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Introduction
Publications
Publications (121)
Background
We describe a collection of themes for a research agenda for personality disorders that was originally formulated for the ESSPD Borderline Congress in 2022.
Methods
Experts with lived and living experience (EE), researchers and clinicians met virtually, exchanged ideas and discussed research topics for the field of personality disorders...
Purpose
Treatment resistance is a significant challenge in addressing eating disorders (EDs). The Autonomous and Controlled Motivation for Treatment Questionnaire (ACMTQ) has been previously validated in ED populations to assess patients’ motivation for treatment. This study aimed to validate the ACMTQ in the Italian language (ACMTQ-ITA) and evalua...
Cyberball, the paradigm developed by Kipling D. Williams and colleagues (2000) to study ostracism, initially counted three experimental conditions: inclusion, exclusion, and overinclusion. The least known of these conditions is overinclusion, a social interaction characterized by excessive social attention (rather than fairness or no attention). Th...
Background
A better characterization of educational processes during psychiatry training is needed, both to foster personal resilience and occupational proficiency.
Methods
An adequate coverage of medical residents at the national level was reached (41.86% of the total reference population, 29 out of 36 training centers—80.55%). Controls were recru...
The perception of social exclusion among patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) could be affected by long-term opioid use. This study explores the emotional and cardiac autonomic responses to an experience of ostracism in a sample of participants with OUD on opioid agonist treatment (OAT). Twenty patients with OUD and twenty healthy controls (HC)...
Background:
Spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) often presents with acute coronary syndrome and underlying pathophysiology involves the interplay between predisposing factors and precipitating stressors, such as emotional and physical triggers. In our study we sought to compare clinical, angiographic and prognostic features in a cohort o...
The "Healthcare workers' wellbeing [Benessere Operatori]" project is an exploratory longitudinal study assessing healthcare workers' mental health at three different time points over a 14-month period during the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected socio-demographic and work-related information and assessed the perceived social support, coping strategie...
Objective:
Transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP) is an empirically supported individualized psychotherapy for patients with borderline personality disorder. This review highlights its development and current status.
Methods:
A review of the theoretical background underpinning TFP and empirical advances in the development of TFP provide perspe...
The Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI) is extensively used in recent empirical literature on pathological narcissism. However, most studies using the PNI are community-based, and no studies have used the PNI to investigate narcissistic presentations in personality disordered patients. This study investigates measurement invariance of the PNI i...
Background:
COVID-19 forced healthcare workers to work in unprecedented and critical circumstances, exacerbating already-problematic and stressful working conditions. The "Healthcare workers' wellbeing (Benessere Operatori)" project aimed at identifying psychological and personal factors, influencing individuals' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic...
The 11th revision of the World Health Organization (WHO) International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) includes a fundamentally new approach to Personality Disorders (PD). ICD-11 is expected to be implemented first in European countries before other WHO member states. The present paper provides an overview of this new ICD-11 model including PD...
Background
Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) feel rejected even when socially included. The pathophysiological mechanisms of this rejection bias are still unknown. Using the Cyberball paradigm, we investigated whether patients with BPD, display altered physiological responses to social inclusion and ostracism, as assessed by ch...
During the last year, the COVID-19 outbreak put all the healthcare workers around the world at risk of physical and psychological sequelae. The general purpose of the present study was to assess the mental health of Italian healthcare workers during the COVID-19 outbreak and to identify high-risk groups. Here, we present results from the baseline a...
Apparent comorbidity between Bipolar Disorder (BD) and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a common condition, but its meaning has not been clarified yet. The present study aimed to evaluate the pattern of occurrence of obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) in the different phases of BD. One hundred and sixty-five BD patients, 62 (37.5%) euthymic,...
Introduction
Effortful control (EC) is the self‐regulatory aspect of temperament that is thought to reflect the efficiency of executive attention (EA). Findings on relationship between EC and performance on EA tasks among adults are still contradictory. This study used a computational approach to clarify whether greater self‐reported EC reflects be...
The study aims to explore the personality patterns of a group of transgender individuals who accessed an Italian gender clinic to undergo gender affirming treatments, by evaluating both dimensional personality domains proposed by the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders and categorical DSM-IV personality disorder (PD) diagnoses. Eighty-seven...
