Marinella Paciello

• UniNettuno University

Self-efficacy plays a critical role in guiding and maintaining behaviours across various life domains, including organisational settings where it enhances task-specific performance. This paper extends the role of self-efficacy to nontask or contextual performance, focusing on citizenship and counterproductive performance. Through a systematic revie...

Despite the consequences of ethnic moral disengagement, such as ethnic bullying, racism, and prejudice, a comprehensive understanding of how to effectively counter it remains an ongoing area of research. The present study proposes an association between ethnic moral disengagement and three individual dimensions: the executive function of inhibitory...

Intergroup contact interventions have been mostly used to foster empathy, promote positive relations, and reduce prejudice and discrimination. However, less is known about the potential of intergroup contact, especially digital, in interventions designed to hinder hate speech and promote counter‐speech. Counter‐speech can be defined as a direct res...

Stereotypes have been studied extensively in the fields of social psychology and, especially with the recent advances in technology, in computational linguistics. Stereotypes have also gained even more attention nowadays because of a notable rise in their dissemination due to demographic changes and world events. This paper focuses on ethnic stereo...

While considerable attention has been devoted to understanding how individual characteristics influence unethical actions, far less research has examined the role of social and organisational processes. We introduce the concept of organisational moral disengagement (OrgMD), drawing on Bandura’s moral agency theory, to explain how unethicality may b...

Moral self‐efficacy refers to individuals' beliefs in their capability to effectively mobilise motivation, cognitive resources and strategic actions to achieve moral performance particularly in challenging situations. We adopt the conceptualization of moral self‐efficacy that encompasses both self‐reflective and behavioural components. The self‐ref...

Literature on the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional (ICU) traits has suggested different versions of the instrument for assessing these traits during development. However, consensus on the instrument version and the best factorial solution remains a matter of debate, with only a few studies having validated ICU versions from a longitudinal perspecti...

Within the field of misinformation, the study focuses on the overlooked phenomenon of racial hoaxes (RHs), defined as misleading news in which the protagonist is negatively described in relation to his/her ethnicity. This work aims to investigate the role of socioanalytic processing through the use of a conversational web app (Rolling Minds) design...

This study addresses the issue of adolescents' susceptibility to racial misinformation, testing a socio-analytical intervention within an educational community through the inducement of analytical processing of misleading news on one side, and mediated contact on the other. Rolling Minds web app has been designed to implement a hybrid schools inter...

Road safety culture among young people necessarily needs to be addressed with a multidisciplinary approach, since they are more reluctant than adults to engage and be openly evaluated in safety research. The present research, using a psychographic through psychometrics approach, combines concepts and methods from cognitive psychology and design to...

This paper explores the possibility of preventing prejudice among adolescents by promoting the analytical processing of social media content emerging from racial misinformation. Specifically, we propose, at this aim, an intervention that centers on recognizing stereotypical beliefs and other media biases about a group of people in misleading news....

Social media have become increasingly embedded in adolescents’ daily lives. Although these contexts have been widely studied, how trust in online relationships is built among adolescents is still an unexplored issue. By adopting the theoretical socio-cognitive model of trust, this study aims to explore the components of online trust as far as today...

Moral disengagement plays an important role in the routinization of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) as a key mediator. What remains unclear are the factors that could attenuate the power of moral disengagement in this process. Building on social-cognitive theory, we hypothesize the moderating role of moral self-efficacy and suggest the import...

The present study aims to understand the processes involved in misinformation among adolescents by examining the role of self-efficacy beliefs in dealing with misleading news. Specifically, we argue that the perceived capability to analyze and reflect critically on the reliability of online information sources should be stayed with the perceived se...

The present study aims to examine whether by promoting the socio-analytic thinking it is possible to intervene in the reliance on ethnic moral disengagement as a negative consequence of racial misleading news, that can seriously contribute to the diffusion of ethnic prejudice. We focus on the neglected phenomenon of racial hoaxes, which can be defi...

During online interactions, adolescents are often exposed to deviant opportunities. In this context, the capacity to regulate one’s behavior is essential to prevent cyberbullying. Among adolescents, this online aggressive behavior is a growing phenomenon, and its deleterious effects on teenagers’ mental health are well known. The present work argue...

The generation of stereotypes allows us to simplify the cognitive complexity we have to deal with in everyday life. Stereotypes are extensively used to describe people who belong to a different ethnic group, particularly in racial hoaxes and hateful content against immigrants. This paper addresses the study of stereotypes from a novel perspective t...

The spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories related to COVID‐19 has represented one of the several undesirable effects of the current pandemic. In understanding why people can be more or less at risk to believe in misinformation, emotional distress and education could play a crucial role. The present study aims to analyze the relationship...

The present study investigates the personal factors underlying online sharing of moral misleading news by observing the interaction between personal values, communication bias, credibility evaluations, and moral emotions. Specifically, we hypothesized that self-transcendence and conservation values may differently influence the sharing of misleadin...

The present study aimed to analyze the differences between maternal and paternal parenting stress and children’s behavioral functioning, as determined by teacher and parent reports. In addition, it sought to evaluate the presence of clusters based on parenting stress and to determine whether perceptions of children’s behavioral functioning varied a...

In this study, we focused on four work self-efficacy dimensions and their relationship with wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. We adopted a person-centered approach and investigated whether individuals with different work self-efficacy profiles would have different wellbeing experiences at 6 and 12 months from the beginning of the pandemic. Da...

Study of storytelling (computer visual novels) as a tool for measuring social prejudices. The work focuses on prejudice toward leading women, attempting to correlate reactions to a visual novel with GL-IAT scores.

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...

Beliefs about misinformation and conspiracy theories are often associated with a state of mind. With the spread of the pandemic there has been an outbreak of depression cases among the population. In this paper, we attempt to test the relationship between affective states and beliefs in misinformation about COVID-19 during the early phase of the pa...

Early adolescence, with its several changes and demands, represents a delicate period of life. Several studies highlighted that during early adolescence, emotional and behavioral problems tend to increase. Using a person-centered approach, the present study explored the emotional and behavioral functioning profiles in a sample of Italian preadolesc...

This article aims to conceptualize, for the first time, an implicit form of moral disengagement and investigate its role in relation to cheating behavior. In line with the implicit social-cognition models, we argue that the implicit moral disengagement would represent an unintentional, automatic, and less accessible form of the mechanisms bypassing...

In the present work, we describe the development of a Facial Expressions Recognition (FER) system able to recognize cognitive emotions in a distance education context. In this case, many research works show that the recognition of basic emotions is not enough and that recognizing emotions more related to the presence/lack of engagement and flow wou...

Online sexist aggression is still overlooked in psychosocial literature. The present study aims to investigate moral cognitive and emotional processes associated with different online stances during a heated online discussion prompted by a sexist meme. To this end, adopting a social cognitive framework, we analyzed Twitter comments in response to t...

Suicidal ideation and attempts in adolescents are closely associated to bipolar disorders (BD). Growing evidence also suggests that high functioning autism spectrum disorders (HF-ASD) are at increased risk for suicidal ideation and behaviors. Although BD and HF-ASD are frequently comorbid, no studies explored suicidality in these individuals. This...

Background: It is currently debated whether specific psychiatric disorders or Internalizing versus Externalizing psychopathological dimensions are associated to Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). We explored this issue in youth with and without IAD referred to a third-level Department of Adolescent Psychiatry during a 12-month period. Method: All t...

Most behavioral studies on animals focus on observation of individual subjects. Current paradigms of sociability set aside the social-operant dimension, i.e. acting in favor of another conspecific. We focused on prosocial behavior and reciprocity of male, adult Wild-Type (WT) and Heterozygous (HET) rats for the dopamine-transporter (DAT) gene. Met...

Disruptive behavior could represent an (un)moral behavioral component of multi-dimensional construct of morality that includes affective and cognitive aspects. Thus, it is pivotal to investigate their interplay between affective and cognitive processes the better to understand how to intervene to contrast disruptive behavior and its antisocial outc...

La confianza interpersonal es un elemento clave en el desarrollo y mantenimiento de interacciones sociales positivas y se ha asociado positivamente con la satisfacción con la vida (Putnam, 2000). Específicamente, es un factor promotor de la salud física y el funcionamiento psicosocial durante la lactancia y la adolescencia (Rotenberg, 2010). A pesa...

The online interactions have become increasingly negative and aggressive, in particular when stereotyped topics are discussed. Based on extensive literature on aggression, the present study investigates the forms, the frequencies of the negative comments and the related both emotive and cognitive processes in response an offensive post toward Carol...

SYNOPSIS Objective. Mothers with psychiatric diagnoses have been found to be generally less responsive and sensitive when interacting with their children, but studies of the quality of their dialogues with their children have not been conducted. Such dialogues are associated with children's coherent representations of their experiences, which promo...

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...

