Cristina Scarpazza

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Verified

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associate Professor at University of Padua

Within precision psychiatry, there is a growing interest in normative models given their ability to parse heterogeneity. While they are intuitive and informative, the technical expertise and resources required to develop normative models may not be accessible to most researchers. Here we present Neurofind, a new freely available tool that bridges t...

In recognising emotions expressed by others, one can make use of both embodied cognition and mechanisms that do not necessarily require activation of the limbic system, such as evoking from memory the meaning of morphological features of the observed face. Instead, we believe that the recognition of the authenticity of an emotional expression is pr...

Predictive coding mechanisms facilitate detection and perceptual recognition, thereby influencing recognition judgements, and, broadly, perceptual decision-making. The anterior insula (AI) has been shown to be involved in reaching a decision about discrimination and recognition, as well as to coordinate brain circuits related to reward-based learni...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is one of the most serious and incapacitating mental diseases that can result from trauma exposure. The exact prevalence of this disorder is not known as the literature provides very different results, ranging from 2.5% to 74%. The aim of this umbrella review is to provide an estimation of PTSD prevalence and to...

Predictive processing (PP) stands as a predominant theoretical framework in neuroscience. While some efforts have been made to frame PP within a cognitive domain‐general network perspective, suggesting the existence of a “prediction network,” these studies have primarily focused on specific cognitive domains or functions. The question of whether a...

Despite research has massively focused on how emotions conveyed by faces are perceived, the perception of emotions’ authenticity is a topic that has been surprisingly overlooked. Here, we present the Emotion Authenticity Recognition (EAR) test, a test specifically developed using dynamic stimuli depicting authentic and posed emotions to evaluate th...

In this study, we propose an approach to detect deception during investigative interviews by integrating response latency and error analysis with the unexpected question technique. Sixty participants were assigned to an honest (n = 30) or deceptive group (n = 30). The deceptive group was instructed to memorize the false biographical details of a fi...

Introduction Autobiographical memory is the capacity to recollect memories of personally experienced events. The detection of such memories plays a key role in criminal trials. Among behavioral memory-detection methods, the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) has gained popularity for its flexibility and suitability for forensic appli...

Simple Summary Humans have the amazing ability to make thousands of different facial expressions due to the existence of two different brain pathways for facial expressions: The Voluntary Pathway, which controls intentional expressions, and the Involuntary Pathway, which is activated for spontaneous expressions. These two pathways could also differ...

In this study, we ran a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies to pinpoint the neural regions that are commonly activated across space, time, and numerosity, and we tested the existence of gradient transitions among these magnitude representations in the brain. Following PRISMA guidelines, we included in the meta-analysis 112 experiments (for space...

Our representations of the future are processed in the service of several different cognitive functions, including episodic future thinking, prospective memory, and temporal discounting. The present meta-analysis used the Activation Likelihood Estimation method to understand whether there is a core network underlying future-oriented cognition and t...

Humans can recombine thousands of different facial expressions. This variability is due to the ability to voluntarily or involuntarily modulate emotional expressions, which, in turn, depends on the existence of two anatomically separate pathways. The Voluntary (VP) and Involuntary (IP) pathways mediate the production of posed and spontaneous facial...

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...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is one of the most serious and incapacitating mental diseases that can result from trauma exposure. However, despite its relevance, there is still considerable confusion and debate surrounding its diagnosis. The aim of this umbrella review is to clarify the overall prevalence of PTSD. Furthermore, the study exam...

While approaching celebrations for the 150 years of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”, scientists’ conclusions on emotion expression are still debated. Emotion expression has been traditionally anchored to prototypical and mutually exclusive facial expressions (e.g., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). However...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1028814.].

Idiopathic and acquired pedophilia are two different disorders with two different etiologies. However, the differential diagnosis is still very difficult, as the behavioral indicators used to discriminate the two forms of pedophilia are underexplored, and clinicians are still devoid of clear guidelines describing the clinical and neuroscientific in...

Sexual offenses are a great concern worldwide due to the devastating physical and psychological consequences the victims of such crimes often experience. It is an important task to investigate potential mechanisms that may underlie sexual offending and predispose an individual for such antisocial behavior. Advanced techniques in neuroscience are in...

