Equipping Youth to Think and Act Responsibly: The Effectiveness of the “EQUIP for Educators” Program on Youths’ Self-Serving Cognitive Distortions and School Bullying Perpetration

Abstract

School bullying is a serious public health concern in many countries worldwide. Over recent decades, several effective anti-bullying prevention programs have been developed. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of an adapted version of the “Equipping Youth to Help One Another (EQUIP) for Educators” (EfE) program in reducing adolescents’ engagement in school bullying perpetration by correcting their use of self-serving cognitive distortions (CDs). Furthermore, guided by the vantage sensitivity framework, we investigated whether the intervention effects varied depending on the adolescents’ gender and environmental sensitivity. A quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test with a control group design involved 354 Italian middle and high school adolescents (51.7% males; Mage = 14.86, SD = 2.54). Both the control (n = 187) and experimental group (n = 167) completed self-report questionnaires, before and after the intervention. Structural equation modeling revealed a significant moderated mediation effect: highly sensitive males participating in the EfE program decreased their engagement in bullying by reducing CDs, compared to females and those with low- and medium- sensitivity. These findings support the effectiveness of the EfE program in equipping youth to think and act more responsible and shed light on “why” and “for whom” the intervention might work better to counteract school bullying during adolescence.

One pot sets another boiling: A case of social learning perspective about leader self-serving behaviour and followers self-serving counterproductive work behaviour

“…The current HIT questionnaire has been validated and used to measure self-serving cognitive distortions by different studies [ 30 , 31 , [37] , [38] , [39] ].…”

Psychoeducation Reduces Alexithymia and Modulates Anger Expression in a School Setting

“…These results are interesting, and our study may be similarly completed with a long-term follow-up of bullying episodes in order to evaluate the effectiveness of our intervention. More recently, in 2022, another Italian research group [ 45 ] tested the effectiveness of the adapted version of “Equipping Youth to Help One Another (EQUIP) for Educators” (EfE) program. A pre- post-test design assessment with a control group involving 354 Italian middle and high school children has shown that males from the experimental group in particular have shown a significant disengagement in bullying after the program.…”

A Four-Wave Cross-Lagged Study of Exposure to Violent Contexts, Cognitive Distortions, and School Bullying during Adolescence

“…An example of a school-based program developed within Gibbs' theoretical framework and aimed at reducing adolescents' "thinking errors" or CDs is the "Equipping Youth to Help One Another (EQUIP) for Educators" (EfE; [127]) whose effectiveness has been recently demonstrated in the Italian context [128]. In accordance with our findings highlighting the key role of CDs in promoting bullying perpetration in youths exposed to violence, Dragone and colleagues [128] provided empirical support for the effectiveness of such psychoeducational program in promoting a more responsible way of (inter)acting with peers in high-risk school contexts by equipping youths with skills for correcting their "thinking errors" or self-serving CDs when interpreting social events. Informed Consent Statement: Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.…”