The present study aims to help better understand the cognitive and affective processes at work in ‘moral struggles’ concerning discussions about hosting immigrants. In particular, it will focus on the prosocial aspect of the debate on hosting of immigrants since previous studies have stressed mainly its racist nature. To this end, a total of 12,583...

In line with the refugee agency recommendations (UNHCR, 2010) the present research recruited citizens in the general population with the aim of understanding whether positive media messages may foster acceptance towards refugee immigrants. The study has specifically considered the case of unaccompanied refugee minors verifying if and how specific a...

It is well known that emotions have a great impact on the learning process and this becomes especially important when moving to on-line education. Then, endowing e-learning systems with the capability of assessing the emotional state of learners, can be used to provide feedback about their difficulties and problems. In this paper, we present an emp...

In line with the refugee agency recommendations (UNHCR, 2010) the present research recruited citizens in the general population with the aim of understanding whether positive media messages may foster acceptance towards refugee immigrants. The study has specifically considered the case of unaccompanied refugee minors verifying if and how specific a...

The present study represents an innovative contribution combining an articulated description of phenomenological manifestations of bullying with an in-depth picture of individual processes operating within the regulative system. Phenomenological configurations of bullying were identified considering not only exposure to and types of bullying, but a...

Previous studies indicated that a lack of empathy could be considered the core feature of callous-unemotional (CU) traits in children and adolescents. The present study is aimed at exploring relationships among CU traits, cognitive and emotional dimensions of empathy, emotion recognition (basic, social, and complex emotions), and history of maltrea...

Digital revolution has drastically changed people’s lives in the last three decades inspiring scholars to deepen the role of technologies in thinking and information processing (Baranyi et al., 2015). Prensky (2001) has developed the notion of digital generation, differentiating between natives and immigrants. Digital natives are characterised by t...

Positivity is an evaluative disposition capturing what self-esteem, life satisfaction and optimism have in common. Self-efficacy refers to specific beliefs aimed at exercising control over the events through self-regulation. This paper examines in two studies whether the effect of positivity on performance is mediated by self-efficacy beliefs. The...

Aim: This paper aimed to explore psychological functioning and mental representations in mothers of preterm infants during the child's hospitalization in a Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Methods: A sample including 62 mothers of premature infants (gestational age < 37 weeks) was recruited in a NICU. According to the gestational age at the tim...

The literature has suggested that to understand the diffusion of unethical conduct in the workplace, it is important to investigate the underlying processes sustaining engagement in misbehaviour and to study what occurs during vocational education. Drawing on social-cognitive theory, in this study, we longitudinally examined the role of two opposit...

The present work is aimed at exploring the psychological paths underlying supportive and unsupportive social media stances toward immigrants. This investigation is based on a particular case of supportive communication on immigration promoted on line by a public figure (Morandi, a famous Italian singer). The used methodology integrated methods from...

Purpose The present work aims to explore the ‘dark nuances’ of social media by identifying moral disengagement (MD) mechanisms and hostile emotions in people discussing the hosting of immigrants and examining the relationship between moral disengagement mechanisms and hostile emotions expressed online (annoyance, irritation and contempt). Design/...

The present work is aimed at exploring prosocial social media stances by means of real words used in on line discussions. In particular within online dynamics, the aim of the present study was twofold: 1) investigation of prosocial orientations emerging from a particular case of supportive communication on immigration promoted by a public figure (M...

Academic cheating has become a pervasive practice from primary schools to university. This study aims at investigating this phenomenon through a nomological network which integrates different theoretical frameworks and models, such as trait and social-cognitive theories and models regarding the approaches to learning and contextual/normative enviro...

Workplace aggression is a critical phenomenon particularly in the healthcare sector, where nurses are especially at risk of bullying and third-party aggression. While workplace aggression has been frequently examined in relation to health problems, less is known about the possible negative impact such aggression may have on the (un)ethical behavior...

In times of growing importance and emphasis on improving academic outcomes for young people, their academic selves/lives are increasingly becoming more central to their understanding of their own wellbeing. How they experience and perceive their academic successes or failures, can influence their perceived self-efficacy and eventual academic achiev...

Self-efficacy (SE) has been recognised as a pervasive mechanism of human agency influencing motivation, performance and well-being. In the organisational literature, it has been mainly assessed in relation to job tasks, leaving the emotional and interpersonal domains quite unexplored, despite their relevance. We aim to fill this gap by presenting a...

