Top-level heading

Thematic areas and research groups

The Department of Psychology of Development and Socialization Processes considers among its main objectives to provide an innovative theoretical and methodological contribution at an international level in relevant the psychological-social and pedagogical disciplines, to conduct empirical research and to disseminate the results among the scientific and social community integrating research into third level teaching.
The scientific-disciplinary sectors pertaining to the department are the following:

  • PSIC-01/C Psychometry
  • PSIC-02/A Developmental Psychology and Educational Psychology
  • PSIC-03/A Social Psychology
  • PAED-01/A General and social pedagogy
  • PAED-01/B History of Pedagogy
  • PAED-02/B Experimental Pedagogy
  • SDEA-01/A Demoethnoanthropological Disciplines
  • MEDS-20/B Child neuropsychiatry
  • GSPS-05/A General sociology
  • GSPS-06/A Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes
  • GSPS-07/A Sociology of Political Phenomena

The research activity of the Department is represented by the research lines active among groups and individual researchers. The lines of research cross disciplinary sectors, capturing common interests and areas of interdisciplinary collaboration, new directions of the broader debate of the scientific communities of reference. The research lines, listed below, therefore represent the current and prospective thematic areas in which the Department's researchers are and will be involved in the next three years in terms of research projects, scientific collaborations, publications and more.

The progress of the Department's empirical research also finds support in the numerous activities carried out in its various laboratories: Social Psychology, Interaction and Culture, Communication and Language, Child Observation, Video-reading, Clinical (Family Mediation Center and the Prevention and Intervention on Learning Difficulties), JointLab IDEaCT. It also makes use of collaboration with the Center for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity “Be as you are”, the Center for Sports Psychology, the Inter-university Center for Research in Environmental Psychology and the University Center for Research on the Genesis and Development of Prosocial Motivations and Antisocial.

The Department's research also benefits from numerous seminars and opportunities for academic discussion, data analysis meetings, inter-institutional collaborations and comparisons, funding from public and private, local and international bodies.

The Department's research follows the ethical code of the Italian Psychology Association and the procedures of the Department's Research Ethics Committee.

The lines of research active at the Department are described below, grouped into thematic areas:

  1. Environment and sustainable development
    Ecological relationship between people and the environment, with particular reference to individual and collective processes of ecologically sustainable behaviour, environmental education, sustainable tourism, mobility, biodiversity, management of communication and environmental risk, centered architectural and urban planning.

  2. Learning and development of cognitive skills
    Studies on the development of cognitive abilities measured with level tests and through the human figure drawing technique. Research investigates how the development of cognitive skills determines the specificity of learning processes in typical and atypical development.

  3. Social skills and socialization processes
    Study of prosociality, socio-emotional skills and group dynamics in school age. The investigation of socio-affective development includes the analysis of individual differences and the child's early relationships with adults and peers.

  4. Risk behaviors and psychological-social factors
    Risk and protective factors for various risky behaviors such as binge-eating and binge-drinking, suicidal ideation, the risk of accidents in preschool age, car driving and sleep regulation, doping in sports groups, building safety in healthcare contexts.

  5. Communication in healthcare contexts
    Communication in medical-health contexts. Medical communication is investigated at a social level of analysis that takes into consideration the different communities that frequent healthcare contexts, including that made up of patients.

  6. Social ergonomics
    Relationship between "technical" and "social" within organizations and within the daily contexts of use of communication technologies. The analyses contribute to empirical research and interdisciplinary theoretical in-depth analysis but also to the development of user-oriented technological products through participatory planning and analyzes of the practices of the users themselves.

  7. Family and parenting
    Analysis of family relationships and communication processes within couples, between children and parents, with particular attention to the adolescence phase. One line of research analyzes the functioning of same-sex parent families and the well-being of children who grow up with same-sex parents. Other studies using an ethnographic perspective and discursive analysis methodologies investigate the daily lives of families.

  8. Risk factors in development
    Risk factors during development connected, for example, with addictive, aggressive, and self-harming behaviors. Among the emerging risky behaviors is the early exposure of pre-school children to new technologies, social media and more generally to autonomous internet browsing.

  9. Motivational and cognitive factors
    Individual, interpersonal and group effects of different motivational and cognitive factors such as the need for cognitive closure, the motivation to reduce uncertainty, social dominance orientation, psychological distance, and authoritarianism.

  10. Training and work
    Connection and congruence between training courses and access to the world of work in different segments of the population (schoolchildren, students, adolescents, adults) and in specific disadvantaged groups (individuals with disabilities, migrants).

  11. Parenting and socialization practices
    Parental conceptions, strategies and practices of socialization considering the relationship between parenting styles and children's socio-emotional skills, the relationship between parents' educational attitudes and children's aggression and adaptation, the influence of cultural factors on the disciplinary methods of fathers and mothers, cultural representations of the parental function.

