Ricerc@Sapienza

In preadolescence and adolescence communication and connectedness with peers is an essential part of adolescents' social life. Mobile Phone (MP) may be considered a way to maintain both communication and connectedness. However, recent studies noted that problematic MP use may negatively affect nocturnal sleep with a variety of negative health, developmental and performance outcomes. The present study aims to explore the association between problematic MP use and sleep quality in preadolescence investigating the mediating role of somatic symptoms.

Background In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the implications of shyness for the psychosocial wellbeing of children and adolescents, exploring its association with internalizing problems. Research in an Italian context is hindered by the lack of a validated self-report measure of shyness. We report two studies aimed to assess the psychometric properties of an Italian translation of the Children’s Shyness Questionnaire (CSQ-it) and investigate its correlations with convergent and divergent constructs.

The association among alexithymia, somatic symptoms and clinical correlates has been
scantly investigated in children. The present study examined alexithymic features and
somatic symptomatology in schoolchildren with high and low levels of depression,
testing the role of depressive symptoms in mediating the associations between
alexithymia and somatic symptoms. Seven-hundred schoolchildren were involved in this
study and divided into two subgroups (8–10 years and 11–14 years) in order to test