The interplay between Callous Unemotional Traits (CU) and Moral Disengagement (MD) was examined in a sample of 90 adolescents with Disruptive Behavior Disorders. Using a person-centered approach, three CU and MD configurations were identified, attesting the strong relationship between these two moral dimensions. However, for some adolescents, CU an...

The present study aimed to assess the psychological profiles of adult male and female obese patients, as well as to verify the possible influence of their psychopathological risk and impulsivity on their body mass index (BMI) and perceived quality of life. A total of 64 obese subjects accessing a center for care of their obesity were assessed throu...

Several studies demonstrated that maternal psychopathological risk is related to child’s maladjustment, but until recently research has relatively neglected fathers. Disruptive behavior disorder (DBD) and Eating disorders (ED) have a large prevalence during childhood but a few studies have focused on their association with paternal psychopathologic...

The pilot study presented in this article investigated the role of moral-cognitive features in understanding aggressive and rule-breaking behaviours in adolescents with Disruptive Behaviour Disorder (DBD). We collected two samples. The community sample was composed of 85 adolescents, whereas the DBD sample was composed of 30 adolescents. Compared w...

The development of new technologies has permitted an upsurge of Smart Universities based on online courses and the effectiveness of e-learning has been widely demonstrated. Yet, the predicting variables at the basis of e-students' success are still in question. Several authors in the field of face-to-face learning have proposed that their future ac...

Recently, a growing body of literature has shown the importance of emotions in e-learning processes by pointing out their effect on academic achievement. Nevertheless, within innovative teaching models, the affective-behavioral notion of engagement has been neglected. The aim of the present pilot study is to analyse the experienced emotions by stud...

Background: Callous-unemotional traits have been proposed as risk factors for a poorer prognosis in young people with disruptive behaviour disorders. Identification of factors that may cause or maintain elevated levels of such traits could help in developing targeted therapeutic interventions. Some previous studies have investigated the role of mo...

The aim of the present study was to identify self-efficacy configurations in different domains (i.e., emotional, social, and self-regulated learning) in a sample of university students using a person-centred approach. Results from a two-cohort sample (N = 1650) assessed at the beginning of their first year supported a 4-cluster solution: 1) Highly...

Background Ethics is a founding component of the nursing profession; however, nurses sometimes find it difficult to constantly adhere to the required ethical standards. There is limited knowledge about the factors that cause a committed nurse to violate standards; moral disengagement, originally developed by Bandura, is an essential variable to con...

Aims: Early adolescence represents a critical developmental period both from a psychological and a psychopathological point of view. During this period, one of the most common disorders that frequently arise is represented by depression, that tends to become chronic and may produce many subsequent psychosocial impairments. The present study aimed t...

Abstract Questo studio ha lo scopo di presentare e validare un questionario sulle convinzioni di efficacia personale nella regolazione dell’apprendimento mediato dalle tecnologie nei contesti universitari telematici. La letteratura psico-pedagogica ha più volte attestato il ruolo di tale dimensione associata a buoni risultati accademici e alla qual...

The pilot study presented in this article investigated the role of moral-cognitive features in understanding aggressive and rule-breaking behaviours in adolescents with Disruptive Behaviour Disorder (DBD). We collected two samples. The community sample was composed of 85 adolescents, whereas the DBD sample was composed of 30 adolescents. Compared w...

Background and objectives: Within the stressor-emotion model, counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is considered a possible result of stress. It is well-known that self-efficacy mitigates the detrimental effects of stress and the stressor-strain relation. We aim to extend the stressor-emotion model of CWB by examining the additive and moderating...

Background: Several studies, but no one in the nursing, have shown that work stress can facilitate the adoption of specific behaviors that the literature identifies as Counterproductive Work Behaviors (CWB). Individuals, however, not giving up to their moral principles, may transgress social, organizational, moral and ethical norms, through the ad...

Several scholars have highlighted the importance of examining moral disengagement (MD) in understanding aggression and deviant conduct across different contexts. The present study investigates the role of MD as a specific social-cognitive construct that, in the organizational context, may intervene in the process leading from stressors to counterpr...

The present paper aims to longitudinally assess the emotional functioning of children of mothers with depression, anxiety, or eating disorders and of mothers with no psychological disorders and to evaluate the possible mediating role of fathers' psychological profiles on children's internalizing/externalizing functioning using SCID I, SCL-90/R and...

Researchers have stressed the importance of assessing individual differences in personality as an approach to understanding aggressive and deviant conduct across different contexts. This study investigated the moderation role of irritability, a specific aggression-related disposition, in the process of work stressors that are conducive to counterpr...

