Ricerc@Sapienza

The crucial role of sleep in physical and mental health is well known, especially during the developmental period. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in examining the relationship between sleep patterns and school performance in adolescents. At this stage of life, several environmental and biological factors may affect both circadian and homeostatic regulation of sleep. A large part of this population does not experience adequate sleep, leading to chronic sleep restriction and/or disrupted sleep–wake cycles.

As of today, there is no proof that the ovarian endometrioma in an adolescent represents a progressive condition, although evidence is accumulating that active management of this phenotype of endometriosis is warranted. Indeed, although symptoms will often start at a young age, even before menarche, a major delay between their onset and final diagnosis seems almost unavoidable, risking serious damage and impairment of future fertility.

Online exchange of sexual content (“sexting”) is associated with potentially negative consequences, especially for girls. We investigated possible associations between family functioning and girls’ sexting.

Cyber dating abuse is a new kind of dating violence. Several recent measures assess this phenomenon, but do not focus on a severe aggression that aims to spoil a partner’s relational network (relational cyber abuse). This study developed and validated the Cyber Dating Violence Inventory (CDVI) with 1405 adolescents and young adults (Mage = 18.17; SDage = 2.39; 65.1% females), an instrument that considers the relational dimension of online dating abuse.

The present study aims to extend research on Dyadic Coping (DC) and its role in broader family functioning by investigating its associations with parenting dimensions (PD) and child adjustment (CA). Little is known about the specific link between marital DC and child adjustment and further studies are needed to investigate this association (Zemp et al., 2016). Our contribution focuses on the mechanism through which supportive or unsupportive partners’ coping interactions influence the way they engage, as parents, in the relationship with their children.

Although previous research has corroborated the independent contributions of parent personality and adolescent temperament in predicting adolescents’ externalizing behavior problems (EXT), few studies have examined their joint contribution to predict EXT in adolescence. In the present longitudinal study, first we examined the developmental trajectory of EXT from ages 12 to 14, and, next, we investigated the joint effects of mothers’ irritability and adolescents’ inhibitory control (IC) in predicting the developmental trajectory of EXT.

During adolescence, some personality characteristics may represent vulnerabilities to adolescents' adjustment. Adopting a person-centered approach, the aims of this study were (a) to examine the relations of early adolescents' personality profiles to internalizing (i.e., anxious/depressed, withdrawal, and somatic complaints) and externalizing (i.e., aggressive and rule breaking behavior) problems three years later, and (b) to explore the moderating role of gender in these relations.

The present study examines whether early adolescents' self-efficacy beliefs about anger regulation mediate the relation between parents' self-efficacy beliefs about anger regulation and early adolescents' internalizing and externalizing problems. Participants were 534 early adolescents (T1: M age = 10.89, SD =.70; 50% female), their mothers (n = 534), and their fathers (n = 431). Families were drawn from Colombia, Italy, and the USA. Follow-up data were obtained two (T2) and three (T3) years later.

The present study examines parents' self-efficacy about anger regulation and irritability as predictors of harsh parenting and adolescent children's irritability (i.e., mediators), which in turn were examined as predictors of adolescents' externalizing and internalizing problems. Mothers, fathers, and adolescents (N = 1,298 families) from 12 cultural groups in 9 countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States) were interviewed when children were about 13 years old and again 1 and 2 years later.

This study grapples with what it means to be part of a cultural group, from a statistical modeling perspective. The method we present compares within- and between-cultural group variability, in behaviors in families. We demonstrate the method using a cross-cultural study of adolescent development and parenting, involving three biennial waves of longitudinal data from 1296 eight-year-olds and their parents (multiple cultures in nine countries).