How does cyberbullying relate to empathy and social functioning?An investigation on a sample of Italian adolescents.

Little is known about psychosocial correlates of cyberbullying and cybervictimization among Italian adolescents; in particular, the influence of empathy – a construct that researchers have already indicated as a crucial predictor of defending behaviour in face-to-face bullying (Gini et al., 2007) – on the perpetration of violent acts through electronic means needs to be investigated: in the cyberspace the opportunity for bullies to hide or conceal their identities and the victims’ invisibility makes it more likely to perform aggression remorselessly and to disengage from empathic concern (Zanetti, Renati, Berrone, 2009). In our exploratory study we aimed at both measuring the occurrence of cyberbullying in the lives of about 250 Italian boys and girls attending the first two years of high-school (age 14-16) by a questionnaire we created and analyzing its relationships to levels of empathy, assessed using the Italian version of the Basic Empathy Scale (Albiero et al., 2009 ) and social functioning in its aspects of school and family adjustment as assessed by the ACESS scales (Galluccio et al., 2002). The data we collected are still being analyzed; our findings will be compared with international literature on the same topics.