Herbert Scheithauer

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB · Institute of Psychology

It is argued that there are overlaps and similarities in the dynamics and other characteristics between perpetrators of acts of terrorist violence and perpetrators of school shootings. In this case analysis article, we retroactively applied the Terrorist Radicalization Assessment Protocol–18 (TRAP-18) to study the perpetrator (Nikolas Cruz [NC]) of...

Bullying at school is a group phenomenon—not only students who are bullied and students who bully others, but also other students are involved, for example, through their pro-bullying behaviour or non-intervention. How can we encourage students to intervene and thus prevent bullying? In the present article the program Fairplayer.Manual—Grades 7–9 (...

This original paper, based on data from the Erasmus+Blurred Lives Project, presents a new multi-dimensional categorisation model to describe negative online experiences, including forms of cyberbullying, based on a study of internet usage among over N = 2,500 adolescents with lower socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds across five European countr...

Cyberbullying, which has been exacerbated by the widespread use of smartphones and the increasing stress associated with the pandemic, needs the promotion of positive online behaviour, cyberbullying awareness, and victim support. The PRISMA technique is used in this review to identify effective preventative tools and intervention options. Eleven st...

Internet usage is a salient developmental factor in adolescents’ lives. Although relevant correlates of Internet use have been documented earlier, there is a lack of information on lower socioeconomic status groups. This is important, as these adolescents have increased risk of negative online experiences. The current survey aimed to explore Intern...

Although there is growing awareness of evaluated, school-based interventions among school staff, there are some obstacles translating programs into practice. Following three focus group discussions (N = 21, 29% male, 71% female), the present paper examines barriers, facilitators, and attitudes that influence school staff engagement in (cyber-)bully...

In addition to primary caregivers, Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers play an important role in children's social-emotional development. Early preventive interventions have the potential to reduce the risk of later maldevelopment in the social-emotional domain. Papilio-U3 (Ortelbach et al., 2022) is a universal prevention program to...

Early childhood is a crucial time for developing social-emotional skills, offering the opportunity to lay the foundation for healthy development. However, early childhood behavior problems are risk factors for problems and disorders in later life phases, including depression, antisocial behavior, and substance abuse. This study uses a longitudinal...

Internet usage is a salient developmental factor in adolescents’ lives. Although relevant correlates of internet use have been documented earlier, there is a lack of information on lower socioeconomic status groups. This is important, as these adolescents have increased risk for negative online experiences. The current survey aimed to explore inter...

This thematic section editorial gives an overview of the three related articles introducing the programs Papilio-3to6, Papilio-U3, and Papilio-6to9. The essential, connecting elements are presented (developmentally appropriate prevention, social-emotional learning [SEL], and developmentally appropriate practice) and the relation between the three p...

Due to an increasing number of children under the age of three attending early childhood education and care (ECEC), there is an increasing need for high-quality care settings. In addition to primary caregivers, ECEC teachers are important socializers of children’s emotional development and may become children’s attachment figures. Early preventive...

Children face increased demands for interpersonal as well as learning-related social skills, especially by the vulnerable stage of school entry, due to the more structured setting, new academic requirements, and the fact that children are supposed to interact successfully within a larger and heterogeneous peer group. Although a plethora of social-e...

Interaction of family risk and child care as well as early child care providers’ characteristics on toddlers’ social-emotional problems: Relevance for promoting resilience in kindergarten

In this paper, developmental and biographical issues in individual biographical pathways of radicalization are examined from birth through to conviction for Islamist terrorism-related offenses. The source of data was court files of forty-five homegrown Germans convicted of Islamist terrorism-related offenses (age range at the time of the crime: 15...

Individuals belonging to terrorist organizations accept and often use violence as an instrument of their strategies to achieve their goals. The present study focuses on the motivational dynamics of three contrastively selected paradigmatic cases of extremists that grew up in Germany, joined and supported terrorist organizations abroad, and later di...

