Andrea Zagaria

University of Trento | UNITN

The aim of the current study has been to highlight the theoretical precariousness of Psychology. The theoretical precariousness has been evidenced through a review of psychological “core-constructs” whose definitions were thoroughly searched in 11 popular introductory textbooks of psychology edited between 2012 and 2019 and in an APA dictionary of...

Objective The emergence and growth of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) in the behavioral sciences has been characterized as a “scientific revolution” (e.g. Buss, 2020). According to Kuhn's framework, a scientific revolution in a discipline is marked by the emergence of a new, dominant school of thought, which eclipses all the other theories. The aim of...

The current paper aimed to analyze quantitatively the trends of four major schools of thought in scientific Psychology (neuroscience, cognitivism, behaviorism, psychoanalysis) and their intersections, covering the period from 1979 to 2020. We utilized a rigorous methodology across three distinct sources: Mainstream Psychology(MP), Highly Influentia...

Attachment Trauma (AT) is a known clinical heuristic in Psychology. However, different perspectives on it have emerged, leading to heterogeneity and confusion. In pursuit of clarity, this paper aims to navigate the perspectives surrounding AT through an integrative review. The review identifies six distinct lines of research. The initial three, fal...

Despite the wide usage of the concept of Attachment Trauma (AT) in clinics and research, there is a scarcity of proper assessment tools. This work aims to fill this gap by outlining the development and validation of the Adult Attachment Trauma Questionnaire (AATQ). The preliminary item pool covered eight conceptual domains: Conflict, Attachment-rel...

The increasing popularity of the Bayesian approach in Psychology has prompted metascientific efforts to quantify its prevalence. However, despite enduring debates between proponents of Frequentist and Bayesian schools of thought, no systematic comparison of their prominence has been conducted in existing literature. This brief report fills this gap...

The increasing popularity of the Bayesian approach in Psychology has prompted metascientific efforts to quantify its prevalence. However, despite enduring debates between proponents of Frequentist and Bayesian approaches, no systematic comparison of their prominence has been conducted in existing literature. This brief report fills this gap, examin...

Purpose The importance of sociality in psychology and psychotherapy is quite undisputed; however, this construct risks being underestimated in psychiatric nosography. The aim of the review was to assess the relevance of sociality in DSM 5 criteria. Method Sociality-laden criteria of 192 selected DSM categories have been identified through a textua...

In recent times, David Buss (2020) has claimed that Evolutionary Psychology (EP) represents a genuine "scientific revolution," drawing parallels with the Kuhnian concept. This paper aims to empirically examine Buss's assertion by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the prevalence of the evolutionary approach in Psychology. EP (broadly defined) is...

In recent times, David Buss (2020) has claimed that Evolutionary Psychology (EP) represents a genuine "scientific revolution”. This paper aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the prevalence of the evolutionary approach in Psychology. EP (broadly defined) is juxtaposed with its classical counterpart, the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). A...

Attachment Trauma (AT) is a well-known clinical heuristic in Psychology. However, different perspectives on it have emerged, leading to heterogeneity and confusion. In pursuit of clarity, this paper aims to navigate the perspectives surrounding AT through an integrative review (Cronin and George, 2023). The review discerns six distinct lines of res...

The current paper aimed to analyze the trends and prominence of four major schools of thought in scientific Psychology (neuroscience, cognitivism, behaviorism, psychoanalysis) and their intersections, covering the period from 1979 to 2020. We utilized an improved methodology across three distinct sources: mainstream psychology, highly influential j...

Hot topics in Evolutionary Psychology (EP) hold a natural fascination for scholars in the field. However, only one study to date was conducted by Webster, Jonason & Schember (2009) on this subject. The objective of this study is to employ advanced topic modeling techniques to identify prominent topics within EP. A total of 1396 abstracts from the j...

In this presentation, we introduce the evolutionary approach to Psychopathology. We then use the case study of Pedophilia to illustrate the benefits of an evolutionary perspective on mental disorders. Although pedophilia might seem to be the quintessential "anti-evolutionary" condition (sexual attraction to prepubescents appears to defy evolutionar...

Attachment Trauma is a well-known topic in Psychology. However, a conceptual review and a rigorous definition of the term are lacking. The aim of this poster, which is a brief excerpt of a larger ongoing review, is a preliminary step to fill this gap.

The compartmentalization of psychological science and of the profession prevents the progress of the discipline. Compartmentalization is a collateral effect of the impressive scientific, methodological, and technical development of psychology, which has led to the emergence of specialized segments of knowledge and practice that unavoidably tend to...

Bibliometric studies of trends are interesting meta-science applications trying to overcome the shortages of subjective impressions regarding historical evolutions of ideas. Here, we tried to quantify the temporal evolution of Bayesian-informed vs Frequentist-informed works in Psychometrics and Mathematical Psychology. We implemented a Boolean quer...

The article by Wells is a chance to ponder on the different conceptions of culture endorsed by the natural sciences and by the social sciences. The standard definition of culture among biologists/natural scientists usually focuses on transmission of behaviors (e.g. “tradition of socially learned behaviors”), while on the other hand anthropologists...

Does evolutionary psychology (EP) properly account for the sociocultural context? Does it underestimate both the developmental and the relational aspects of the human psyche? Is it instantiated in a mechanistic epistemology? Does it imply determinism or reductionism? The commentaries on our previous target article raised similar questions and we tr...

The aim of this thesis has been to analyze the official definitions of mental disorder (i.e. those routinely used in the Health System to make diagnosis), to demonstrate that they are biological and individual-based. A mental disorder is essentially conceived and measured as a biological phenomenon embedded in an individual. Thanks to a logical an...

Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures (PNES) affect at least 10% of patients seen in tertiary epilepsy centers (Benbadis et al., 2000; Lesser, 1996; O'Brien et al., 2009). Despite widespread evidence, PNES remains underrecognized by many healthcare professionals (Benbadis et al., 2005). Historically labeled as hysteria—removed from the DSM-III in 1980...