Alessandro Couyoumdjian

Sapienza University of Rome | la sapienza · Department of Psychology

Background: Young adults, aged between 17 and 25 years, experienced a strong impact on both their mental health and well-being due to COVID-19. Indeed, they were simultaneously faced with the normative tasks of their age and stressors associated with the long-lasting COVID-19 pandemic. This study offers further insights into the perceptions of the...

L’autocritica è un fattore transdiagnostico che contribuisce all’esordio e al mantenimento di diversi quadri psicopatologici. Sebbene la letteratura suggerisca come sia centrale la comprensione del ruolo dell’autocritica nei disturbi mentali, non sono attualmente disponibili studi che valutino come questa si declini nei vari quadri sintomatologici...

Purpose in life, which is a central component of the eudaimonic paradigm of well-being, has been sparsely examined in adolescence. This is unfortunate as adolescence is characterised by identity development and is a key period for the onset of mental disorders. To inform future research on well-being and purpose in life in adolescents, we drew fact...

The importance of communication skills for well-being and self-realization is widely accepted. Despite that, research on assertiveness and assertiveness training has declined significantly in recent decades. Consequently, traditional training does not consider the most recent novel technologies used to spread psychological interventions. This study...

Con questo studio s’intende analizzare la relazione tra sintomatologia depressiva, valori professionali e formativi e significato della vita in 299 giovani adulti (Mage = 25.75, SD =2,8) che hanno compilato i seguenti questionari self-report: il Beck Depression Inventory 2 (BDI-II; Beck et al., 1996; che valuta la sintomatologia depressiva), il Val...

Previous research has extensively explored the role of anxiety, disgust, guilt, and shame in obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms, but few studies have investigated anger and associated vengeful motivations, especially during adolescence, when OC symptoms typically onset. This is unfortunate as anger is a key human emotion linked to various aspects o...

The last decades have been characterized by a growing use of imagery-based techniques. A broad range of evidence suggests that they have a significant positive influence on beliefs about the future, in improving specific skills and in purpose-oriented behaviours. Considering the versatility of imaginative techniques, we developed ComunicaBene, a we...

NoiBene is a web-based psychological prevention program for university students. The study compared the efficacy of NoiBene as a self-help intervention (NB-SH), where students carry out the program in autonomy, and as a guided self-help intervention (NB-GSH) that involves the guidance of a Tutor. 303 students were included in the study. Standardize...

The last decades have been characterized by a growing use of imagery-based techniques. A broad range of evidence suggests that they have a significant positive influence on beliefs about the future, in improving specific skills and in purpose-oriented behaviours. Considering the versatility of imaginative techniques, we developed ComunicaBene, a we...

University students’ mental health has become a public health issue since increasingly students report high levels of psychological distress. Mental health difficulties influence students’ lives, such as academic performance, relationships satisfaction, and quality of life. Moreover, different kinds of obstacles often hinder help-seeking behavior....

Road accidents are a major emergency in Europe, and several studies investigating road trauma victims have demonstrated their serious psychological consequences and their incidence related to several serious psychological disorders (e.g., anxiety disorders, depression, psychoactive substance abuse, Acute Stress Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Di...

Sociotropy (anaclitic) and autonomy (introjective) are conceptualised as two personality dimensions that confer vulnerability to depression. According to Blatt and Beck’s theories, sociotropic individuals exhibit distinctive patterns of symptoms such as prominent anxiety, depressed mood, helplessness, crying and somatic concerns, while self-critica...

To reduce the spread of Covid-19, the Italian government imposed a rigid lockdown and, for a whole year, continued to declare stringent rules to curb the community spread. This study provides an overview of university students’ symptomatology and help-seeking behaviour before and during the pandemic. It aims to evaluate the impact of the different...

BACKGROUND To reduce the spread of Covid-19 the Italian government imposed a rigid lockdown and, for a whole year, it kept declaring stringent rules to curb the community spread. The pandemic had a great negative impact on general population mental health, including the one of university students. OBJECTIVE The study provides an overview about sym...

La definizione dell’essere umano come animale sociale, che ritroviamo già in Aristotele (IV sec. a. C.; Politica I, 2, 1253a) e che è oramai parte integrante del linguaggio comune, evidenzia il ruolo centrale che assume, per la sopravvivenza della nostra specie, la capacità di sviluppare sistemi sociali complessi in grado di rendere ogni individuo...

