mental health related symptoms of bullying/victimization treated in the ED is still scarce. The aim of this st...

Objective Loneliness and the onset of depression in old age are growing problems related to the greater life expectancy nowadays. This review investigated the longitudinal association between loneliness and depressive symptoms in the elderly. Design A comprehensive search was conducted using three databases (Scopus, PsycInfo, and PubMed) combing f...

The term ‘cyber dating violence’ refers to a new form of interpersonal violence in romantic relationships brought about via new technologies. In recent years, despite a large number of instruments developed to measure this phenomenon by the scientific community, there are no systematic reviews that specifically compare measures focused on the adole...

In this study, we evaluated the variation on stress reactions in Italian adolescents during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic as related to national diffusion of the outbreak, demographic characteristics, and personal experiences related to COVID-19. An online survey was disseminated from April 1 to April 5, 2020. The sample was composed of 5,295 I...

Il bullismo costituisce un problema rilevante nel contesto scolastico, tuttavia mancano a li-vello nazionale ed internazionale protocolli strutturati per la gestione del fenomeno. Lo stu-dio propone la valutazione del progetto PEBUC, protocollo standardizzato per le azioni in-dicate in caso di bullismo. Hanno partecipato al progetto 11 insegnanti d...

Research on bullying underlines the role of significant adults: the way teachers and parents respond to offline bullying has the potential to reduce bullying behaviours, but whether they have an influence on cyberbullying is unknown. This study delves into what effects parent and teacher responses to offline bullying have on cyberbullying. The samp...

Introduction Despite a growing interest in the field, scarce narrative studies have delved into adolescents’ psychological experiences related to global emergencies caused by infective diseases. The present study aims to investigate adolescents’ narratives on positive and negative experiences related to COVID-19. Methods Italian adolescents, 2,758...

This special issue on Prevention and Social-Emotional Development in Childhood and Adolescence aimed to outline the growing conceptual and empirical connections between promotion of SED and the prevention of problem behaviour in children and adolescents. The general goal was to present studies that explore the meeting point between preventive inter...

Background School violence and bullying are a pandemic issue. The academic literature underlined the need to investigate social-contextual risk factors. The United Nations called for more comprehensive and disaggregated data to inform prevention strategies. Objective The present study comprises a set of secondary analyses on Italian data from the...

Peer victimization is a public health concern that affects a significant proportion of children and adolescents. The study evaluated the prevalence of peer victimization among 440 subjects referred to Emergency Department for a psychiatric consultation and analyzed the association with psychopathological symptoms. Sample was divided into two catego...

Moral Disengagement (MD) has been found to be related to higher levels of different aggressive and bullying behaviours. Although some studies found that it plays an important role in cyberbullying too, results in this field are still puzzling and the association between MD and cyberbullying is still unclear. Therefore, this systematic review was ai...

There is a debate in scientific literature about the effectiveness of a peer-led approach to anti-bullying interventions. In order to understand which circumstances and for whom these approaches work best, the present study was carried out within the NoTrap! anti-bullying program. Using a cluster design, classes were randomly assigned into two diff...

This study examines the role of acculturation orientation toward home and host countries in ethnic bullying victimization, by considering citizenship status and taking into account social withdrawal. Within a larger school project with middle and high school students, we analyzed data on 252 adolescents from immigrant backgrounds: 71 born abroad wi...

Research on individual differences in mind wandering (MW) in healthy adults has supported the separation of spontaneous and deliberate MW given their different association with a number of psychological traits. This study aimed to further test this distinction by investigating the associations of the two types of MW with attentional control and dep...

This study aimed to understand if specific types of guilt were associated with distinct bystander roles. Specifically, we tested if differences in children’s endorsement of ethical vs. sanction-oriented guilt predicted differences in defending and outsider behaviours. Participants were 574 primary Italian school students from 4th and 5th grade. Mea...

Il contributo propone la definizione di un modello a molteplici livelli per la prevenzione e l’intervento sul cyberbullismo, che include il piano della promozione della salute, della prevenzione di comportamenti a rischio (universale, selettiva e indicata), del trattamento dei potenziali disturbi conseguenti, fino alla riabilitazione. Dopo l’approf...

This study examines the differential role of traditional and online moral disengagement (MD) in relation to cyberbullying. Traditional MD is operationalised as a process operating across contexts, whereas online MD as a contextualised process related to online settings. We hypothesised that they are separate, although correlated, and have different...

Cybermentoring refers to virtual peer support in which young people themselves are trained as cybermentors and interact with those needing help and advice (cybermentees) online. This article describes the training in, and implementation of, a cross-national cybermentoring scheme, Beatbullying Europe, developed in the United Kingdom. It involved tra...

The teacher plays an important role in the management of classroom bullying (Yoon and Bauman, 2014). Therefore, understanding and fostering teachers’ characteristics able to predict successful responses to bullying and victimization is a priority for prevention programs. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether the association between the teac...

Victims of bullying and cyberbullying present internalizing problems, such as anxiety, psychosomatic and depressive symptoms, and are at higher risk of considering or attempting suicide. Researchers have put great effort into developing interventions able to stop bullying and cyberbullying, and thus buffering possible negative consequences. Despite...

The present study addressed institutionalised children and staff members' perspectives about bullying in Residential Care settings (RCs) in five European countries (Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy and Romania.). Interviews and focus groups were conducted respectively with 123 institutionalised children and adolescents (age range: 6–18) and staff me...

Background: The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy of the school-based "Dat-e Adolescence" prevention program in the reduction of dating aggression and victimization and bullying in adolescents. Method: a RCT design with three waves (pre-test, post-test and follow-up six months apart) and two groups (an experimental group and a control gr...