The functional specialization of the ventral stream in Perception and the dorsal stream in Action is the cornerstone of the leading model proposed by Goodale and Milner in 1982. This model is based on neuropsychological evidence and has been a matter of debate for almost three decades, during which the dual-visual stream hypothesis has received muc...

Pragmatics, defined as the ability to integrate language and context to communicate effectively, may be impaired in Multiple Sclerosis (MS). We present the case of a patient with active secondary progressive MS who, after a first neuropsychological assessment that evidenced only a slight pragmatic impairment, suffered a sudden worsening of her clin...

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...

Facial expressions are among the most powerful signals for human beings to convey their emotional states. Indeed, emotional facial datasets represent the most effective and controlled method of examining humans’ interpretation of and reaction to various emotions. However, scientific research on emotion mainly relied on static pictures of facial exp...

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...

The functional specialization of the ventral stream in Perception and the dorsal stream in Action is the cornerstone of the leading model proposed by Goodale and Milner in 1982. This model is based on neuropsychological evidence and has been a matter of debate for almost three decades, during which the dual-visual stream hypothesis has received muc...

The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) is a brain area that plays a critical role in a variety of cognitive functions. Although different theoretical proposals tried to explain the ubiquitous role of rTPJ, recent evidence suggests that rTPJ may be a fundamental cortical region involved in different kinds of predictions. This systematic review ai...

Background and Hypothesis Schizophrenia is increasingly understood as a disorder of brain dysconnectivity. Recently, graph-based approaches such as graph convolutional network (GCN) have been leveraged to explore complex pairwise similarities in imaging features among brain regions, which can reveal abstract and complex relationships within brain n...

In recent years, research on interoceptive abilities (i.e., sensibility, accuracy, and awareness) and their associations with emotional experience has flourished. Yet interoceptive abilities in alexithymia—a personality trait characterized by a difficulty in the cognitive interpretation of emotional arousal, which impacts emotional experience—remai...

Pragmatics is the ability to integrate language in context and to communicateeffectively. This skill is essential in many aspects of communication in daily life, both incomprehension and in production, to understand the speaker’s intended meaning andto convey a message adequately. Recent studies showed that pragmatics may beimpaired in Multiple Scl...

The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) is a brain area that plays a critical role in a variety of cognitive functions. Although many different theoretical proposals tried to explain the ubiquitous role of rTPJ, recent sources of evidence seem to suggest that rTPJ may be a fundamental cortical region related to different kinds of predictions, eas...

The reliance of number processing on sensorimotor mechanisms involved in hand action has been extensively documented by behavioural studies. Nonetheless, where and how the computations of number and hand action interact in the brain has received limited attention. In this study we investigated the brain networks underlying symbolic number compariso...

Following publication of the original article [1], the authors reported a typesetting error in the citations in the Discussion section. The following two paragraphs (paragraph 9 and 10 in the Discussion section) have been corrected to reflect citation [32, 33] respectively. “Thus, aging-related characteristics, which have been proposed to explain s...

The rise of machine learning has unlocked new ways of analysing structural neuroimaging data, including brain age prediction. In this state-of-the-art review, we provide an introduction to the methods and potential clinical applications of brain age prediction. Studies on brain age typically involve the creation of a regression machine learning mod...

Pedophilia is a disorder of public concern because of its association with child sexual offense and recidivism. Previous neuro-imaging studies of potential brain abnormalities underlying pedophilic behavior, either in idiopathic or acquired (i.e., emerging following brain damages) pedophilia, led to inconsistent results. This study sought to explor...

In the last decades, research has claimed facial micro-expressions are a reliable means to detect deception. However, experimental results showed that trained and naïve human judges observing facial micro-expressions can distinguish liars from truth-tellers with an accuracy just slightly above the chance level. More promising results recently came...

Efficient inhibitory control is vital. However, environmental cues can influence motor control especially in an emotional context. One common task to measure inhibitory control is the stop-signal task (SST), which asks participants to respond to go stimuli knowing that on some trials a stop signal will be presented, requiring them to inhibit their...