  12. Groups and intergroup relations
    Socialization processes in small groups; the effects of group composition; the intergenerational transmission of norms in groups and families; intra- and inter-group conflicts and reconciliation processes; the adaptation processes of minority and immigrant groups.

  13. Gender identity and behaviour
    Gender identity and sexual orientations, with particular attention to the experiences linked to the construction of identity and the coming out process for young lesbians and young gay, bisexual and transgender individuals (LGBT). The effects of minority stress on the well-being of LGBT people are also investigated.

  14. Social integration of families, people and migrant minors
    Social integration of families, people, and migrant minors according to different psychological, sociological, and pedagogical perspectives.

  15. Work and organizations
    Work activities and psychological-social phenomena in organizational and institutional contexts. Furthermore, through research or research/intervention methods, the processes of change and innovation in organizations, of organizational and business communication, of worker development and of maintaining relationships with various stakeholders are also investigated.

  16. Language and typical and atypical development processes
    Observation and evaluation of the linguistic and communicative development processes of children in the first years of life, examined both with regard to typical and atypical development (e.g. prematurity, genetic syndromes, neurological damage).

  17. Politics and psycho-social factors
    Identify the relationship between psychosocial factors, orientations and behaviors in the political sphere. Another line of research concerns political leadership with respect to the role of language, gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes in representations of politics, with a theoretical framework in the tradition of social representations.

  18. Power and leadership
    Processes underlying the choice and acceptance of particular interpersonal influence tactics as well as the support and effectiveness of certain leader styles and characteristics.

  19. Teaching and learning processes in educational and school contexts
    Knowledge construction processes that take place in the classroom and documents the negotiated, participatory nature between the various subjects involved, of the learning processes, including at early levels of schooling (e.g. development of children's narrative skills and literacy processes in preschool age).

  20. Social representations
    Study of the construct and methodology characteristic of social representations to investigate opinions, attitudes, stereotypes, in various fields linked to common sense such as illness, the financial market and its crises, places and the environment, the family, traumatic events, multimedia and virtual environments, institutional and movement politics, terrorism, electoral communication.

  21. Attitude-Behavior Relationships and Regulation of Conduct
    Classic lines of research in social psychology connected to the study of the relationships between attitudes and behaviors in different contexts. The lines of research also concern the study of the mechanisms of regulation of conduct through regulatory ways and foci, the temporal perspective, the feeling of remorse.

  22. Health, Wellbeing and Happiness
    Interaction between psycho-social and biological processes related to physical health and well-being. The processes through which different people exposed to different risk factors, or who undertake virtuous health-promoting behaviors, achieve better physical, mental and social health outcomes are studied.

  23. Sport, motor development, and socialization
    Sport as a model of social integration, as an educational tool, as a vehicle for psycho-physical health and well-being in the different phases of the life cycle. Included in this research area are studies on the development of motor skills in preschool and school age, both in terms of the psychophysiology of movement and as a prerequisite for the socialization of the child.

  24. History, memories and collections
    The historical dimension of psychology as a science, analyzing its epistemological evolutions and investigating, in particular, the contribution of authors of the 'Italian school'. Attention to the birth of scientific psychology was also developed through an innovative approach, which uses lexicographic analysis, both on computerized databases and on digitized paper material.

  25. Personality development and assessment
    Psychometric evaluation of normal and pathological personality characteristics, at various stages of the life cycle, in student, community and clinical samples.

  26. Political cultures, power, electoral campaigns and leadership styles
    The lines of research analyze from a socio-political perspective the change in political cultures that inform the relationship between governors and the governed. We analyze the change in forms, narratives and methods of exercising power, the methods and rhetoric of its legitimation, as well as leadership styles and, ultimately, the relationship between politics and society.

  27. Stereotypes and prejudices in the social representation of gender violence
    Analysis of the stereotypes and prejudices that underlie the social representation of gender violence, contributing to secondary and tertiary victimization. The studies focus on the narration of violence by the press and procedural documents, through the socio-linguistic analysis of articles and sentences.

 

Research lines Excellence Project
The MIUR-Ministry of Education, University and Research has selected 180 university departments to which 271 million Euros, foreseen annually by the 2017 Budget Law, will go to strengthen and enhance research excellence, with investments in human capital, infrastructure and highly qualified teaching activities for the five-year period 2018-2022. Among the 180 departments of excellence admitted to funding, 8 departments are from Sapienza and among these, the Department of Psychology of Development and Socialization Processes.
The project aims to create an interdisciplinary research task force on one of the most relevant social issues: migratory flows and inclusive practices in Europe and Italy. Faced with this social challenge, which requires immediate responses, the Department intends to strengthen the interconnections between excellent scientific-disciplinary sectors in research, teaching and international collaborations with an immediate socio-economic impact through existing services and the creation of new services consultancy on the psychosocial implications connected to migratory phenomena. It is possible to view the project activities and scientific publications relating to the project at the following link.