Background Complex constellations of socio-emotional and behavioural problems (i.e., mental health problems) in childhood and adolescence are common and heighten the risk for subsequent personality, anxiety and mood disorders in adulthood. Aims of this study included the examination of patterns of mental health problems (e.g., externalizing-interna...

The development of social-emotional skills is crucial in early childhood. Behavior problems in early childhood are risk factors for difficulties throughout childhood and adolescence and beyond. Considering the importance of developing social and emotional skills during early childhood, this study introduced the Papilio-3to6 program into everyday ea...

The present study aimed at giving voice to students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds using a co-participatory approach. Participants were 59 adolescents (52.5% males) aged between 14 and 16 from five European countries who created ten comics to illustrate cyberbullying for a broader audience of peers. We analyzed texts and images accor...

Das Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit der sozialen Entwicklung von Kindern und Jugendlichen in ihrer Peergruppe. Dabei werden unter Anderem Themen wie Beliebtheit, Popularität und Freundschaft im Entwicklungsverlauf behandelt.

With implemented school closures, the global crisis of COVID-19 has caused drastic changes in the dynamics and routines of children and their families. The rapid transition to homeschooling and social distancing measures have been particularly challenging for schoolchildren and their parents. In the adverse situation of COVID-19, children are more...

Although cyberbullying has received much attention over the past decade, there still is no clear consensus on how cyberbullying should be conceptualized, for example regarding different forms of cyberbullying. Due to the specificities of cyberbullying, categorizations of offline or so-called traditional bullying are not transferable to the cyber co...

Rejection Sensitivity (RS) is defined as the disposition to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and overreact to social rejection cues. Aim of the two studies presented in this paper was to develop and administer an instrument to assess RS in a German sample of healthy (pre)adolescents as well as in a clinical sample. The English Children’s Rejecti...

This chapter provides some findings from the Blurred Lives Project, funded under the Erasmus+ scheme within the EU. This project aimed to investigate cyberbullying in schools among young people (age range 14–16 years old) in Northern Ireland, England, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The young people came from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. I...

Current reviews revealed that there is a lack of effective programs and valuable effectiveness studies related to prevention of aggressive behavior and fostering of social competence in early adolescents participating in organized team sports (e.g., ball sports, such as soccer). Using a randomized controlled design, the present pilot study presents...

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...

Warning behavior prior to an act of severe targeted school violence was often not recognized by peers and school staff. With regard to preventive efforts, we attempted to identify barriers to information exchange in German schools and understand mechanisms that influenced the recognition, evaluation, and reporting of warning behavior through a teac...

Little is known about the associations between cultural class composition, teacher support for diversity (TSD), cognitive and affective empathy, and bullying and victimisation. Research shows that empathy is negatively associated with bullying and victimisation; and support for diversity and classroom cultural diversity are positively linked to soc...

Digital communication technologies play an important role in the social development of young people, but can create vulnerabilities to cyberbullying and other negative online experiences. The Blurred Lives project aimed to tackle cyberbullying innovatively using a co-participatory approach, collaborating with 14–16-year olds living in areas of soci...

This research paper presents an operationalization procedure for measuring fidelity of implementation (FOI) of a school-based crisis prevention program. The implementation literature recommends that program developers specify core components of an intervention that are directly related to a program’s theory of change and need to be implemented with...

Zusammenfassung. Das Cybermobbing-Präventionsprogramm „Medienhelden“ richtet sich an Schüler_innen der Klassen 7 bis 10, ihre Lehrkräfte und ihre Eltern. Die Wirksamkeit wurde in einer randomisierten kontrollierten Studie (Pre-Posttest-Design, 9-Monats-Intervall) evaluiert. Die vorliegende Cross-Lagged-Panel-Analyse wurde mit 586 deutschen Jugendli...

