Ada Ghiggia

• Doctor of Psychology
• University of Trieste

Objective: The study analyzed the role of traumatic experiences and psychosomatic components as potential predictors of the likelihood of chronic pain patients having or not having fibromyalgia. Methods: We examined the role of stressful life events (Traumatic Experiences Checklist), psychosomatic syndromes (Toronto Alexithymia Scale and Diagnostic...

Emotional competencies, such as emotion regulation and empathy, are essential for social interaction. Impairment of these skills has been associated with increased rates of anxiety/depressive symptoms and loneliness, which has been defined as the discrepancy between the desired and actual quality and quantity of social relationships a person mainta...

Terminally ill cancer patients often experience demoralization and loss of dignity, which undermines their spiritual wellbeing, which could, however, be supported by the presence of other factors such as self-transcendence and religious coping strategies. To assess self-transcendence and religious coping strategies and how they influence spirituali...

Loneliness is defined as the discrepancy between the desired and actual quality and quantity of social relationships a person maintains. Several factors, such as socioemotional skills (emotion recognition, empathy, and emotion regulation), may play a role in the experience of loneliness. Socioemotional skills represent a complex set of abilities th...

Evidence relative to facial emotion recognition and the role played by alexithymia in fibromyalgia syndrome is rare and heterogeneous. In this work, we investigated this ability in fibromyalgia investigating the implicit behaviour in the facial emotion recognition task, focusing on fear and anger. Twenty women with fibromyalgia and twenty healthy w...

Background: The emergency caused by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic exacerbated psychological distress. Our aim was to investigate the impact of breast cancer on patients' lives during the Italian lockdown. Methods: Sixty-five female breast cancer patients were studied, assessing the level of psychological distress with the Hospital Anxiety and Depressi...

Objective: Several studies have shown a strong association between alexithymia and psychological distress in both healthy and clinical populations. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence and association between alexithymia and psychological distress in individuals with fibromyalgia (FM) and chronic migraine (CM) compared with healt...

Aim Emotional dysregulation (ED), defined by deficits in the ability to monitor and modulate the valence, intensity, and expression of emotions, is typically expressed with irritability, tantrums, mood fluctuations, and self-harm in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although ED does not represent a diagnostic feature of ASD, its m...

Purpose Individuals with fibromyalgia and obesity experience significant impairment in physical functioning. Pain catastrophizing, kinesiophobia, and pain acceptance have all been identified as important factors associated with the level of disability. The objective of this study was to evaluate the role of pain catastrophizing, kinesiophobia, and...

Background: The role that psychological factors and personality traits play in the pathogenesis of Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS) is currently controversial. Most of the studies on FMS used self-report measures, and to date only a doctoral dissertation was conducted to compare the Rorschach responses of patients with FMS to the normative sample. Aim...

Purpose Personality could be an interesting dimension to explore in end-of-life cancer patients, in order to investigate how personality affects quality of life. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the relationship among personality through the Big Five Inventory (BFI), spirituality, and demoralization and to explore their impact on their quality...

Psychological, emotional, and behavioral domains could be altered in COVID-19 patients and measurement of variables within these domains seems to be mandatory. Neuropsychological assessment could detect possible cognitive impairment caused by COVID-19 and the choice of appropriate tools is an important question. Aim of this exploratory study was to...

Aim: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has abruptly changed the life of millions as travel and social contacts have been severely restricted. We assessed the psychological impact of COVID-19 on adults and children, with special attention to health care workers (HCWs). Methods: A self-rated online survey, including the Impact of Event...

Objective: Psychological factors like traumatic life events seem to affect the etiopathogenesis and the exacerbation of fibromyalgia (FM), a chronic widespread musculoskeletal pain syndrome. This Study investigated the prevalence of traumatic events, with a particular attention to the whole life span, and both psychoform and somatoform dissociation...

The Fibromyalgia Survey Questionnaire (FSQ) was self-administered by a sample of 207 Italian individuals with obesity to screen for fibromyalgia (FM). We aimed to investigate the inter-rater reliability and the agreement in the detection of FM symptomatology between the self-administered FSQ and the clinical interview conducted by a rheumatologist....