Normative modelling is an emerging method for quantifying how individuals deviate from the healthy populational pattern. Several machine learning models have been implemented to develop normative models to investigate brain disorders, including regression, support vector machines and Gaussian process models. With the advance of deep learning techno...

Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) severity seems to be influenced by genetic background, sex, age, and presence of specific comorbidities. So far, little attention has been paid to sex-specific variations of demographic, clinical, and laboratory features of COVID-19 patients referred to the same hospital in the two consecutive pandem...

Facial expressions are among the most powerful signals for human beings to convey their emotional states. Indeed, emotional facial datasets represent the most effective and controlled method of examining humans' interpretationof and reaction to various emotions. However, the scientific research on emotion mainly relied on static pictures of facial...

Background: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) severity seems to be influenced by genetic background, sex, age, and presence of specific comorbidities. So far, little attention has been paid to sex-specific variations of demographic, clinical and laboratory features of COVID-19 patients referred to the same hospital in the two consecutive pandemic...

Idiopathic and acquired paedophilia are two different disorders with different aetiology, neural basis, modus operandi, and possible treatments. In this chapter, these differences will be summarized and the legal implications for punishment will be discussed for both forms of paedophilia. We conclude that, based on our current scientific knowledge...

Brain morphology varies across the ageing trajectory and the prediction of a person's age using brain features can aid the detection of abnormalities in the ageing process. Existing studies on such “brain age prediction” vary widely in terms of their methods and type of data, so at present the most accurate and generalisable methodological approach...

Criminal behavior is a clinical feature of the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), ranging from socially inappropriate behavior and minor offenses (such as shoplifting, driving-related violations, housebreaking, trespassing) to the more extreme acts of sex crimes and violence. To our knowledge, no homicide case involving bvFTD is...

A prominent body of literature indicates that insanity evaluations, which are intended to provide influential expert reports for judges to reach a decision “beyond any reasonable doubt,” suffer from a low inter-rater reliability. This paper reviews the limitations of the classical approach to insanity evaluation and the criticisms to the introducti...

Insanity assessment requires the evaluation of the psychopathological condition that underlies the mens rea. Psychopathological evaluation may be quite challenging due to (i) absence of biomarkers; (ii) low inter-rater reliability; (iii) presence of cognitive bias. This intrinsic low reliability of forensic psychiatric diagnosis does impact on insa...

The risk of infection associated with immunomodulatory or immunosuppressive disease-modifying drugs (DMDs) in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) has been increasingly addressed in recent scientific literature. A modified Delphi consensus process was conducted to develop clinically relevant, evidence-based recommendations to assist physicians wit...

Background: Patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) are at increased risk of infection. Vaccination can mitigate these risks but only if safe and effective in MS patients, including those taking disease-modifying drugs. Methods: A modified Delphi consensus process (October 2017–June 2018) was used to develop clinically relevant recommendations for m...

According to the ATOM (A Theory Of Magnitude), formulated by Walsh more than fifteen years ago, there is a general system of magnitude in the brain that comprises regions, such as the parietal cortex, shared by space, time and other magnitudes. The present meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies used the Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) method...

Background Patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) are at increased risk of infection. Vaccination can mitigate these risks but only if safe and effective in MS patients, including those taking disease-modifying drugs. Methods A modified Delphi consensus process (October 2017–June 2018) was used to develop clinically relevant recommendations for mak...

Discontinuation of natalizumab in patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) at risk of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) is associated with disease reactivation. Forty-two RRMS patients, who switched from an extended interval dose (EID) of natalizumab to ocrelizumab, underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cl...

Eye-blink is a sensitive index of cognitive load and some studies have reported that it can be a useful cue for detecting deception. However, it is difficult to apply in the real forensic scenario as very complex techniques to record eye blinking are usually needed (e.g., electrooculography, eye tracker technology). In this paper, we propose a new...

Background: Pneumonia with severe respiratory failure represents the principal cause of death in COVID-19, where hyper-inflammation plays an important role in lung damage. An effective treatment aiming at reducing the inflammation without preventing virus clearance is thus urgently needed. Tocilizumab, an anti-soluble IL-6 receptor monoclonal antib...