Zusammenfassung. Cybermobbing bzw. Cyberbullying stellt ein Phänomen dar, welchem im Zuge der Digitalisierung dringend Beachtung geschenkt werden muss. Trotz steigender Prävalenzraten und schwerwiegenden sozial-emotionalen Auswirkungen für die Beteiligten fehlen spezifische Therapieansätze in der (psychotherapeutischen) Behandlung von Kindern und J...

Bystanders play a crucial role in aggressive behavior in group contexts. Cyberbystanders can react in proactive ways such as assisting a cyberbully or defending the victim. Since school relationships spill over to the online world, the school context is likely to influence students’ online behavior. In the present study, we examine the influence of...

Most research on severe targeted school violence (STSV) - defined as planned offenses committed by former or current students intending to kill one or more persons associated with their school - is related to risk factor approaches or theoretically informed models and thus lacks an empirical explanation of underlying mechanisms and the dynamic of c...

The standardized, indicated school-based prevention program “Networks Against School Shootings” (NETWASS) combines a threat assessment approach with a general model of prevention of emergency situations in schools through early intervention in student psychosocial crises and training teachers to recognize warning signs of targeted school violence....

This chapter describes the development and interrater reliability analysis for a standardised research tool to analyse the characteristics of school shooting threats systematically, based on state-of-the-art knowledge. The instrument was developed on the basis of the current but not empirically tested approaches evaluating the seriousness of school...

Mobbing in der Schule ist ein Gruppenphänomen – nicht nur Schüler, die gemobbt werden und Schüler, die andere mobben, sondern fast alle Schülerinnen und Schüler sind beispielsweise durch ihr Verhalten oder Nicht-Einschreiten beteiligt. Wie kann man grundlegend SchülerInnen und Schüler darin fördern, zivilcouragiert einzugreifen und damit Mobbing zu...

Past studies investigating the phenomenon of cyberbullying employed mainly quantitative methods, yielding significant findings in prevalence rates, patterns of behaviours, coping strategies, and causes. However, there is a need for more qualitative studies to provide the rich details in order to develop a clearer and more congruent concept of cyber...

Im Rahmen der Jugendarbeit in Sportvereinen bietet sich nicht nur die Möglichkeit, Kinder und Jugendliche in ihren sportlichen Fähigkeiten zu trainieren, sondern auch die Gelegenheit, soziale Kompetenzen und faires Verhalten auf und auch abseits des Sportplatzes zu fördern. Allerdings ist hierzu aktive pädagogische Unterstützung nötig, die auf Kenn...

Welcome to this resource designed for pupils by young people across Europe as part of the Blurred Lives Project - a cross-national, co-participatory exploration of cyberbullying, young people and socio-economic disadvantage. The Blurred Lives Project focused on the online experiences of 14-16-year olds in schools in disadvantaged urban areas in Nor...

Welcome to this resource designed for social networking providers by young people across Europe as part of the Blurred Lives Project - a cross-national, co-participatory exploration of cyberbullying, young people and socio-econ omic disadvantage. The Blurred Lives Project focuses on the online experiences of 14-16 year olds in schools in disadvant...

Welcome to this resource designed for pupils by young people across Europe as part of the Blurred Lives Project - a cross-national, co-participatory exploration of cyberbullying, young people and socio-economic disadvantage. The Blurred Lives Project focused on the online experiences of 14-16-year olds in schools in disadvantaged urban areas in Nor...

Welcome to this resource designed for pupils by young people across Europe as part of the Blurred Lives Project - a cross-national, co-participatory exploration of cyberbullying, young people and socio-economic disadvantage. The Blurred Lives Project focused on the online experiences of 14-16-year olds in schools in disadvantaged urban areas in Nor...

This study contributed to the field of early childhood education development by using a longitudinal design to examine the impact of a preventive intervention program “Papilio” on children’s social-emotional development in Germany. The Papilio program was evaluated using a 1-year-randomized controlled trial design with an intervention and waiting-c...

This study investigated the cross‐national adaptation and implementation of Papilio, a German social–emotional learning programme, in Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres. Papilio is a developmentally focused, scientifically based intervention programme focused on preventing behavioural problems and fostering social–emotional c...