Both peer relations problems and moral disengagement – the set of social-cognitive processes by which the moral content of an antisocial act is altered or removed so that the act may be more easily performed – have been repeatedly demonstrated to have a considerable impact on social development. Despite the fact that each has been found to be a rel...

This study examines the role of moral disengagement in fostering engagement in aggression and violence through adolescence to young adulthood in accordance with a design in which the study of individual differences and of their relations is instrumental to address underlying intraindividual structures and process conducive to detrimental conduct. P...

This study aimed to investigate the process that leads people to offer or omit help in response to an explicit request for assistance, taking into account both emotional and cognitive factors. Specifically, a hypothetical scenario methodology was used in a sample of 174 Italian youths (50% males) to examine whether and how factors such as empathy,...

Several studies have suggested that maternal eating disorders (EDs) represent a significant risk factor for children's affective and behavioral development. Yet, little emphasis has been placed on the paternal role. The present longitudinal study aimed to clarify the role of maternal EDs and the influence of paternal psychological profiles on child...

This paper examined empirically the value of a conceptual model in which emotional stability and agreeableness contribute to engagement in aggression and violence (EAV) indirectly through irritability, hostile rumination and moral disengagement. Three hundred and forty young adults (130 male and 190 female) participated in the study. The average ag...

The decision-making process was investigated in which a request for help was explicit but clearly not in the helper's personal interest. Based on Eisenberg's theory on prosocial moral reasoning, Schwartz's theory on basic human values and Bandura's moral disengagement theory it was hypothesized that personal values influence prosocial moral reasoni...

Diverse ricerche hanno sottolineato l'importanza di esaminare il Disimpegno Morale (DM) per comprendere l'aggressione strumentale e la condotta deviante nei diversi contesti. Questo studio esamina il ruolo del DM organizzativo come uno specifico costrutto social-cognitivo che interviene nel processo che conduce ai comportamenti controproduttivi (CW...

During adolescence, manifestations of aggressive and antisocial conduct may change dramatically (Brame, Nagin and Tremblay, 2001; Loeber and Hay, 1997). Although most adolescents act antisocial , a large part of them desist in adulthood and only a small percentage of individuals become chronically engaged in antisocial behavior (Moffit, 1993). Furt...

The present contribution investigates gender differences in psychosocial determinants of condom use in the framework of Theory of Planned Behavior of Fishbein e Ajzen. Two hundred seventy one college students of “Sapienza” University of Rome (60% females) ranging in age between 18 and 41 years (Mean = 23.5, SD = 3.17) participated to the research....

This contribution investigated cheating behaviors in the academic context by translating a model developed by Bandura and his colleagues in the study of transgressive behaviors. We investigated the role of domain specific self-efficacy beliefs and academic moral disengagement in influencing students’ cheating behaviors and academic performance. We...

A prospective study was conducted to examine a conceptual model in which affective and interpersonal social self-efficacy beliefs affect depression and delinquency concurrently and at 4 years of distance, controlling for earlier adolescents’ exposure to family violence and adolescents’ self-regulation problems. Three hundred and ninety adolescents...

This study extends understanding of romantic development in the emerging adult years by using an 8-year longitudinal design in Italy. Peer groups at age 13, interpersonal functioning and emotion regulation at age 17, and romantic styles at age 21 were measured in 388 youth. Early peer groups were shown to be indirectly associated with two romantic...

To longitudinally describe prosocial behaviour development from childhood to adolescence, using multiple informants within Canadian and Italian samples. Participants in Study 1 were 1037 boys from low socioeconomic status (SES) areas in Montreal, Canada, for whom yearly teacher and mother reports were obtained between the ages of 10 and 15. Partici...

Stability and change of moral disengagement were examined in a sample of 366 adolescents from ages 14 to 20 years. Four developmental trajectories were identified: (a) nondisengaged group that started with initially low levels followed by an important decline, (b) normative group that started with initially moderate levels followed by a decline, (c...

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of the Big Five Questionnaire – Children construct validity by means of a multitrait-multimethod study among junior high school preadolescents from 13 to 14 years old. Self-report, teacher and parent ratings were gathered. Confirmatory Factor Analyses were performed to study convergent and...

Despite the fact that juvenile fire involvement is associated with significant injuries and is highly correlated with diverse maladjustment characteristics, firesetting has never been empirically evaluated in Italy. Participants included 567 youth between 11 and 18 years of age. This investigation attempted to address four gaps in the literature. T...