Objective: Pedophilia is a disorder of public concern because of its association with child sexual offense and recidivism. Previous neuroimaging studies identified inconsistent brain abnormalities underlying pedophilic behavior both in idiopathic and acquired (i.e., emerging following brain damage) pedophilia. This study sought to explore the neura...

Background: Pedophilia is a disorder of public concern because of its association with child sexual offense and recidivism. Previous neuroimaging studies identified inconsistent brain abnormalities underlying pedophilic behavior both in idiopathic and acquired (i.e., emerging following brain damage) pedophilia. This study sought to explore the neur...

Insanity is a distinctive element of criminal law because it brings together two very different disciplines, psychiatry and psychology on the one hand and the law on the other. It might strongly benefit from the introduction of structural neuroimaging, that, however, had so far a limited translational impact. Brain imaging purports to demonstrate f...

Background Machine learning (ML) can distinguish cases with psychotic disorder from healthy controls based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data but it is not yet clear which MRI metrics are the most informative for case-control ML, or how ML algorithms relate to the underlying biology. Methods We analysed multi-modal MRI data from two independ...

Background: Pneumonia with respiratory failure represents the main cause of death in COVID-19, where hyper inflammation plays an important role in lung damage. This study aims to evaluate if tocilizumab, an anti-soluble IL-6 receptor monoclonal antibody, reduces patients’ mortality. Methods: 85 consecutive patients admitted to the Montichiari Hospi...

According to the ATOM (A Theory Of Magnitude), formulated by Walsh more than fifteen years ago, there is a general system of magnitude in the brain that comprises regions, such as the parietal cortex, shared by space, time and other magnitudes (Walsh, 2003). The present meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies used the Activation Likelihood Estimation...

Background: The mechanisms underlying the therapeutic activity of interferon-β in multiple sclerosis are still not completely understood. In the present study, we evaluated the short and long-term effects of interferon-β treatment on different subsets of regulatory T cells in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients biologically responsive...

A pivotal aim of psychiatric and neurological research is to promote the translation of the findings into clinical practice to improve diagnostic and prognostic assessment of individual patients. Structural neuroimaging holds much promise, with neuroanatomical measures accounting for up to 40% of the variance in clinical outcome. Building on these...

Normative modelling is an emerging method for quantifying how individuals deviate from the healthy populational pattern. Several machine learning models have been implemented to develop normative models to investigate brain disorders, including regression, support vector machines and Gaussian process models. With the advance of deep learning techno...

In this chapter, we explore the potential applications of machine learning to brain disorders. Specifically, we illustrate why the use of machine learning in brain disorders is attracting so much interest among researchers and clinicians by highlighting three key applications: prediction of illness onset, assistance with diagnosis, and prediction o...

Background: Neuroanatomical abnormalities in first-episode psychosis (FEP) tend to be subtle and widespread. The vast majority of previous studies have used small samples, and therefore may have been underpowered. In addition, most studies have examined participants at a single research site, and therefore the results may be specific to the local s...

Background Neuroanatomical abnormalities in first-episode psychosis (FEP) tend to be subtle and widespread. The vast majority of previous studies have used small samples, and therefore may have been underpowered. In addition, most studies have examined participants at a single research site, and therefore the results may be specific to the local sa...

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder associated with both structural and functional brain abnormalities. In the past few years, there has been growing interest in the application of machine learning techniques to neuroimaging data for the diagnostic and prognostic assessment of this disorder. However, the vast majority of studies publishe...

Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) is a rare, potentially devastating myelin-degrading disease caused by the JC virus. PML occurs preferentially in patients with compromised immune system, but has been also observed in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients treated with disease-modifying drugs. We characterized T and B cells in 5 MS patient...

Neurological disorders can be mis-diagnosed as psychiatric ones. This might happen to pedophilia emerging as a symptom of brain insult (i.e. acquired pedophilic behavior). This paper aims to delineate a behavioral profile that might help to identify defendants whose pedophilic behavior is likely to be the consequence of a neurological disorder. Thr...

