Psychopathic traits of business and psychology students and their relationship to academic success

The notion that high levels of psychopathic trait leads to career success in the business sector has become a popular point of theorising in recent years, with research providing support for the alleged overrepresentation of psychopathy in the financial sector, and the existence of a relationship between psychopathy and professional success. A cross-sectional design was employed to compare psychopathy scores of business and psychology students, as well as to examine the psychopathy-academic success relationship. Participates were 263 participants recruited from a UK university. Results revealed greater psychopathic traits in business students relative to psychology students on all four factors of psychopathy. Furthermore, hierarchical multiple regression indicated that the four psychopathy factors, gender, age, study hours, and course explain 14% of variance in grade outcome. Two variables made unique statistic contributions to the model with antisocial behaviour and gender (male) negatively related to grade outcome. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.     

Behavior during cyberbullying episodes: Initial validation of a new self-report scale

Research on cyberbullying has been growing worldwide, with much of the focus on the characteristics of perpetrators and targets of cyberbullying. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid on bystanders of cyber-attacks. This study presents the Italian validation of a newly developed self-report scale that measures different forms of participation in cyberbullying, namely cyberbullying, cybervictimization, cyber-defending and cyber-passive bystanding. We used responses from 561 young adolescents (289 girls; mean age = 12 years, 1 month; SD = 9 months) attending middle schools in Italy. A 16-item scale was developed paralleling the content of an already existing scale that measures young adolescents’ behavior in traditional bullying. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the four-dimensional structure of the scale and the four subscale's scores showed acceptable levels of internal consistency. Multigroup analyses demonstrated full scalar invariance of the scale across gender groups. Finally, each behavior in the electronic context was positively correlated with its counterpart in the school context, suggesting certain stability across contexts. It is concluded that the scale may be a first, promising attempt to measure different youths’ behavior during cyberbullying episodes.