Emergent Forms of Psychopathology and Their Associations with Homophobic Bullying in Adolescents: An Exploratory Quantitative Study

This study identified emergent forms of psychopathological traits and explored their role in the etiology of homophobic bullying in adolescence. Participants were 394 adolescents and young adults (41.6% male and 58.4% female) aged 15–20 years (M = 16.55; SD =.85) attending the third and fourth classes of public high schools in Italian cities. Participants completed the Homophobic Bullying Scale to evaluate acts of bullying towards gays and lesbians and the Symptom Check-list-90-R (SCL-90) to evaluate symptomatology connected to anxiety, depression, hostility and psychoticism. An exploratory factor analysis yielded three unique scales in the Italian sample: (1) paranoid destructiveness; (2) social desolation, and (3) anxious exhaustion, that drew items from across the Symptom Check-list-90-R (SCL-90). The scales were tested using confirmatory factor analysis and used to predict homophobic bullying in a structural equation model. Results demonstrated that paranoid destructiveness predicted bullying of gay and lesbian adolescents, anxious exhaustion prevented bullying of gay adolescents, and social desolation did not associate with bullying in the sample. Theoretical and educational implications are provided.