Bullying in schools is a widespread phenomenon, witnessed worldwide, with negative consequences for victims and perpetrators. Although it is an international issue, there are several issues with cross-national and cross-cultural/ethnic research that can make comparisons between countries and cultures/ethnic groups difficult including language, cult...

Zusammenfassung Die vorliegende Überblicksarbeit erklärt das Phänomen Cybermobbing im Kindes- und Jugendalter und geht auf mögliche Folgen für die Betroffenen sowie auf Entstehungsbedingungen ein. Im Beitrag werden Möglichkeiten der systematischen Prävention im Kontext Schule mithilfe des wirksamkeitsevaluierten Programms Medienhelden aufgezeigt. I...

The present analyses empirically explored the roles in cyberbullying by using Latent Class Analysis. Potential predictors of class membership were also examined using multinomial logistic regression analysis. Participants were 849 German students (52.7% girls, 45.6% boys, Mage = 13.4 years, SDage = 1.1 years). Observed indicators of latent class me...

As Facebook enables adolescents to present themselves positively by means of their Facebook profile and to gain positive feedback for doing so, the aim of the current study is to investigate which kinds of adolescents' positive self-presentation in profile pictures and status updates are associated with positive feedback in terms of Likes from the...

Behavior in interdependent contexts is guided by social value orientations. In a simplified version, social value orientations either tend to be pro-self, leading to competitive behavior or pro-other, leading to cooperative behavior in social interactions. As the majority of interactions are goal driven, social value orientations are expected to in...

The current investigation hypothesized and tested latent bully/victim traits for physical, verbal or relational bullying/victimization, both cyber and traditional behaviors. Data were collected from 1,356 German students who attended grades 5 to 10; 48.4% male, 49.3% female from eight different schools in Northern Germany. Based on two samples for...

Analysis of incidents over the past ten years in Germany reveals that the boundaries between targeted attacks in schools and terrorist attacks are starting to blur. Böckler, Leuschner, Roth, Zick, and Scheithauer (2018) recently presented a set of hypotheses about similarities between the developmental pathways of school attackers and lone actor te...

The theory of reasoned action (ToRA) has been proposed as a framework for cyberbullying prevention design, targeting attitudes and norms. In this study effects of a long (10 weekly sessions) and a short (one day, four sessions) cyberbullying prevention program based on the ToRA were compared with a control group over 9 months. Longitudinal data fro...

Over the past 5 years, Europe has witnessed an increasing number of attacks by "lone actors," whose definition and classification presents challenges to the existing premises of violence research. These cases appear to combine elements from both rampage killings (school shootings) and terrorism. Research has to date treated school shootings and lon...

Taten schwerer, zielgerichteter Schulgewalt werden langfristig von Jugendlichen geplant, die sich in einer krisenhaften Entwicklung befinden. Retrospektive Fallanalysen haben gezeigt, dass jedem in Deutschland stattgefundenen School Shooting eine Drohung oder Ankündigung der Tat vorausging. Gleichzeitig drohen Schüler häufig mit Amok, ohne dass es...

Intervention and Therapy for Perpetrators and Victims of Bullying: A Systematic Review Bullying is a form of repeated and aggressive behavior with serious consequences for victims and perpetrators, who often suffer from their experiences long after the bullying episodes have ended. However, the therapeutic treatment of bullying and its consequences...

Social networking sites are a substantial part of adolescents’ daily lives. By using a longitudinal approach the current study examined the impact of (a) positive self-presentation, (b) number of friends, and (c) the initiation of online relationships on Facebook on adolescents’ self-esteem and their initiation of offline relationships, as well as...

"Media Heroes" (German: "Medienhelden") is a structured, manual-based cyberbullying prevention program implemented by trained teachers within the existing school curriculum. It targets middle-school students (7th to 10th grade), their teachers, and parents. "Media Heroes" aims to promote media literacy and to prevent cyberbullying. It was one of th...