The genetic polymorphisms involved in the physiopathology of binge eating disorder (BED) are currently unclear. This systematic review aims to highlight and summarize the research on polymorphisms that is conducted in the BED. We looked for observational studies where there was a genetic comparison between adults with BED, in some cases also with o...

Mental health problems are very common among university students. NoiBene is an evidence-based intervention for the promotion of well-being and the prevention of psychological distress among university students. NoiBene was tested in two studies. In study 1, a randomized controlled pilot trial was conducted to investigate the efficacy of NoiBene on...

Road crashes are a major social emergency in Europe. In addition to the enormous social costs, they often result in severe psychological distress both for the individuals directly involved and their loved ones. In Italy, no specific psychological first aid and rehabilitation program exists for road crashes victims. For this purpose , ANIACARES, a s...

Road accidents are a major social and public health emergency. The World Health Or- ganization (2017) estimates that 1.2 million people die every year as a result of road accidents, and millions are injured. In addition to physical injury, traffic accidents are often associated with serious psychological distress and emotional disorders. This work...

Background: Cognitive dysfunction affects 40%-65% of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, most often affecting information processing speed and working memory, mediated by the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Objective: Our study aimed to investigate PFC functioning through a task-switching protocol in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) patient...

We tested whether a mirror could enhance the efficacy of a self-compassion manipulation in increasing soothing positive affect and heart rate variability (HRV). Eighty-six participants generated four phrases they would use to soothe and encourage their best friend. Second, they described an episode where they criticized themselves and were assigned...

Anxiety disorders may not only be characterized by specific symptomatology (e.g., tachycardia) in response to the fearful stimulus (primary problem or first-level emotion) but also by the tendency to negatively evaluate oneself for having those symptoms (secondary problem or negative meta-emotion). An exploratory study was conducted driven by the h...

In recent years, many studies have been carried out to identify deficits at different levels of information processing in OCD patients. This appears to be consistent both with OCD symptoms and what patients often complain about (e.g. distraction, memory lapses). From a theoretical point of view, these studies, are consistent with a neurobiological...

Rumination about the past and worries about the future (perseverative cognition) are extremely common, although pervasive and distressing, dysfunctional cognitive processes. Perseverative cognition is not only implicated in psychological health, contributing to mood worsening and psychopathology but, due to its ability to elicit prolonged physiolog...

This study examined the factorial structure, internal consistency, and construct validity of the Italian version of the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-3. The test has been administered in a mixed sample of anxiety disorder patients and non-clinical participants, along with measures of anxiety sensitivity, depression and anxiety. Participants with differ...

Early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) are cognitive patterns resulting from unmet core emotional needs in childhood that have been linked to the development of psychopathology. As depression is a multifaceted phenomenon, we hypothesized that specific dysphoric symptoms would be predicted by different EMSs. Four hundred and fifty-six participants complet...

Early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) are cognitive patterns resulting from unmet core emotional needs in childhood that have been linked to the development of psychopathology. As depression is a multifaceted phenomenon, we hypothesized that specific dysphoric symptoms would be predicted by different EMSs. Four hundred and fifty-six participants complet...

Background: The construct of self-compassion is receiving increased attention due to its strong link to mental health. Nonetheless, many questions concerning its dimensionality and construct validity remain open. Aims: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the factorial structure and construct validity of the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) in a...

Gratitude significantly predicts less depression and anxiety symptoms in general population. Three types of self-relating processes as possible mediators of this relationship were evaluated. Trait gratitude, depression, anxiety, and three forms of self-relating (criticizing, attacking, and reassuring the self) were assessed in 410 Italian participa...

Mind wandering (MW) has recently been associated with both adaptive (e.g., creativity enhancement) and maladaptive (e.g., mood worsening) consequences. This study aimed at investigating whether proneness to MW was prospectively associated with negative health outcomes. At time 0, 21 women, 19 men; mean age = 24.5 (4.9) underwent a 5-min baseline el...

Se una vittima non prova più rabbia, significa che ha perdonato? È davvero sempre possibile il perdono? Quali sono i fattori che ostacolano il processo? E quelli che lo facilitano? Può avere la pratica del perdono delle applicazioni di natura clinica? In questo volume, studiosi di differenti discipline affrontano per la prima volta il tema del perd...