Objective To evaluate the efficacy of a reinforcement message (RM) administered by a hospital pharmacist on adherence, through a randomised study involving patients undergoing oral chemotherapy from which an objective outcome measure and patients’ subjective opinions were collected. A secondary aim was to detect which psychological or clinical fac...

Objectives Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic pain syndrome, and alexithymia, which is a condition that is characterised by deficits in emotional self-awareness, is highly prevalent among individuals with FM. Insecure attachment styles and inadequate parental care appear to play an important role in the onset and maintenance of both alexithymia and chr...

Objective: Breast cancer (BC) diagnosis is a potentially traumatic event, the related challenges of which can trigger positive or negative reactions. Posttraumatic growth (PTG) is defined as a positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle. The present study aimed to shed light on the relationship between the evolution of de...

Background: Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is considered a positive outcome of struggling with a traumatic event, distinct, and opposite from negative outcomes, i.e., psychological distress. The present study aimed to shed light on the relationship between potentially relating factors (i.e., coping strategies, perceived social support, and attachment...

Background The Fear of Pain Questionnaire-III (FPQ-III) is a self-report instrument developed to assess fear of different stimuli usually causing pain. The present study aimed to construct an Italian version of the FPQ-III and examine its psychometric properties in a heterogeneous sample of Italian healthy individuals. Methods The questionnaire wa...

Raw data used in the current study. (XLSX)

Appendix B. Descriptive statistics for the summed subscales and total scores of FPQ-III (N = 511). (DOCX)

Fear of Pain Questionnaire–III. This is the Italian translation of the Fear of Pain Questionnaire–III. (DOCX)

Appendix A. Descriptive statistics for the 30 items of FPQ-III (N = 511). (DOCX)

Pain in fibromyalgia (FM) is accompanied by a heterogeneous series of other symptoms, which strongly affect patients’ quality of life and interfere with social and work performance. The present study aimed to evaluate the effects of alexithymia on both the physical and the psychosocial components of the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of FM...

Background Fibromyalgia (FM) is a syndrome characterized by chronic, widespread musculoskeletal pain, occurring predominantly in women. Previous studies have shown that patients with FM display a pattern of selective processing or cognitive bias which fosters the encoding of pain-related information. The present study tested the hypothesis of an i...

Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic pain syndrome characterized by high levels of psychological distress and alexithymia, a personality disposition affecting emotional self-awareness. The main aim of the present study was to investigate for the first time the relationship between alexithymia and coping strategies on the one hand, and alexithymia and per...

Background: Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic pain syndrome with a high prevalence of alexithymia, a personality disposition that affects emotional self-awareness. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between alexithymia and pain, differentiating between the sensory and affective components of pain experience, in a sample of FM pat...

This study investigated the link between alexithymia and depressive symptoms in Fibromyalgia (FM). 181 FM women and 181 healthy controls (HC) were compared using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. A moderation analysis was performed to examine the moderation effect of the group (FM vs. HC) on the relationsh...

Objectives: The aim of this study was to compare the prevalence of psychosomatic symptoms in patients with fibromyalgia (FM) or rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Methods: Seventy-six consecutive women with FM and 80 with RA without concomitant FM were assessed using the Diagnostic Criteria for Psychosomatic Research (DCPR) interview to evaluate the pre...

To identify factors fostering Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is very important in order to promote PTG itself through specific psychological interventions. To this end, we investigated PTG and its relationship with clinical and psychological variables in a sample of 108 females breast cancer survivors. Results showed that women with higher depressive...

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is the head and neck cancer with the greatest impact on patients’ quality of life. The aim of this explorative study is to investigate the psychological distress, coping strategies and quality of life of NPC patients in the post-treatment observation period. Twenty-one patients disease-free for at least two years were...

Objectives Patients with Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FM) often complain about a cluster of cognitive disorders that strongly interferes with their work and daily life, but the relationship between impaired cognitive functions and self-reported dysfunctions remains unclear. We aimed to investigate the presence of cognitive impairments in FM patients and...