Angelo Gemignani

• MD, PhD
• Head of Department at University of Pisa

Sleep is a fundamental physiological process for maintaining physical health, cognitive function and overall wellbeing. For athletes, its restorative properties are essential for optimal recovery and performance. Emerging evidence highlights the intricate relationship between circadian rhythms, recovery processes and sport‐specific performance outc...

Two key steps in addressing the vaccination hesitancy issue are assessing the population’s attitudes toward vaccination and making measures’ availability as broad as possible (not limited to English-speaking populations). To reach the latter goal, we adapted the Vaccination Attitudes Examination (VAX) Scale to the Italian context. This scale has th...

Insomnia disorder affects about 10% of the global population, representing a major health concern. Despite the availability of evidence‐based treatments, the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning this disorder remain poorly understood. Recently, the investigation of the less than 1 Hz oscillations (commonly termed slow oscillations), a hallmark o...

This study introduces the FOUndatioNal trait-BaseD Characterization (FOUND) questionnaire, specifically developed to assess stable characteristics of perceptual, cognitive, and emotional domains critical for effective performance in mediated settings. By submitting the questionnaire to 302 Italian individuals and performing factor analysis, four re...

Background: Telemanipulation enables the execution of remote operations using specialized tools, often under reduced sensory input, such as lack of haptic feedback. With practice, these tools can become extensions of the user's body, a phenomenon known as embodiment, thereby enhancing telepresence-the perception of being present at the action site....

Volunteers were asked to participate in two experimental sessions separated by at least two weeks. In one session they were asked to undergo the vr-BAT, and in the other one the traditional version with a real spider (real-BAT): the order of the sessions was randomized. During each stage of the task, volunteers – even if invited to get as close as...

Objective To investigate dispositional mindfulness (DM), interoceptive awareness (AI), and the occurrence of panic-agoraphobic spectrum signs and symptoms in a non-clinical population. Methods The study involved a general population sample ( n = 141), aged between 18 and 40, evaluated with the Panic-Agoraphobic Spectrum Self-Report Lifetime Versio...

The human diving reflex (DR), an innate defensive reflex triggered during periods of apnea, concurrently activates both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system to regulate physiology against challenging demands. Despite pupil dilation and constriction being antagonistically controlled by the two autonomic branch...

Objectives: The mental health and well-being of university students are crucial areas of research due to their significant impact on academic success, personal development, and overall life satisfaction. Since previous research consistently shows that the stress related to academic challenges can significantly affect mental health, the study aims t...

Background The transition into menopause marks a significant stage in a woman’s life, indicating the end of reproductive capability. This period, encompassing perimenopause and menopause, is characterized by declining levels of estrogen and progesterone, leading to various symptoms such as hot flashes, sleep disturbances, sexual dysfunction, and mo...

It is increasingly recognized that interoceptive ability, the capacity to detect, interpret, and consciously integrate signals related to the physiological condition of the body, is central to emotion experience and regulation. Interoceptive ability can be trained and improved through mind–body interventions. This article attempts to provide an int...

Chronic pain (CP) affects about 30% of the global population and poses significant challenges to individuals and healthcare systems worldwide. The interactions between physiological, psychological, and social factors are crucial in the onset and development of CP conditions. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interv...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a leading cause of dementia, with early detection crucial for effective intervention. Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a promising tool for identifying AD-related biomarkers in neuroimaging and cognitive assessments. We reviewed literature from peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings using PubMed, focusing...

Background/Objectives. Problematic Internet uUse (PIU) is a multifaceted syndrome characterized by excessive or poorly controlled preoccupations, urges, or behaviors regarding Internet use leading to significant impairments in daily life and mental health. Previous research has separately related PIU to loneliness and dissociation, both in adults a...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of neuromodulation techniques, including transcranial direct current stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and deep brain stimulation, on the treatments of nicotine dependence. Specifically, our objective was to assess the existing evidence by conducting an umbrella review of...

