Aphasia is a complex disorder, frequent after stroke (with an incidence of 38%), with a detailed pathophysiological characterization. Effective approaches are crucial for devising an efficient rehabilitative strategy, in order to address the everyday life and professional disability. Several rehabilitative procedures are based on psycholinguistic, cognitive, psychosocial or pragmatic approaches, including amongst those with a neurobehavioral approach the Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT). Van Eeckhout’s adaptation of MIT to French language (Melodic-Rhythmic Therapy: MRT) has implemented the training strategy by adding a (...) rhythmic structure reproducing French prosody. The purpose of this study was to adapt MRT rehabilitation procedures to Italian language and to verify its efficacy in a group of six chronic patients (five males) with severe non-fluent aphasia and without specific aphasic treatments during the previous 9 months. The patients were treated 4 days a week for 16 weeks, with sessions of 30–40 min. They were assessed 6 months after the end of the treatment (follow-up). The patients showed a significant improvement at the Aachener Aphasie Test (AAT) in different fields of spontaneous speech, with superimposable results at the follow-up. Albeit preliminary, these findings support the use of MRT in the rehabilitation after stroke. Specifically, MRT seems to benefit from its stronger structure than the available stimulation-facilitation procedures and allows a better quantification of the rehabilitation efficacy. (shrink)

El artículo sostiene una relación fundacional entre la visión bioética potteriana con el cometido de la sostenibilidad. Teniendo en cuenta que V. R. Potter no desarrolló conceptualmente cómo y desde qué enfoque tendría que entenderse la sostenibilidad de la humanidad, se hace necesario mostrar tal desarrollo conceptual. Así, la visión bioética potteriana podría ser repensada y actualizada para enfrentar el desafío de la humanidad en la época actual. En este orden de ideas, se propone analizar descriptivamente los enfoques teóricos y (...) las ampliaciones conceptuales del concepto de sostenibilidad para reconocer en qué sentido contribuyen a la construcción de una supervivencia aceptable para la humanidad, en términos de la bioética global. Para esto, se presenta el eje teórico del desarrollo sostenible, del cual se resalta su componente sistémico e intergeneracional, sin dejar de exponer las críticas a su estructura de crecimiento económico y la incompatibilidad de esto con la visión bioética potteriana. Seguidamente, se expone la propuesta alternativa del ecodesarrollo y de la racionalidad ambiental, como elementos importantes para ampliar el paradigma de la sostenibilidad. Finalmente, se concluye con una integración de los elementos de ambos ejes teóricos como un punto de partida para pensar en la sostenibilidad de una visión bioética. (shrink)

Uno de los problemas centrales que el filósofo francés Bernard Stiegler ha abordado para sostener una constitución tecno- lógica de la humanidad, es la cuestión del origen del hombre. El asunto recae en preguntarse si es posible pensar quién es el hombre desde esta tesis, sin volver a la metafísica o la filosofía trascendental. Esta posición ha de estar enraizada en una ontología que aprehenda el componente causal a nivel relacional, dejando de lado las explicaciones en las cuales la causa (...) es substancialista. Para dar desarrollo a esta propuesta, este artículo se compone de dos partes generales: la primera está destinada a presentar hasta dónde sigue y en dónde se separa Stiegler de la concepción zoo-antropológica de André Leroi-Gourhan sobre el origen del hombre; para luego explicar las bases epistemológicas y ontológicas sobre las que Stiegler erige sus tesis tecno-ontológica de la humanidad; a saber: los fundamentos de la transducción simondoniana y la diferancia derridiana. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 health crisis is strongly affecting the psychological well-being of the general population. According to a very recent literature, the imposed lockdown and social distancing measures have generated a series of negative outcomes, including fear of the future, anxiety, and somatization symptoms. Few studies have investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being of parents and children, and still fewer studies have assessed the relationship between the psychological health of parents and children. The present study (...) aimed at understanding the effect of parents’ psychological distress and verbal aggression on behavioral and emotional symptoms of children during the COVID-19 lockdown. Using an online survey administered in the first weeks of the lockdown in Italy, we explored the mediating effects of parent verbal hostility and child emotional symptoms on the relationship between parent distress and child hyperactivity/inattention in a sample of 878 Italian parents. Two hypotheses were proposed: parent distress would significantly predict child hyperactivity/inattention, and parent verbal hostility and child emotional symptoms would mediate the association between parent distress and child hyperactivity/inattention. The serial mediated model confirmed both hypotheses, suggesting that higher rates of psychological distress in parents were associated with higher levels of hyperactivity/inattention in children. Parent verbal hostility and child emotional problems were also found to positively mediate this relation. Our results may be used to improve sociopsychological interventions in the general population in the near future. They may also contribute to the clinical definition of therapeutic paths for parents and families. (shrink)