The present research case sought to illustrate how self-regulatory patterns of interpersonal behavior manifest within a rejection sensitive individual at the daily level. Cross-sectional research has demonstrated negative relational outcomes associated with rejection sensitivity, but less attention has been paid to how this manifests in daily relat...
Abstract The objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between cognitive functions and obsessive-compulsive dimension in schizophrenia and a possible moderating effect of schizophrenia symptom dimensions on this association. Sixty-one schizophrenia patients were administered the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, the Yale-Brown...
Few studies assess the role of personality styles in predicting the onset of depression among cardiac patients. This study evaluates whether temperament and character can represent a risk factor for the development of incident first-ever depressive episodes in patients at their first acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Two hundred sixty-seven (72.1%) su...
This study evaluated whether the impairment in cooperation that characterizes individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) can be explained by the difficulty to use emotion regulation strategies and to accurately perceive the fairness of others’ behaviour. Forty-one patients with BPD and forty-one sex and age matched healthy controls (HC)...
In this article, we focus on rejection sensitivity (RS) in adolescents. Although the RS model distinguishes clearly between the emotional (i.e., anger and anxiety) and the cognitive (i.e., expectation of rejection) components, research has rarely examined their unique connection with psychological problems. We argue that considering the three compo...
Objective:
Depression is an established risk factor for acute coronary syndrome (ACS), with an impact on cardiac prognosis; nonetheless, the literature disagrees on the role played by anxiety. No study has evaluated this relationship in a cardiac population with no history of depression and after their first diagnosis of ACS. The aim of this study...
The role of effortful control in performing an executive attention task: a new computational approach
Background: A major challenge in psychopathology research is understanding how psychiatric disturbances relate to underlying normal and abnormal mental processes. In this regard, an important dimension of cognitive and behavioural functioning is E...
Purpose of the review:
To update the recent findings on the influence of personality features on postoperative weight loss in patients undergoing bariatric surgery.
Recent findings:
Several studies investigated the influence of pre-surgical psychological variables on the outcome of bariatric surgery, but the effective role of personality factors...
The relationship between personality and Delusional Disorder in still debated. The present study aimed to evaluate the role of personality features and emotional dispositions on the proneness to delusional beliefs, through the lens of a dimensional approach. 91 outpatients were administered the Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality Disorders,...
Introduction:
Emerging personality organization may play an important role in the psychological adjustment of early adolescents, but research in this area is still limited. The current study evaluated if personality organization moderates the association between rejection sensitivity and adverse psychological outcomes in early adolescence.
Method...
Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is associated with both seeming indifference and hypersensitivity to social feedback. This study evaluated whether rejection sensitivity and empathic difficulties in NPD are accounted for by altered facial emotion recognition (FER). Two-hundred non-clinical individuals self-reported NPD features, rejection se...
Rejection sensitivity (RS) was evaluated as a moderator of the relationship between perceptions of others and interpersonal behavior over the course of a week. Participants (n = 240) were non-clinical young adults who completed a 7-day event-contingent experience sampling study of interpersonal perception and affect. Multilevel linear models indica...
We argue that clinical information related to an object-relations model of personality pathology can be used by untrained and clinically inexperienced students to rate personality-disordered patients on the Level of Personality Functioning Scale (LPFS). To do so, 73 clinically inexperienced undergraduate students were asked to assess personality fu...
The Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) was used to examine effortful control (EC) as a moderator of daily interpersonal behavior. Participants (N = 240) were nonclinical young adults who completed a 7-day event-contingent experience sampling study of interpersonal perception and affect. Multilevel linear models indicated that EC moderated...
Background. Bipolar Disorder is characterised by opposite fluctuations of mood and goal-directed behaviours (i.e. manic and depressive episodes) interspersed with period of stability (i.e. euthymia). Deficit in executive control have been observed both in the prodromal phases of the disorder and in euthymia, suggesting a trait feature. Recent model...