Background: Machine learning (ML) can distinguish cases with psychotic disorder from healthy controls based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, with reported accuracy in the range 60-100%. It is not yet clear which MRI metrics are the most informative for case-control ML. Methods: We analysed multi-modal MRI data from two independent case-con...

22q11.2 deletion syndrome (DS) is considered to be the most robust genetic model of psychosis. In the last decade, there has been increased interest in the brain abnormalities associated with these genetic changes. Most imaging findings in this population come from small samples. This increases the risk of reporting spurious effects that reflect th...

Background Previous studies using resting-state functional neuroimaging have revealed alterations in whole-brain images, connectome-wide functional connectivity and graph-based metrics in groups of patients with schizophrenia relative to groups of healthy controls. However, it is unclear which of these measures best captures the neural correlates o...

Background Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) is a severe adverse event of natalizumab (NTZ). The administration of NTZ with extended interval dosing (EID) has been proposed as a strategy to potentially reduce the incidence of PML while maintaining its therapeutic efficacy. Methods In the current paper, we describe 4 cases of NTZ-PML...

Background Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most effective surveillance tool for the detection of asymptomatic progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). However, the optimal frequency for routine MRI surveillance is under-investigated. Objective To understand whether, upon their first MRI appearance, PML lesions present a diff...

Schizophrenia has been conceived as a disorder of brain connectivity, but it is unclear how this network phenotype is related to the underlying genetics. We used morphometric similarity analysis of MRI data as a marker of interareal cortical connectivity in three prior case–control studies of psychosis: in total, n = 185 cases and n = 227 controls....

Spatial representations are processed in the service of several different cognitive functions. The present study utilized capitalise on the Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) method of meta-analysis to identify: 1) the shared activations among spatial functions to reveal the ‘core’ neural network of spatial processing; 2) the specific neural ac...

COVER ILLUSTRATION Where is the ‘where’ in the brain? Brain activations associated with spatial processing.

Recently, the literature showed that psychiatric disorders, such as Schizophrenia and Bipolar disorder, cause abnormalities in some brain regions. Therefore, several automatic mechanisms based on classical Machine Learning techniques have been used to recognize these diseases by means of the study of neuroimaging. A serious drawback of these approa...

Despite the high level of interest in the use of machine learning (ML) and neuroimaging to detect psychosis at the individual level, the reliability of the findings is unclear due to potential methodological issues that may have inflated the existing literature. This study aimed to elucidate the extent to which the application of ML to neuroanatomi...

Despite the high level of interest in the use of machine learning (ML) and neuroimaging to detect psychosis at the individual level, the reliability of the findings is unclear due to potential methodological issues that may have inflated the existing literature. This study aimed to elucidate the extent to which the application of ML to neuroanatomi...

Tactile perception on one's own face is enhanced when viewing a fearful face being touched – as opposed to just approached – by fingers, compared to viewing other expressions, a phenomenon known as the emotional modulation of Visual Remapping of Touch (eVRT). This effect seems to be related to a preferential activation of the somatosensory system i...

Schizophrenia has been conceived as a disorder of brain connectivity but it is unclear how this network phenotype is related to the emerging genetics. We used morphometric similarity analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data as a marker of inter-areal cortical connectivity in three prior case-control studies of psychosis: in total, N=185 ca...

Objective Early diagnosis of natalizumab-related progressive multifocal leucoencephalopathy (NTZ-PML) in multiple sclerosis has been deemed a major priority by the regulatory agencies but has yet to become a reality. The current paper aims to: (1) investigate whether patients with NTZ-PML pass through a prolonged presymptomatic phase with MRI abnor...

Abstract Despite the popularity of structural neuroimaging techniques in twenty-first-century research, its results have had limited translational impact in real-world settings, where inferences need to be made at the individual level. Structural neuroimaging methods are now introduced frequently to aid in assessing defendants for insanity in crimi...

Despite an increasing focus on transdiagnostic approaches to mental health, it remains unclear whether different diagnostic categories share a common neuronatomical basis. The current investigation sought to investigate whether a transdiagnostic set of structural alterations characterized schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, a...