How relevant are specific perceptual features for the quick categorization of evolutionary-relevant stimuli? We used augmented reality to measure the nature/nurture role in processing hairiness of spiders. A sample of 75 more-or-less spiderfearful participants was administered emotionally-subliminal holograms representing phobic (hairy or glabrous...

Objective Insomnia can be a contributing factor, a comorbid disorder, or a transdiagnostic element to several mental disorders, including mood disorders (MDs). A recent meta-analysis has already shown the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) for insomnia that is comorbid with MDs. This work aimed to systematically review data on ph...

Embodiment (the sensation that arises when the properties of an external instrument are processed as if they are the attributes of one's own biological body) and (tele)presence (the sensation of being fully engaged and immersed in a location other than the physical space occupied by one's body) sustain the perception of the physical self and potent...

Acromegaly is a rare endocrine syndrome characterized by unrestrained growth hormone (GH) secretion from a GH-secreting pituitary neuroendocrine tumor (PitNET). Data on sleep disorders are scanty and mainly linked to Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome (OSAS). This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of insomnia and sleep quality in a cohort of pat...

Climate change is intrinsically complex and demands a certain degree of abstraction. However, different individuals report a wide range and degree of tangible and sensory experiences of climate change. As perceptual and sensory awareness of climate change has important consequences for the promotion of sustainable behaviors, pro-climate policies, a...

Introduction Alzheimer’s disease (AD) stands as the most prevalent form of dementia. Alzheimer’s Disease is acknowledged to have a complex origin, a gradual neurodegenerative progression, and a wide-ranging clinical profile marked primarily by progressive memory loss, cognitive decline, and various functional impairments that significantly diminish...

Introduction Engaging in moderate physical activity holds a vital role in our daily lives, serving as both a means of social recreation and a fundamental contributor to physical and mental wellbeing. It is also worth noting that such activity can potentially produce mood-enhancing effects by promoting neurogenesis and neuronal adaptability. Intrigu...

Introduction: Suicide is a widespread problem, with risk factors still a challenge. The aim was to assess correlations among insomnia, circadian rhythm, and inflammatory markers in individuals who attempted suicide. Materials and methods: Consecutive patients hospitalised following an attempted suicide, were assessed. Psychiatric diagnosis (DSM-...

This exploratory study aimed to investigate the relationship between interoceptive sensibility and quality of consciousness in individuals with insomnia disorder, in order to understand how the modulation of internal states may contribute to modifying the experience of consciousness during sleep difficulties. A total of 37 patients with insomnia di...

Introduction The prevailing theories of consciousness consider the integration of different sensory stimuli as a key component for this phenomenon to rise on the brain level. Despite many theories and models have been proposed for multisensory integration between supraliminal stimuli (e.g., the optimal integration model), we do not know if multisen...

Purpose of Review Mood disorders tend to be recurrent, chronic, and disabling, caused by a complex interplay of factors. Within this context, sleep, which is crucial for mental health, may contribute to mental disorders, including mood disorders. Sleep disturbances can serve as risk factors for the onset, exacerbation, and relapse of mood disorders...

The positive effects of meditation on human wellbeing are indisputable, ranging from emotion regulation improvement to stress reduction and present-moment awareness enhancement. Changes in brain activity regulate and support these phenomena. However, the heterogeneity of meditation practices and their cultural background, as well as their poor cate...

Purpose of Review Insomnia can act as a precipitating factor, a comorbid disorder, or a transdiagnostic element for many mental disorders. The stress system’s hyperactivation has been identified as the key factor in insomnia that contributes to mental disorders. It is possible that insomnia may utilize the orexinergic pathway as a link with psychop...

Agency is central to remote actions, and it may enhance skills learning due to a partial overlap between brain structures and networks, the promotion of confidence towards a telemanipulator, and the feeling of congruence of the motor choice to the motor plan. We systematically reviewed studies aiming to verify the role of agency in improving learni...