The main aim of the present research is to analyze the predictive value of individual characteristics such as online self-efficacy, adaptability to uncertainty, and sources of stress during online learning on learning engagement. We also aimed to highlight if these relationships could be mediated by the online self-regulated learning strategies, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants were 529 university students and the design was cross-sectional. The results showed significant associations of the sources of stress in online learning with self-efficacy, leaning (...) engagement and self-regulated learning strategies. Self-regulated strategies—task strategies and goal setting represent mediators of stressors perceived by the students under the conditions of the sudden shift to online activity and online learning engagement. The most relevant self-regulation strategies seemed to be goal setting and task strategies, which confirm the need for a clear structure of learning in the context of online activities. The implications of this study reside in the increased awareness regarding how learning engagement in online learning can be predicted by individual characteristics. (shrink)

Soccer players inescapably live under stress during the sportive career, and many real-life aspects of soccer situations operate in the ongoing performance. This study’s main objective was to elaborate the List of Stressors in Professional Indoor and Field Soccer, a self-report instrument designed to measure the impact of 77 soccer situations upon the sport performance. Participants were 138 indoor and field soccer players from the Brazilian Premier League. Each situation was evaluated on a 7-point scale, ranging from the most negative (...) to the most positive. Data were analyzed according to the players’ perception of the items: distress or eustress and its intensity, and after that, situations perceived as plus −1 and +1 were compared by time in which they were experienced and distributed among five categories established by the literature: Expectations about the Performance, Personal Factors, Competition Aspects, Training Demands, and Relationship with Significant People. Narratives of athletes’ experiences were also used to discuss the results. An Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling using Bi-factorial was employed to assess the factor structure. For the total participants, 49 situations were perceived as distress and 28 as eustress. Using the criteria established a priori, the distribution was among the five categories in the remaining 32 situations. Differences in perception between less and more experienced players were found in 11 situations. The results revealed that Brazilian professional soccer players experience various stressful situations. These events are important representations of environmental demands and could predict the performance as they are perceived as eustress or distress. Some of these stressful situations are inherent in sport and others adjacent to the sports system or environment. Coach pressure to win and conflicts with teammates are examples of stressors in-sport, family problems and disputes with press or fans are examples of stressors external to the team, also called peripheral opponents, and showed the relative social influence of significant others in soccer performance. We can conclude that the knowledge of the direction of a given stress situation has important practical implications in preparing athletes and helping them face the performance stressors that are part of soccer daily life. (shrink)

This study explored whether parental directions about location differ by socioeconomic status and whether children’s performance is associated with parental spatial directions. We designed a task in which parents hid a toy in one of five identical boxes in a small-scale space, and then verbally guided their children’s search. Middle-SES parents employed more language in general than low-SES parents. However, groups used the same amount of spatial terms, suggesting that providing effective spatial directions is probably a matter of quality than (...) quantity. Parents differed in the use of frames of reference; withLSESparents scarcely using them, which resulted in ambiguous reference.MSESparents showed a higher rate of person frames of reference and proximity terms, and their children performed better in the task. Our results suggest that spatial communication including person frames of reference combined with proximity information might be an effective strategy to communicate location. (shrink)