Despite robust findings identifying impairments in interpersonal functioning associated with rejection sensitivity (RS), the object representations (OR) of self in relation to others from which such rejection expectancies and anxieties arise have not been evaluated. Our study was the first effort to evaluate the structural aspects of object represe...
We argue that the series of traits characterizing Borderline Personality Disorder samples do not weigh equally. In this regard, we believe that network approaches employed recently in Personality and Psychopathology research to provide information about the differential relationships among symptoms would be useful to test our claim. To our knowledg...
Network estimation.
(DOCX)
Edge values of the nine symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder in the student (below the diagonal) and clinical (above the diagonal) samples.
(DOCX)
Correlations among the nine symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder in the student sample (below the diagonal) and in the clinical sample (above the diagonal).
(DOCX)
Centrality indices of nine symptoms of the Borderline Personality Disorder in the student and clinical samples.
(DOCX)
Correlations among different centrality measures in the student (below the diagonal) and the clinical (above the diagonal) samples and correlations between the same indices in the two samples (diagonal).
(DOCX)
Confirmatory Factor Analysis.
(DOCX)
Reliabilities and descriptive statistics of the nine BPDCL symptoms for men and women samples.
(DOCX)
This article demonstrates the utility of a theory-guided psychodynamic approach to the assessment of personality and personality pathology based on the object relations model developed by Kernberg (1984). We describe a clinical interview, the Structural Interview (SI; Kernberg, 1984), and also a semistructured approach, the Structured Interview of...
Objective
The relationship between personality and delusional ideation in still debated. The present study was aimed to evaluate the role of personality features and trait affectivity on the severity of delusional beliefs, through the lens of a dimensional approach. In fact, robust evidence suggests that delusional experience presents a dimensional...
Objective
Recent research has suggested a dual impact of obsessive-compulsive dimension on functioning in schizophrenia with a gradual transition from an improving to a worsening effect depending on obsessive-compulsive symptom (OCS) severity (from mild to moderate-severe). Aim of the present study was to investigate whether this varying effect of...
Although the role of emotion in socioeconomic decision making is increasingly recognized, theimpact of specific psychiatric disorders, such as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), on these decisions hasnot been fully elucidated yet (Grecucci et al., 2013). In the present study, 41 patients with BPD (mean age: 37.9±11.6) and 41 matched controls (m...
Psychological factors, including temperament features, may influence the outcome of bariatric surgery (BS). Temperament refers to constitutionally based personality traits that underlie individuals’ responses to environmental stimuli and their capacity to regulate behavior in favor of long-term goals. Thus, variations in temperamental traits (TT) m...
The relationships of personal resources with symptom severity and psychosocial functioning have never been tested systematically in a large sample of people with schizophrenia. We applied structural equation models to a sample of 921 patients with schizophrenia collected in a nationwide Italian study, with the aim to identify, among a large set of...
Background:
Altered intrinsic function of the brain has been implicated in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Nonetheless, imaging studies have yielded inconsistent alterations of brain function. To investigate the neural activity at rest in BPD, we conducted a set of meta-analyses of brain imaging studies performed at rest.
Methods:
A total...
Individuals high in rejection sensitivity (RS) are at risk for experiencing high levels of interpersonal distress, yet little is known about the interpersonal profiles associated with RS. This investigation examined the interpersonal problems, sensitivities, and values associated with RS in 2 samples: 763 multicultural undergraduate students (Study...
Introduction:
A growing literature suggests that obsessive-compulsive (OC) phenomena represent a distinct dimension in schizophrenia, independent of nuclear psychotic symptoms. Nevertheless, the OC psychopathologic profile in schizophrenia, compared with "pure" obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), has not yet been investigated extensively. This st...
Introduction
Depression is an established risk factor for acute coronary syndrome (ACS), nonetheless the mechanisms underlying this association are still unclear and literature disagrees on the role played by anxiety. Moreover, most of the studies included subjects with a long lasting history of heart disease or recurrent depressive episodes that c...
Introduction
Recent studies have underlined the importance of considering the form of thoughts, beyond their content, in order to achieve a better phenomenological comprehension of mental states in mood disorders. The subjective experience of thought overactivation is an important feature of mood disorders that could help in identifying, among pati...
