No abstract

Cyberbullying is inducing significant socio-cultural problems and psychological disorders, which require a rapid solution. Cyberbullying is an extension of the traditional bullying that involves the typical behaviors of bullying perpetrated through the use of various technologies, electronic devices in particular (e-mail, instant messaging applications, media, etc.). While providing differences between traditional bullying and cyberbullying, this review aims at investigating how the new media can be used to prevent such phenomenon and investigating its psychological impact on victims. The focus will be on tools and interventions that are capable of identifying online bullying, on existent treatments with special regard to strategies that take advantage of technologies to fight cyberbullying. In particular, the web will be considered as a mean to assist a vast number of people; moreover, the role of virtual reality as a tool to help victims overcoming psychological distress within safe and protected environments will be object of discussion.

Cyberbullying is inducing significant socio-cultural problems and psychological disorders, which require a rapid solution. Cyberbullying is an extension of the traditional bullying that involves the typical behaviors of bullying perpetrated through the use of various technologies, electronic devices in particular (e-mail, instant messaging applications, media, etc.). While providing differences between traditional bullying and cyberbullying, this review aims at investigating how the new media can be used to prevent such phenomenon and investigating its psychological impact on victims. The focus will be on tools and interventions that are capable of identifying online bullying, on existent treatments with special regard to strategies that take advantage of technologies to fight cyberbullying. In particular, the web will be considered as a mean to assist a vast number of people; moreover, the role of virtual reality as a tool to help victims overcoming psychological distress within safe and protected environments will be object of discussion.

The dramatic increase and impact of psychological research conducted via the internet is widely spotlighted, but objective assessments of the matter are scarce. In the present paper, we analyzed trends based on online and offline (in-laboratory) sample sizes in randomly sampled articles (N = 1,000) published in five general and experimental psychology journals in each year from 2003 to 2022. While our samples included no online participants at all in the early 2000s, in recent years’ publications we indeed found soaring online sample sizes (per article as well as per study), with online participants accounting for almost two thirds of all participants. At the same time, offline sample sizes increased only slightly, and comparatively negligibly. The generally increased sample sizes likely bode well for replicability and robustness, but the potential pitfalls of this rapid migration to online research warrant thoughtful and thorough further examinations.