Various authors hold that some emotions (i.e., moral emotions) have the function of orienting people toward ethical actions. In addition to embarrassment, shame and pride, the moral emotion of guilt is believed to affect humans' behavior when they carry out transgressions that violate social and cultural standards. Over the past century, many studi...

Mind wandering (MW) has been defined the brain's default mode of operation. It is a common experience, however, that this process can become maladaptive, and take the form of repetitive thoughts. We aimed to compare the cardiac and cognitive correlates of Perseverative Cognition (PC) and MW. Seventy-three healthy participants were engaged in two re...

Consistent with cognitive views of depression, we aimed to investigate the mediating role of personal goals in the relationship between stressful events and distinct patterns of depressive symptoms in a nonclinical sample. Participants identified a dysphoric episode that occurred in the previous year by reporting the severity of 12 depressive sympt...

This paper examines the state-of-the-art in relation to cognitive-behavioural therapy applied to depressive disorders in the elderly. The research work considered referred to the last thirty years. The review included those studies in which cognitive-behavioural therapy was applied in group and individual settings as a monotherapy or associated wit...

Recent studies have shown the existence of a relationship between sleep and moral judgment. In this study, we investigated whether one night of sleep deprivation affects the ability to judge the appropriateness of moral dilemmas. Forty-eight students had to judge 30 moral dilemmas at test, after a night of home sleep, and another 30 dilemmas at ret...

Sleep deprivation (SD) negatively affects various cognitive performances, but surprisingly evidence about a specific impact of sleep loss on subjective evaluation of emotional stimuli remains sparse. In the present study, we assessed the effect of SD on the emotional rating of standardized visual stimuli selected from the International Affective Pi...

Neural systems of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) involved in executive functions are particularly vulnerable to sleep deprivation (SD). In this study, we investigated whether SD selectively affects specific components of the executive control processes involved in task-switching performance. Two different tasks are performed in rapid and random succes...

Humans have an individual profile of the electroencephalographic power spectra at the 8 to 16Hz frequency during non–rapid eye movement sleep that is stable over time and resistant to experimental perturbations. We tested the hypothesis that this electroencephalographic “fingerprint” is genetically determined, by recording 40 monozygotic and dizygo...

Several studies on cross-modal attention showed that remapping processes between sensory modalities occur in the spatial orienting of attention. One hypothesis that accounts for such links is that spatial attention operates upon representations of common locations in the external space. However, convincing evidence only exists for cross-modal links...

This paper introduces a perspective accounting for errors that may occur as a result of the human interaction with the three-dimensional (3D) space. Particularly, we are interested in errors that are caused by cognitively crossing the boundary between peripersonal and extrapersonal space. Several behavioural, neurophysiological, and neuropsychologi...

Since two recent meta-analyses on sleep changes associated with placebo in clinical trials suggested a beneficial effect of placebo treatments, pointing to a dissociation between subjective and objective measures of sleep, the current experiment was directly aimed to assess the effects of an inert compound, administered with the suggestion that it...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relation between visual hemifields and spatial frames of reference, according to the idea that multiple representations of 3D space exist. Results from two experiments clearly show that an upper visual hemifield advantage only arises when allocentric spatial judgments are required in order to...

The aim of this study was to explore whether the attentional system, as far as an endogenous orienting is concerned, allocates resources along the sagittal plane and whether such a process is affected by, and is likely to be based on, different functional representations of 3D space in the brain. Several models make a main action-based distinction...

Six experiments examined the issue of whether one single system or separate systems underlie visual and auditory orienting of spatial attention. When auditory targets were used, reaction times were slower on trials in which cued and target locations were at opposite sides of the vertical head-centred meridian than on trials in which cued and target...

Within the classical approach by Norman (1981); action slips are essentially due to activation and triggering of a unappropriate schema. The aim of this study was to investigate action slips starting from the consideration that action is always performed in a space. In our hypothesis, spatial frames of reference could be conceptualized as low level...

Spatial cueing is a largely used experimental paradigm to study exogenous attention orienting, both in behavioural and neurological research. In such a paradigm participants are presented a sequence of trials that are assumed to be independent from each other. In each trial a peripheral spatial cue is presented, followed by a target peripheral stim...