BACKGROUND. Among bariatric surgery evaluation criteria, improvement in quality of life (QoL) surely represents the most important. However, the lack of reliable evaluation models has significantly limited the research in this field. The aim of this study is to prospectively compare QoL after RouxenY gastric bypass (RYGB) and laparoscopic adjusta...
This investigation examined the moderating role of effortful control (EC) in the association between rejection sensitivity (RS) and its subsequent interpersonal distress (IP-distress) on borderline personality disorder (BPD) features. In total, 625 multicultural undergraduates (Study 1) and 562 community international adults (Study 2) completed sca...
In recent years, the pandemic explosion of obesity has led to the definition of a pre-eminent therapeutic role for bariatric surgery, confining physical activity to a success parameter of surgery rather than a primary prevention measure. The aim of this study is to evaluate the role for aerobic physical activity (road running) in strengthening the...
Obsessive Compulsive Symptoms (OCS) and Disorder (OCD) occur frequently in patients with schizophrenia. Nevertheless the impact of OCS/OCD on clinical characteristics and outcome of schizophrenia remains controversial. The aim of the present study is to examine the effect of obsessive-compulsive dimension on symptom expression and functioning in sc...
BACKGROUND: High levels of anhedonia have been found in patients with schizophrenia; specifically they report higher levels of social anhedonia rather than physical anhedonia, and further, in the anticipatory rather than consummatory facets of pleasure. Nonetheless, contrasting results emerged regarding the underlying mechanisms of this deficit. Ba...
Objective:
Alexithymia has been considered both to predispose to depression and to worsen cardiac prognosis after an acute coronary syndrome. Nonetheless, no studies have evaluated its role as a risk factor for incident depression, in patients with acute coronary syndrome.
Methods:
In 251 consecutive patients, the presence of a first-ever depres...
It has been suggested that Type D Personality is a risk factor for acute coronary syndrome (ACS) and the DS14 has been developed for its assessment. However, some of the items on the DS14 seem to evaluate depressive symptoms rather than personality features. Therefore, the present study aims to verify whether an overlap exists between the construct...
Introduction: Among bariatric surgery evaluation criteria, improvement in quality of life (QoL) surely represents the most important. However, the lack of reliable evaluation models has significantly limited the research in this field. The aim of this study is to prospectively compare QoL after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) and laparoscopic adjus...
Increasing evidence suggests that individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) might feel rejected even when socially included by others. A psychological mechanism accounting for this response bias could be that, objective social inclusion violates BPD patients’ underlying implicit needs of “extreme” inclusion. Thus, this study investigat...
The association between depression and acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is well-established and the first seems to impact meaningfully on cardiac prognosis. Nonetheless only a few studies have evaluated the relationship between incident depression, defined as new cases in patients with no history of depression, and ACS. Therefore the aim of this study...
The impact of obsessive-compulsive symptoms on functioning in schizophrenia is still debated. This study investigated the relationship between OC symptoms and functioning along a severity gradient of obsessive-compulsive dimension. Sixty patients affected by schizophrenia completed the SCID-IV, the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, the Yale-Bro...
In schizophrenia, a better level of functioning has been generally associated with symptomatic remission. However, this association has been supported by cross-sectional studies or by studies with a short follow-up period. Forty-eight patients with schizophrenia were evaluated by the Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale and the Social and Occupatio...
This work aims to further validate the object-relations-based model of personality pathology assessment, evaluating the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Inventory of Personality Organization (IPO), a self-report instrument for the assessment of personality organization according to O. Kernberg's model of personality pathology....
Background:
High levels of anhedonia have been found in patients with schizophrenia; specifically they report higher levels of social anhedonia rather than physical anhedonia, and further, in the anticipatory rather than consummatory facets of pleasure. Nonetheless, contrasting results emerged regarding the underlying mechanisms of this deficit. B...
This study examined whether personality disorders (PDs) are associated with alexithymic features at varying levels of comorbid psychopathology distress. 167 psychiatric outpatients completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) and the General Severity Index (GSI) of the SCL90-revised. Bootstrapping analyses were performed to test whether the PD/ale...