En Argentina el regreso de la institucionalidad democrática en 1983 provocó el ensanchamiento del acceso a la universidad. No obstante, la inclusión de nuevos grupos sociales y sus problemáticas en la educación superior no fue democratizadora, sino que aún persisten barreras que, paradójicamente, hacen que la inclusión sea excluyente tal como lo exponen diversos autores y autoras. El ingreso a las carreras de Derecho y al ejercicio de la profesión jurídica no presenta barreras formales para las mujeres y diversidades; sin (...) embargo, desde un punto de vista sustantivo, la enseñanza del derecho sigue considerando un sujeto jurídico universal neutral al género. Ello puede observarse en distintos aspectos: la inexistencia de incentivos para la formación docente en perspectiva de género y diversidades; la omisión de problemáticas sobre género, mujeres y diversidades entre los temas prioritarios de investigación jurídica, falta de transversalización de la perspectiva de género y diversidades en los planes de estudio y en los programas de las asignaturas; composición de las cátedras y los órganos de gobierno universitario, el ineficiente abordaje de las violencias y acoso en las universidades, entre otros. En ese sentido, la enseñanza del derecho constituye una injusticia epistémica (Fricker, 2017), invisibiliza los problemas y necesidades de mujeres y personas de la diversidad y por la falta de articulación entre docencia e investigación se mantienen modelos tradicionales de enseñanza legal. A partir de los avances de un proyecto de investigación que utiliza aportes y metodologías de análisis feministas del derecho y su enseñanza, nos proponemos revisar una parte de estos problemas: la modalidad que adquiere la articulación docencia e investigación en la carrera de Abogacía en una universidad de Argentina y cómo se estimulan y ejercen esas funciones a nivel institucional. (shrink)

Recent studies reported the development of psychological distress symptoms in patients who recovered from COVID-19. However, evidence is still scarce and new data are needed to define the exact risk and protective factors that can explain the variability in symptoms manifestation. In this study, we enrolled 257 patients who recovered from COVID-19 and we evaluated the levels of psychological distress through the Symptoms Checklist-90-R scale. Data concerning illness-related variables were collected from medical records, while the presence of subjective cognitive difficulties, (...) both before and after the illness, as well as the level of the cognitive reserve, were assessed over a clinical interview. Results revealed that being female and reporting the presence of subjective cognitive difficulties after COVID-19 were associated with higher levels of psychological distress. At the same time, being admitted to the hospital and having a high CR were protective factors. Adding new information to this emerging research field, our results highlight the importance of a complete psychological and cognitive assessment in patients with COVID-19. (shrink)

El artículo se propone describir y analizar el discurso pedagógico construido en torno a la política de formación desplegada por la Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular (CTEP). Desde nuestro abordaje conceptual, la formación política es entendida como un proceso enmarcador que mediatiza la relación del movimiento social y su contexto encuadrando la acción colectiva. Con este fin, se analizan distintos aspectos de la política de formación: (a) su génesis y objetivos; (b) el material de apoyo a la formación; (...) (c) los trayectos formativos establecidos. El supuesto que recorre este artículo plantea que las prácticas político-sindicales de la CTEP y las características de este actor poseen su correlato en el terreno de la política de formación y, en sentido inverso, la construcción de un discurso pedagógico opera en la reafirmación de las prácticas político-sindicales. Se adoptó una metodología cualitativa sustentada en la recopilación de documentos —materiales de apoyo a la formación y artículos de la página web de la CTEP— y la realización de entrevistas a dirigentxs de las distintas organizaciones integrantes de la Confederación vinculadxs a la política de formación. La relevancia de las consideraciones aquí esbozadas reside en abordar un caso de estudio aún poco indagado en general y particularmente desde la perspectiva de la construcción de su discurso pedagógico. (shrink)

O recasamento tem ocorrido com bastante frequência, principalmente como decorrência do número de separações e divórcios. Nesta pesquisa, buscou-se compreender a percepção dos filhos ante as mudanças ocorridas em suas vidas devido ao recasamento, de um ou de ambos os genitores, especialmente, no que ..

Estudos indicam que o estresse altera o sistema imune e pode influir na etiologia, progressão e severidade de doenças. A resiliência pode ser definida como a capacidade que algumas pessoas desenvolvem e as ajudam a passar por situações adversas na vida, a superá-las, e ainda a saírem fortalecidas ou..

