Cyberbullying and Empathy in the Age of Hyperconnection: An Interdisciplinary Approach.

Considering cyberbullying as a challenging frontier of analysis in the social sciences, we find ourselves today with the duty to analyze it within a much broader social context. Indeed, we must take into account the logic of exclusion, as a fact. Today, in the logic of how the Internet works, a thin line separates the victim from the perpetrator; this is also due to the Internet we know today, made up of a mass and a headless power. Trying to amplify this dichotomy, we can say that today we live in the era of the so-called "ban-opticon" (or the logic of prohibition). This logic ranges from simply removing Facebook friends from the list, to excluding sources of knowledge. This article has focused on the discussion of cyberbullying by applying an interdisciplinary approach from sociology to psychology, with the analysis of important aspects such as empathy, hyperconnection, individualization. The concept of empathy, studied several times through the terms Verstehen and Einfuhlung, has today been explored by many parties. In fact, the term Empathy has been used to describe sympathy or compassion. The interdisciplinary approach allows a broader and more innovative analysis to better understand the phenomenon of cyberbullying and to conceptualize new intervention strategies in the social and educational fields to open new frontiers in research.

Identity matters to individuals: Group assessment cannot be reduced to collective performance.

Although we agree that both identification and differentiation play a key role in explaining individual behaviour in groups, we suggest that (1) cohesion and differentiation should be better articulated, (2) the proposal carries implicit value choices that are not necessarily universal, and (3) the success of a group in shaping individual behaviour should refer to the values of individual members.

[Pica: nosographical and psychopathological aspects]. / La pica: aspetti nosografici e rilievi psicopatologici.

The authors, after examining a clinical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, associated to Pica syndrome, analyse psychopathological development of the symptomatology in its complex, refuting some statements of published studies, that include Pica within obsessive-compulsive disorder spectrum. On the contrary, they think the coexistence of the two symptomatologies simply as an expression of a comorbidity, explaining why they are prone to link Pica with eating disorders.