Insomnia disorder may affect mental health, increasing suicidal risk. Targeting insomnia is crucial in the clinical practice. Sixty‐six consecutive patients with insomnia disorder according with the DSM‐5‐TR criteria were treated with the dual orexin receptor antagonist, daridorexant 50 mg. Baseline (T0), 1 month (T1) and 3 month (T2) evaluations w...

While insomnia symptoms may be a risk factor for mental disturbances, few studies evaluated “Insomnia Disorder” and its relationship with perinatal psychopathology. Pregnant women were recruited during their last routine assessment before being hospitalized for delivery during the 3rd trimester at the Gynaecological Unit of the University Hospital...

One significant obstacle to gaining a widespread awareness of the ongoing climate change is the nature of its manifestations in relation to our perception: climate change effects are gradual, distributed, and sometimes seemingly contradictory. These features result in a lag in collective climate action and sometimes foster climate skepticism and cl...

We investigated if interoceptive deficits could be the link between alexithymic traits and eating spectrum manifestations in a non-clinical sample. One-hundred sixty-one young adults (mean age: 23.2 ± 2.4 years) were evaluated with the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20), the Interoceptive Accuracy Scale (IAS), the Interoceptive Confusion Questio...

Motivationally significant events like oddball stimuli elicit both a characteristic event-related potential (ERPs) known as P300 and a set of autonomic responses including a phasic pupil dilation. Although co-occurring, P300 and pupil-dilation responses to oddball events have been repeatedly found to be uncorrelated, suggesting separate origins. We...

Background Persons with specific phobias typically generalize the dangerousness of the phobic animal to all members of its species, possibly as a result of malfunctioning brain circuitry normally providing quick and dirty identification of evolutionary-relevant stimuli. An objective assessment of which perceptual features make an animal more or les...

Sleep is a physiological process characterized by a crucial interaction between behavioural and neurobiological aspects, thereby directly influencing mental functionality. The present work aims at providing an overview of the structure, topological distribution, and functions of the sleep slow oscillation (< 1 Hz), and at attempting to unveil how t...

Background: Well-being encompasses physical, mental, social, and cultural aspects. Sleep quality and pathologies are among the objective conditions jeopardising it. Chronic insomnia, inflammatory-based diseases, and mood disorders often occur in a single cluster, and inflammation can negatively impact sleep, potentially harming well-being. Some evi...

Various reviews and meta‐analyses have shown the positive effects of mindfulness‐based interventions (MBIs) on the mental health of cancer patients and survivors. Some studies have also investigated the impact of MBIs on physiological markers of health in oncology, but a systematic review has not been conducted in this field. The current paper aims...

Despite the clinical relevance of the interaction between emotionally-laden stimuli and their context, little is known about it. We used virtual reality (VR) to create an experimental setting capable to measure subjective, behavioral and psychophysiological correlates of the conscious access – and subsequent recognition – of phobic (spiders), gener...

Insomnia is the most reported sleep disorder in industrialized countries, affecting, in the chronic form, around 10% of the European population. In Italy, such a percentage seems to be even higher. Although insomnia can be an independent disorder, it is frequently described as comorbid condition and may precipitate, exacerbate, or prolong a broad r...

Background: Patients' adherence to medical prescription during pre-and post-liver transplant phases is crucial to prevent treatment inefficacy. Literature has highlighted the urge of performing a psychological characterization to prevent post-intervention relapses and to impede treatment non-adherence behavior. The aim of this study is to define an...

Objective: A significant body of research has suggested that the contraction of SARS-CoV-2 may cause memory impairment, even in the months following recovery. In this regard, studies suggest that COVID-19 predominantly targets structures and cortices within the temporal lobe, and the hippocampus, a critical brain structure for memory and spatial na...