Legal information retrieval is in need of the provision of legal knowledge for the improvement of search strategies. For this purpose, the LOIS project is concerned with the construction of a multilingual WordNet for cross-lingual information retrieval in the legal domain. In this article, we set out how a hybrid approach, featuring lexically and legally grounded conceptual representations, can fit the cross-lingual information retrieval needs of both legal professionals and laymen.

The present study focused on the dynamics and factors underpinning domestic abuse survivors’ decisions to end the abusive relationship. The experiences and opinions of 12 female DA survivors and 18 support workers were examined through in-depth, one-to-one, semi-structured interviews. Hybrid thematic analysis was conducted to retrieve semantic themes and explore relationships among the themes identified and the differences in survivors’ and professionals’ narratives of the separation process. The findings highlighted that separation decisions derived from the joint action of two sets (...) of factors, the “promoters” and the “accelerators.” Whilst the “promoters” are factors leading to the separation from the abuser over time, the “accelerators” bear a stronger and more direct connection with survivors’ decision to end the abusive relationship. Despite their differences, both these factors acted as propelling forces, leading survivors to actively pursue the separation from the perpetrator. To portray the dynamic links among these factors, we propose a conceptualisation drawn from Newton’s laws of motion. Our findings also highlighted important differences in the views of survivors and support workers, as the former conceived themselves as proactive in ending the abuse, whereas the latter described the leaving process as mainly led by authorities and services supporting survivors. This study has potential implications for research, policy and clinical practice, as it suggests that far from being a linear sequence of multiple stages, leaving an abusive relationship results from a complex interplay of factors that facilitate or drastically accelerate the separation process. We argue that future research should aim at improving our current understanding of the subjective and situational factors that can act as “accelerators” or “promoters” for women’s leaving decisions. Moreover, clinicians and policymakers should invest in creating interventions that aid victims to recognise and leverage promoters and accelerators, thus increasing their readiness to end the abuse. (shrink)

We present a novel argumentation-based method for finding and analyzing communities in social media on the Web, where a community is regarded as a set of supported opinions that might be in conflict. Based on their stance, we identify argumentative coalitions to define them; then, we apply a similarity-based evaluation method over the set of arguments in the coalition to determine the level of cohesion inherent to each community, classifying them appropriately. Introducing conflict points and attacks between coalitions based on (...) argumentative (dis)similarities to model the interaction between communities leads to considering a meta-argumentation framework where the set of coalitions plays the role of the set of arguments and where the attack relation between the coalitions is assigned a particular strength which is inherited from the arguments belonging to the coalition. Various semantics are introduced to consider attacks’ strength to particularize the effect of the new perspective. Finally, we analyze a case study where all the elements of the formal construction of the formalism are exercised. (shrink)

Abstract. The notion of similarity has been studied in many areas of Computer Science; in a general sense, this concept is defined to provide a measure of the semantic equivalence between two pieces of knowledge, expressing how “close” their meaning can be regarded. In this work, we study similarity as a tool useful to improve the representation of arguments, the interpretation of the relations between arguments, and the semantic evaluation associated with the arguments in the argumentative process. In this direction, (...) we present a novel mechanism to determine the similarity between two arguments based on descriptors representing particular aspects associated with these arguments. This mechanism involves a comparison process influenced by the context in which the process develops, where this context provides the relevant aspects that need to be analyzed in the application domain. Then, we use this similarity measure as a quantity to compute the result of attacks and supports in the argumentation process. These valuations, applied to a Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks, allowed us to refine the argument relations, providing the tools to establish a family of new argumentation semantics that considers the similarity between arguments as a crucial part for the argumentation process. (shrink)

