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

Abstract

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.

Exploring Multivariate Profiles of Psychological Distress and Empathy in Early Adolescent Victims, Bullies, and Bystanders Involved in Cyberbullying Episodes

“…Therefore, considering the negative impact on individuals’ psychological adjustment, it is important to develop knowledge about the risk factors of cyberbullying in order to organize prevention and intervention programs. In this sense, socio-emotional skills, especially empathy and emotion regulation, seem to play a key role in the dynamics of cyberbullying [ 21 , 22 ].…”

Feelings of loneliness and isolation: Social brain and social cognition in the elderly and Alzheimer's disease

“…It is precisely in neurocognitive diseases that the importance of social relations has been studied and how they can modulate and enhance the neural correlates of the circuits that create wellbeing in feeling that one belongs to a specific social group (Morese et al, 2018; (Figure 1). Several studies have shown that the social brain network, associated with a positive feeling of wellbeing and pleasure ("warm glow"), is the one that is activated when people feel part of their communities and experience social support (Morese et al, 2016(Morese et al, , 2019aLo Gerfo et al, 2019;Auriemma et al, 2020;Longobardi et al, 2020;Morese and Longobardi, 2022). This might suggest that older adults' ToM is driven by the retrieval of information relevant to isolation (Beadle et al, 2012).…”

Editorial: Neurosociology: A New Field for Transdisciplinary Social Analysis

“…The main goal of this call, which we felt was fully met, was to highlight some of the insights that can be gleaned from a transdisciplinary exploration that can both account for the postulates of sociological thinking and adapt them to new neuroscientific paradigms. This has allowed, in this way, to avoid a drift into the two biggest reductionisms, cultural and biological, to put in evidence not to lean toward one discipline rather than another, but that all disciplines, in a trans-disciplinary agreement, can generate a greater knowledge for each of them (e.g., Auriemma et al, 2020 ; Fante et al, 2022 ). Consequently, one should be wary of any theory that claims that our understanding of others is only a matter of biological input, as the cultural interaction aspect remains at the core of any discourse.…”