Studying moderators of the effects of anti-bullying universal interventions is essential to elucidate what works for whom and to tailor more intensive, selective, and indicated programs which meet the needs of non-responders. The present study investigated whether early adolescents’ temperament—effortful control (EC), negative emotionality (NE), an...

Bullying affects a considerable number of children and adolescents, with serious consequences for school performance, health and emotional well-being. To understand bullying a promising approach is the individual by context approach, which implies that social contexts can either attenuate or exacerbate the effect of individual characteristics on bu...

The present study aims to evaluate the structure and the construct validity of the Competitive Attitude Scale (CAS) among adolescents. This is composed by two dimensions Hypercompetitive Attitude (HCA scale by Ryckman et al.1) and Personal Development Competition Attitude (PDCA scale by Ryckman et al.2). 1011 high school students (583 males and 428...

Meta-analyses on the effectiveness of antibullying interventions show that average effects tend to be significant but small. Informed by the vantage sensitivity framework, the current study aimed to test in a large randomized controlled trial whether individual differences in environmental sensitivity predict treatment response to an antibullying i...

Research indicates that involving families is essential to success of bullying intervention. Moral disengagement is a strong predictor of aggressive behavior including school bullying. We were interested in the proximal role of parents in late childhood and early adolescence for moral disengagement. We examined whether the relation between specific...

The review investigates the role played by contextual family processes, relational processes and parental individual processes on bullying and victimization. A systematic review has been conducted in five databases (Scopus, Web of Science, PsycINFO, PubMed, ERIC) from 1970 through November 2017. Finally, 154 studies were reviewed differentiating am...

Literature on homophobic bullying underlines that many teachers do not intervene in this kind of issue and often underestimate this type of bullying. At the same time, the protective role of teachers’ support for victimized students is well recognized. The present study aims to understand the processes that can lead to teachers’ activation against...

The present study aims to explore if students who voluntarily decide to become peer educators in an anti-bullying program differ from their classmates who don’t take on this role. 524 Italian students (age 13–18; males = 57%), completed self-report questionnaires at the pre-test measure of the NoTrap! anti-bullying program. In a following step, 118...

NoTrap! is an Italian online and school-based universal intervention, which makes use of a peer-led approach to prevent and combat both traditional bullying and cyberbullying. It is designed for secondary school students. The program includes three main phases, involving, at different levels, students, peer educators, teachers, school, and a virtua...

The present paper offers a review of the phenomena of bullying and peer violence among children and adolescents living in residential care settings (RCS). The review was conducted on four databases (Scopus, Web of Science, PsycINFO and ERIC). Findings of the 31 full-text papers included in the present work showed that bullying and peer violence inv...

Cyberbullying is a ubiquitous topic when considering young people and internet and communication technologies (ICTs). For interventional purposes, it is essential to take into account the perspective of adolescents. This is the reason why our main focus is (1) investigating the role of different criteria in the perceived severity of cyberbullying i...

Teachers respond differently to bullying and victimization. Socio-cognitive and moral domain theory suggest that students process teachers’ behavior cognitively and that teachers’ responses to incidents of bullying and victimization could affect students’ level of moral disengagement. We examined the mediating effect of students’ moral disengagemen...

During the school years, bullying is one of the most common expressions of violence in the peer context. Research on bullying started more than forty years ago, when the phenomenon was defined as ‘aggressive, intentional acts carried out by a group or an individual repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend him- or herself’....

The present study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the KiVa anti-bullying program in Italy through a randomized control trial of students in grades 4 and 6. The sample involved 2042 students (51 % female; grade 4, mean age = 8.85; ds = 0.43; grade 6, mean age = 10.93; ds = 0.50); 13 comprehensive schools were randomly assigned into interventio...

The NoTrap! (Noncadiamointrappola!) program is a school-based intervention, which utilizes a peer-led approach to prevent and combat both traditional bullying and cyberbullying. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the efficacy of the third Edition of the program in accordance with the recent criteria for evidence-based interventions. Towar...

This article aims to present a systematic review on anti-bullying interventions developed in virtual environment. In the first section, search strategies, inclusion criteria, results and the coding system adopted are presented. In the second part we describe the selected virtual programs (Mii-School, Noncadiamointrappola!, Quest for the Golden Rule...

Victims of cyberbullying report a number of undesirable outcomes regarding their well-being, especially those who are not able to successfully cope with cyber victimization. Research on coping with cyberbullying has identified a number of different coping strategies that seem to be differentially adaptive in cases of cyber victimization. However, k...

The present study tried to answer the research need for empirically validated and theoretically based instruments to assess cyberbullying and cybervictimization. The psychometric properties of the Florence CyberBullying-CyberVictimization Scales (FCBVSs) were analyzed in a sample of 1,142 adolescents (Mage=15.18 years; SD=1.12 years; 54.5% male). F...

Using an individual-by-environment framework, this study evaluated the role of individual- and group-level moral indices and their interaction in predicting student reports of bullying. The sample included 1,009 Italian adolescents (36% girls) from 56 classrooms (mean age = 15.02 years, SD = .71). Individual-level predictors included gender and emo...

The current study aims to analyze the impact of online and conventional couple quality on the explanation of dating aggression in Spain and Italy. 312 Italian and 430 Spanish university students participated in the study. Logistic regression analysis showed that conflicts increased the likelihood to be involved in psychological and physical aggress...

The present study aims to test a theoretical model in which child maltreatment and peer violence can predict psychological dating aggression. Results show that both emotional abuse and witnessing violence in family context, increase the odds to be involved both as perpetrator and victim in psychological dating aggression. Only for males we found a...