The radical changes deriving from the COVID-19 emergency have heavily upset some of the most familiar routines of daily work life. Abruptly, many workers have been forced to face the difficulties that come with switching to remote working. Basing on the theoretical framework proposed by the Job Demands-Resources model, the purpose of this paper was to explore the effect of work overload, on behavioral stress, meant as an outcome linked to the health impairment process. Furthermore, the aim of the study (...) was to explore the mediating role of job crafting, considered as a second-order construct consisting of two dimensions in the abovementioned relation. Participants were 530 workers experiencing remote working or work-from-home during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. Hypotheses were explored by using three different latent variables, measured reflexively through indicators on a 5-point scale, extracted from validated questionnaires. Data analysis was performed through Structural Equation Modeling; to test the mediation, bootstrap validation was computed. Results showed that the mediation of job crafting was partial. More specifically, the direct effect between work overload and behavioral stress was positive; moreover, the indirect, negative effect through the mediation of job crafting was also significant. Therefore, results showed that job crafting can play a crucial role as a protective factor supporting the activation and adjustment of suitable resources; these resources can be useful to deal with the negative effects of work overload, particularly under the condition of heavy remote working and use of technologies, on individual outcomes. Starting from the current global scenario of the pandemic that has not yet ceased its effects, the study suggested decisive theoretical and practical implications. Accordingly, findings extended the current trends in occupational health psychology research, with special reference to the mainstream topic “work and COVID-19” in the Italian context. Finally, results can give suggestions to companies engaged in managing change, recommending that they build a collaborative workplace at the individual and collective level to implement job crafting interventions and enrich the personal and organizational resources of workers, which is useful cope with the current demands. (shrink)

Background: Depressive disorder is one of the main health problems worldwide. Many risk factors have been associated with this pathology. However, while the association between risks factors and adult depression is well established, the mechanisms behind its impact remains poorly understood. A possible, yet untested explanation is the mediating impact of levels of personality functioning, i.e., impairments with regard to self and interpersonal.Method: Around 162 patients were assessed at the beginning of their therapy, with regard to risk factors, such as (...) sociodemographic, physical, hereditary, and adverse childhood experiences. Depressive symptoms and personality functioning were also measured. Associations between the related variables as well as other possible covariates were examined by means of zero-order correlations and bootstrapping-based mediation analysis.Results: Of all the risk factors taken into account, level of education and physical illness were associated with depression. On the other hand, the most significant predictor of depressive symptomatology was ACE, and this relationship was mediated by personality functioning. This indicates that patients presenting adverse childhood experiences are more likely to develop deficiencies in personality functioning, which in turn increases their likelihood of developing depressive symptomatology.Conclusion: These results reaffirm the importance of incorporating risk and vulnerability factors such as personality functioning in understanding depression. (shrink)

Bullying is a phenomenon that affects children and adolescents worldwide, and it has major consequences for all participants involved in these situations. In Chile, researchers have validated several instruments used to investigate aggression between peers and school violence, but there is a lack of validation of instruments to investigate bullying. The purpose of this study was to provide evidence of the validity and reliability of the Olweus Bully/Victim Questionnaire—Revised version in the Chilean context. The participants were 2,775 students from schools (...) of low, medium, and high socioeconomic status. OBVQ-R is a self-report questionnaire with 42 items, which has been used in different countries, and has adequate psychometric properties to assess the prevalence of victimization and aggression and various forms of bullying worldwide. Results confirmed the two-factor structure of the OBVQ-R and good reliability. These dimensions seem to be correlated. Comparison between OBVQ-R with the School Violence between Peers Questionnaire and the Internet Experiences Questionnaire showed some degree of agreement. The Item Response Theory analysis showed that the item about verbal bullying, in both subscales, had the lowest-severity parameters, meaning that these forms of bullying were the most prevalent. The higher-severity parameter in the victimization scale was the cyberbullying item, and the sexual bullying item showed higher severity in the perpetration subscale. The differential item functioning analysis by gender showed a trend in which boys responded with lower-severity parameters than girls. In the victimization scale, the exception was the item about spreading rumors, and in the perpetration subscale, it was the item about racial bullying. We have provided evidence of the validation of OBVQ-R among school-age children and adolescents in Chile. This study is part of a trial registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT02898324. (shrink)

O objetivo deste estudo foi relatar características mencionadas por adolescentes do sexo feminino, em avaliação para psicoterapia, acerca de si mesmas, bem como seus planos em relação ao futuro. Participaram do estudo cinco adolescentes de 13 a 17 anos, que vivenciavam em seus contextos familiares a..