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...

Empathy entails basic cognitive processes such as the recognition of facial expressions and basic emotional processes such as emotional contagion, but also higher-order cognitive processes such as abstract reasoning about the other person's emotional states and higher-order emotional processes such as empathic concern. Thus, empathy must be concept...

Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag beschreibt die Entwicklung eines Instruments zur Messung des subjektiven Sicherheitsgefühls – in der Literatur generell als Kriminalitätsfurcht bezeichnet – des Schulpersonals im Zusammenhang mit „school shootings“ bzw. schwerer, zielgerichteter Schulgewalt (SG-L-SS). Das SG-L-SS ist das erste delikt- bzw. kontextspez...

The standardized, indicated school-based prevention program “Networks Against School Shootings” combines a threat assessment approach with a general model of prevention of emergency situations in schools through early intervention in student psychosocial crises and training teachers to recognize warning signs of targeted school violence. An evaluat...

Bullying is a form of repeated and aggressive behavior with serious consequences for victims and perpetrators, who often suffer from their experiences long after the bullying episodes have ended. However, the therapeutic treatment of bullying and its consequences represents a neglected topic in bullying research. Objective of the present article is...

Das Ausmaß an sozialer Perspektivenübernahme und affektiver Empathie wird häufig mit der Beteiligung an traditionellem Mobbing im Jugendalter in Zusammenhang gebracht. Die wechselseitige Rolle dieser beiden sozial-emotionalen Schlüsselkompetenzen beim Cybermobbing wurde hingegen weniger untersucht (z.B. Ang & Goh, 2010). Erschwerend kommt hinzu, da...

The theory-based, modularized and standardized preventive intervention “Medienhelden” (Engl. = “MediaHeroes”) (Schultze-Krumbholz, Zagorscak, Siebenbrock, & Scheithauer, 2012) is implemented in one of two different versions within the school context (7th-9th graders): either as a ten-week program during lessons (curriculum) or as a single project d...

Many play-oriented preventive interventions have been developed for preschool children to foster socio-emotional competence and to prevent behavior problems. However, knowledge about managing the steps from an evaluated “lab” program to a successful implementation into everyday care is scarce. As a teacher-taught universal program, Papilio is direc...

The research-based NETWASS prevention model aims to enable school staff to identify students experiencing a psychosocial crisis that could lead to severe targeted school violence and to initiate appropriate support measures. A detailed analysis of the adolescent psychosocial crisis is conducted at an early stage by evaluating possible warning behav...

Background: Several researchers have investigated substance use patterns using a latent class analysis; however, hardly no studies exist on substance use patterns across countries. Objectives: Adolescent substance use patterns, demographic factors, and international differences in the prevalence of substance use patterns were explored. Methods:...

Threats and announcements of homicidal violence at schools may have massive consequences like evacuations, police searches, criminal investigations, or loss of the sense of security by students, teachers, and parents. However, there is a lack of systematic studies about that phenomenon. The present article would like to contribute to closing the re...

There is considerable debate over whether cyberbullying is just another form of bullying, or whether it is a problem distinct enough to require specific intervention. One way to explore this issue is to analyze whether programs designed to prevent traditional bullying help prevent cyberbullying, and whether programs designed to prevent cyberbullyin...

As the world's population increasingly relies on the use of modern technology, cyberbullying becomes an omnipresent risk for children and adolescents and demands counteraction to prevent negative (online) experiences. The classroom-based German preventive intervention "Medienhelden" (engl.: "Media Heroes") builds on previous knowledge about links b...

„Medienhelden“ (Schultze‐Krumbholz et al. 2012) ist ein strukturiertes und manualisiertes Programm zur Prävention von Cybermobbing und Förderung von schützenden Onlinefertigkeiten im Kontext Schule. Grundlegende Ziele stellen die Verminderung und Prävention von Cybermobbing – Opferwerdung und Täterschaft – sowie die Verminderung von Onlinerisiken (...