Objective: Prior research has suggested a possible connection between vaccination and manifestations of Sickness Behavior; however, a need remains to first delve deeper into this association and second examine how Interoceptive Awareness and emotional factors may modulate individuals' perceptions of their health status post vaccination. Method:...

Sensory Substitution (SS) allows the elaboration of information via non preferential sensory modalities. This phenomenon occurs in robotic-assisted surgery (RAS), in which haptic feedback is lacking. It has been suggested that SS could sustain surgeons’ proficiency by means of visual clues for inferring tactile information, that also promotes the f...

Insomnia disorder signifies a major public health concern. The development of neuroimaging techniques has permitted to investigate brain mechanisms at a structural and functional level. The present systematic review aims at shedding light on functional, structural, and metabolic substrates of insomnia disorder by integrating the available published...

Purpose of Review While sleep serves important regulatory functions for mental health, sleep disturbances, in particular insomnia, may contribute to mental disorders. Since insomnia symptoms are frequent during the perinatal period, the aim of this work is to systematically review the potential association between perinatal insomnia and maternal an...

Author contributions: Conceptuali-zation, M.M. and C.P.; methodology, M.M., C.P., and L.P.; validation, C.C., A.G., G.P., G.O., and D.M.; analyses, M.M., and L.P.; writing and original draft preparation, M.M., C.P., and L.P.; Abstract Objective: Alexithymic traits are associated with the difficulty of perceiving 'non-affective interoceptive signals...

Objective: The present study explores, retrospectively, the link between anti-vaccination attitude and vaccination intentions and extends this relationship to the effect of media consumption style on attitude. Method: Generalized linear mixed-models were used to estimate vaccination intentions (related to each of the four available vaccines at the...

Introduction Mood disorders are complex illnesses possibly resulting from the interaction of genetic, physiological, psychological, and environmental factors.Within this framework, a role for early life stressors has been proposed. Although this association is probably not specific to Bipolar Disorders BDs, with early life stressors predisposing to...

Suicidal risk in mothers is a public health priority. Risk factors include biological, psychological and psychosocial factors. Among the biological factors, the role of sleep disturbances as potential contributors to increased suicidal risk during the peripartum period is becoming apparent. To explore this further, we conducted a systematic review...

Introduction The false consensus effect consists of an overestimation of how common a subject opinion is among other people. This research demonstrates that individual endorsement of questions may be predicted by estimating peers’ responses to the same question. Moreover, we aim to demonstrate how this prediction can be used to reconstruct the indi...

Backgrounds: The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen a major shift in recent years due to the development of new Machine Learning (ML) models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT). GPT has achieved previously unheard-of levels of accuracy in most computerized language processing tasks and their chat-based variations. Aim: The...

Patients with Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) exposed to traumatic reminders show hyperreactivity in brain areas (e.g., amygdala) belonging or related to the Innate Alarm System (IAS), allowing the rapid processing of salient stimuli. Evidence that IAS is activated by subliminal trauma-reminders could shed a new light on the factors precipita...

Sleep changes significantly throughout the human lifespan. Physiological modifications in sleep regulation, in common with many mammals (especially in the circadian rhythms), predispose adolescents to sleep loss until early adulthood. Adolescents are one-sixth of all human beings and are at high risk for mental diseases (particularly mood disorders...

Effective communication between the doctor and the patient is considered the core element within the clinical care setting, as it can contribute to greater understanding of medical information, resulting in a significant level of engagement, awareness, general competence, and empowerment of the individual, which is personally involved in the decisi...

Backgrounds: The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen a major shift in recent years due to the development of new Machine Learning (ML) models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) and AI which are progressively becoming part our everyday lives. GPT has achieved previously unheard-of levels of accuracy in most computerized lang...

Psychological inflexibility is related to depressive symptoms through the ‘ruminative response style’ (RR) and ‘cognitive fusion’ (CF). We aimed at exploring whether university students were more exposed to CF, RR and depressive symptoms because of their intellectual performance than non-university students of the same age. We compared university s...