For families all over the world, going through a pandemic has presented a number of challenges. In particular, social distancing measures involving the closure of schools and day care centers, as well as increasing work hours at home, made parents face very demanding situations. However, we know little about whether parents’ burnout levels are influenced by the age of their children. This study sought to determine whether levels of parental burnout are higher in families with at least one child under (...) the age of four than in families with older children. The second goal was to explore whether having children under 4 years of age moderates the relationship between parental cooperation and PB. A cross-sectional study was conducted with a sample of 651 participants since May 18th until August 27th, 2020. The main results showed that child age is a predictor of PB. Besides, having a child aged 0–4 years old moderates the relationship between parental cooperation and PB. Finally, it was found that in cases where there was at least one child under 4 years of age in the family, with one of the partners who worked remotely, the respondent’s PB rose by 7.9 points. The implications of these results with respect to the consideration of children’s ages in the different parental scenarios were discussed. (shrink)

Background: In the present study, we aimed to better investigate attention system profile of Parkinson's disease-Mild Cognitive Impairment patients and to determine if specific attentional deficits are associated with 123I-FP-CIT SPECT.Methods: A total of 44 de novo drug-naïve PD patients [ with normal cognition and 17 with MCI ], 23 MCI patients and 23 individuals with subjective cognitive impairment were recruited at the Clinical Neurology Unit of Santa Chiara hospital. They were assessed by a wide neuropsychological battery, including Visual Search (...) Test measuring selective attention. Performances among groups were compared by non-parametric tests. Further, Spearman's rank correlations were performed to explore the association between neuropsychological variables and 123I-FP-CIT SPECT data in PD subgroup.Results: PD-MCI patients performed worse on VST than patients with PD-NC, patients with MCI and individuals with SCI. The performance of PD-MCI patients on VST significantly correlated with caudate nucleus 123I-FP-CIT SPECT uptake, whereas a negative correlation between such test and 123I-FP-CIT SPECT uptake in the left putamen was found in PD-NC patients.Conclusions: We suggest that selective attention deficit might be a trigger of cognitive decay in de novo PD-MCI patients. The VST should be routinely used to detect attentional deficits in hospital clinical practice, in the light of its closely association with dopamine depletion of basal ganglia in mildly impaired PD patients. (shrink)

Emergence of the novel pathogenic coronavirus SARS‐CoV‐2 and its rapid pandemic spread presents challenges that demand immediate attention. Here, we describe the development of a semi‐quantitative high‐content microscopy‐based assay for detection of three major classes (IgG, IgA, and IgM) of SARS‐CoV‐2 specific antibodies in human samples. The possibility to detect antibodies against the entire viral proteome together with a robust semi‐automated image analysis workflow resulted in specific, sensitive and unbiased assay that complements the portfolio of SARS‐CoV‐2 serological assays. Sensitive, specific (...) and quantitative serological assays are urgently needed for a better understanding of humoral immune response against the virus as a basis for developing public health strategies to control viral spread. The procedure described here has been used for clinical studies and provides a general framework for the application of quantitative high‐throughput microscopy to rapidly develop serological assays for emerging virus infections. (shrink)

Objetivo: El siguiente artículo tiene como propósito la revisión de la literatura existente cuyo enfoque sea las herramientas tecnológicas utilizadas para el abordaje del paciente con síntomas de salud mental, de manera virtual, para describir las ventajas, la eficacia, la efectividad y los beneficios de estas herramientas, a partir de la literatura encontrada. Métodos: se realizó una búsqueda en las bases de datos Pubmed, Elsevier, UpToDate, Journal of Medical Internet Research y Google Académico. Se identificó un total de 58 artículos (...) que versan sobre la eficacia y efectividad de las diferentes modalidades digitales (tales como aplicaciones, cuestionarios en línea, mensajes de texto, etc.) que tratan la salud mental. Resultados: la búsqueda realizada arrojó un total de 58 artículos. Tras la eliminación de duplicados, el número fue de 50 artículos. Después de la caracterización de la información basada en la revisión de la totalidad del contenido, fueron elegidos 30 artículos para que sirvieran como base para la construcción de la síntesis de datos. Conclusiones: las herramientas virtuales utilizadas en salud mental ofrecen un sin fin de beneficios para prestar un servicio con un acceso más sencillo a la población, de forma económica y efectiva, sin temor a que los pacientes sean estigmatizados al momento de buscar ayuda, como se pudo evidenciar en los artículos presentados. Además, las herramientas digitales utilizadas en psiquiatría han demostrado ser eficaces y seguras, sin embargo, son de reciente aparición y cuentan con una cantidad limitada de estudios que demuestren objetivamente su eficacia en esta área. (shrink)

The COVID-19 outbreak has placed extraordinary demands upon healthcare systems worldwide. Italy's hospitals have been among the most severely overwhelmed, and as a result, Italian healthcare workers' well-being has been at risk. The aim of this study is to explore the relationships between dimensions of burnout and various psychological features among Italian healthcare workers during the COVID-19 emergency. A group of 267 HCWs from a hospital in the Lazio Region completed self-administered questionnaires online through Google Forms, including the Maslach Burnout (...) Inventory, Resilience Scale, and Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale Short Form. Cluster analysis highlighted two opposite burnout risk profiles: low burnout and high-risk burnout. The high-risk group had lower resilience and greater difficulties in tolerating the uncertainty than the low-burnout group. A set of general linear models confirmed that both IU subscales, prospective and inhibition, moderated the relationship between resilience and burnout. In conclusion, the results showed that individual levels of resilience and one's ability to tolerate uncertainty have been significant factors in determining the impact of the COVID-19 emergency on HCWs. The use of emotional strategies that allow individuals to stay in a critical situation without the need to control it appears to protect against burnout in these circumstances. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 outbreak, individuals with or without mental disorders may resort to dysfunctional psychological strategies that could trigger or heighten their emotional distress. The current study aims to explore the links between maladaptive daydreaming, psychological symptoms of depression, anxiety, and negative stress, and COVID-19-related variables, such as changes in face-to-face and online relationships, during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. A total of 6,277 Italian adults completed an online survey, including socio-demographic variables, COVID-19 related information, the 16-item Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale, (...) and Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scales-21 Items. Based on an empirically derived cut-off score, 1,082 participants were identified as probable maladaptive daydreamers. A binary logistic regression revealed that compared to controls, probable MDers reported that during the COVID-19 lockdown they experienced higher levels of anxiety and depression, decreased online social relationships, and, surprisingly, stable or increased face-to-face social relationships. Given the peculiar characteristics of the pandemic context, these findings suggest that the exposure to the risk of contagion had probably exacerbated the tendency of probable MDers to lock themselves inside their mental fantasy worlds, which in turn may have contributed to further estrangement from online social relationships and support, thus worsening their emotional distress. (shrink)

ORCA.IT, a new online test of online research and comprehension was developed for the Italian population. A group of 183 students attending various types of upper secondary schools in Northern Italy were tested with the new tool and underwent further cognitive and neuropsychological assessment. The different school types involved in the study are representative of the school population in the Italian system, but can also be easily compared with the educational systems of other countries. The new test turned out to (...) have good psychometric properties after accurate item construction and final selection. In particular, Version 1 showed better characteristics than Version 2. Subsequently, comparison with one-way ANOVAs were performed to test whether differences exist between different school types, between groups with and without reading difficulties, and between males and females. Such differences are sometimes reported in the literature, but many remain controversial. Further, Pearson’s bivariate correlations were calculated to analyze associations between scores on the ORCA.IT and cognitive/neuropsychological variables. Finally, a stepwise regression analysis was performed on aggregated scores to identify the predictors of performance on each of the two versions, The test, especially in the most complete version (Version 1), appears to accurately and reliably capture students’ web searching abilities and online reading comprehension. The tool could highlight differences in online search and comprehension ability between students with and without reading difficulties, not penalizing overall performance but allowing very specific weaknesses to be pointed out. Further, it seems to be able to capture differences due to both educational pathways (different school types) and social attitudes (differences between males and females). Most interesting, it shows to be clearly resting on specific cognitive and neuropsychological abilities, including language, memory and attentional skills, which explain a large portion of the total variance. Offline text reading comprehension is a crucial predictor of online reading performance, while decoding ability is not. Prior knowledge also influences the results, as expected. The new tool turns out to be rather independent from previous internet experience and to measure more cognitively grounded processes related to information gathering, processing and communicating. (shrink)