Insomnia is a stress-related sleep disorder conceptualised within a diathesis-stress framework, which it is thought to result from predisposing factors interacting with precipitating stressful events that trigger the development of insomnia. Among predisposing factors genetics and epigenetics may play a role. A systematic review of the current evid...

Supplementary Appendix of the published MS

Insomnia disorder is considered as a stress-related disorder associated with hyperarousal, stress and emotion dysregulation and the instability of the 'flip-flop' switch system. The orexinergic system is well known for its key role in sleep and arousal processes but also in the allostatic system regulating stress and emotions and may thus be of maj...

There exist no objective markers for tinnitus or tinnitus disorders, which complicates diagnosis and treatments. The combination of EEG with sophisticated classification procedures may reveal biomarkers that can identify tinnitus and accurately differentiate different levels of distress experienced by patients. EEG recordings were obtained from 129...

Considering the growing interest in the possible effects of internet’s addiction on adoles-cent’s mental health, this study aimed at exploring the psychological correlates of social media and internet problematic use during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic. A cross-sectional study was conducted in a sample of secondary school students (N = 2...

Introduction Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by recurrent distressing thoughts and repetitive behaviors, or mental rituals performed to reduce anxiety. Recent neurobiological techniques have been particularly convincing in suggesting that cortico-striatal-thalamic-cortico (CSTC) circuits, including orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) an...

Accidents at work are a major concern because of their social and economic impact. The causes are highly variable and often linked to risk behaviors that could be avoided, of which substance use is a prime example. The aim of this paper was to meta-analytically review the scientific literature on substance intake and its link to work-related accide...

Background Climate Change is a global issue which touches the lives of all human beings, each with different outlooks and motivations. The high degree of complexity which emerges from the involvement of such a large number of people might be better understood through the lenses of their individual differences. Methods We performed a pre-registered...

Emotion regulation is an important aspect of psychological functioning that influences subjective experience and moderates emotional responses throughout the lifetime. Adaptive responses to stressful life events depend on the positive interaction between explicit and implicit emotion regulation strategies, such as mindfulness and defense mechanisms...

The investigation of the physiological and pathological processes involved in fear perception is complicated due to the difficulties in eliciting and measuring fear's complex construct. This study proposes a novel approach to inducing and measuring subjective fear and its physiological correlates by combining virtual reality (VR) with a mixed-effec...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a health priority, which worldwide, mainly affects women. The consequences of IPV include several psychophysiological effects. These range from altered levels of hormones and neurotrophins to difficulties in emotion regulation and cognitive impairment. Mounting evidence from preclinical studies has shown that envi...

Total sleep deprivation (TSD) has a major impact on sustained attention as reported by previous studies that have investigated effects of TSD, however by using classical neuropsychological tests that lack ecological validity. To study the effects of TSD on daily-life activities, we carried out an ecological evaluation of sustained attention using...

Objective This proof-of-concept paper provides evidence to support machine learning (ML) as a valid alternative to traditional psychometric techniques in the development of short forms of longer parent psychological tests. ML comprises a variety of feature selection techniques that can be efficiently applied to identify the set of items that best r...

Obesity represents one of the wellness diseases concurring to increase the incidence of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. One of the main perpetuating factors of obesity is food craving, which is characterized by an urgent desire to eat a large and various amount of food, regardless of calories requirement or satiety signals, and it mi...

Anger has always been included in the repertoire of basic emotions. In 5- to 12-month-old infants viewing facial expressions of happiness, fear, and anger, the right fusiform face area, which is related to N290 event-related potentials (ERP) component, was found to be larger in amplitude in response to fearful and happy faces than to angry ones, wh...

We administered tactile, visual or visuotactile stimuli below- or above-threshold (subliminal or supraliminal, respectively) while measuring cortical activity (through EEG) and just noticeable differences. We found evidence of the integration of subliminal stimuli, an observation that contradicts current theories of consciousness