Donatella Petretto

Università degli studi di Cagliari | UNICA · Department of Pedagogy, Psychology, Philosophy

Fashion models are thought to be at an elevated risk for eating disorders, but few methodologically rigorous studies have explored this assumption. We have investigated the prevalence of eating disorders in a group of 55 fashion models born in Sardinia, Italy, comparing them with a group of 110 girls of the same age and of comparable social and cul...

Despite evidence that the reporting of delusion-like or hallucinatory experiences are predictive of the future development of a mental disorder in the spectrum of psychosis, the exact nature of such a kind of unusual subjective experience in the general population is still disputed. We investigated the multidimensionality of these experiences with...

Rural/urban differences in the prevalence of mental disorders have often been reported in the last 30 years, among others in the distribution of eating disorder symptoms and suicide rates. The role of sex, age and socioeconomic status in the differences by place of residence has often been neglected in past studies. Two independent community sample...

To establish sensitivity, specificity, and discriminative validity of the Peters et al Delusions Inventory (PDI), a recently released self-compiled questionnaire aimed at measuring psychosis proneness in the general population. Eighty-one patients diagnosed with a mental disorder with psychotic features (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bip...

The relationship between sexual abuse and eating disorders remains controversial; the role of intervening variables has often been neglected in past research. This study aimed at investigating the role of bodily dissatisfaction as a mediator effect on the impact of sexual abuse and the reporting of eating disorder symptoms. In a community sample of...

In the last decades, an increasing number of researchers addressed the relationship between autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and severe visual impairment (SVI) (like blindness or very low visual acuity) and nowadays autism could be considered one of the most reported coexisting developmental disorders in children with blindness or other severe visua...

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to a sudden increase in the speed of the digitization process, which has affected several areas of life (public administration, schools, universities, and healthcare, and extending to so-called “digital citizenship”) [...]

The progressive ageing of the global population is an important anthropological and social phenomenon, and it is due to the overall increasing of life expectancy and the overall increasing of health and living conditions, even if with various trends and speeds in various countries all over the world [...]

Since the first half of the 20th century there has been an interest in the study of the relationship between autism and autistic-like clinical features and with visual impairments. Autism Spectrum disorders are one of the more worldwide-studied neurodevelopmental disorder with an increasing prevalence in the last ten years. Visual impairment is a c...

In February 2020, Italy has been the first country in Europe fighting against COVID-19. In March 2020, Italian government declared national lockdown. Until May 4th, people stayed in home confinement and only the so-called “essential works and activities” were continued. Like in other countries, both for the disease severity and for the risk of deat...

Even if the use of distance learning and E-learning has a long tradition all over the world and both have been used to keep in contact with students and to provide lessons, support and learning materials, there is an open debate on the balance between advantages and disadvantages in the use of distance learning. This debate is even more central in...

The aim of this research was to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teachers, particularly on their self-esteem and self-efficacy, their difficulty in the transition to distance learning, the difficulty of students, and specially of students with learning disabilities (LDs students), as perceived by teachers. 226 teachers were invite...

Citation: Petretto, D.R.; Carta, S.M.; Cataudella, S.; Masala, I.; Mascia, M.L.; Penna, M.P.; Piras, P.; Pistis, I.; Masala, C. Some Lessons Learned in the Use of Distance Learning with Students with Special Educational Needs during COVID-19 Outbreak.

Over 100 years ago, Alois Alzheimer presented the clinical signs and symptoms of what has been later called “Alzheimer Dementia” in a young woman whose name was Augustine Deter [...]

What are the main learning difficulties or advantages encountered by students with learning disabilities (LDs) within e-environments? As a result of the Covid-19 emergency, e-learning is being increasingly used to support students’ learning processes. A number of countries closed their schools altogether, so face-to-face lessons were and have been...

School closure and home confinement are two of the measures of lockdown chosen by governments and policymakers all over the world to prevent and limit the spread of the infection of COVID-19. There is still an open debate about the real effect of school closure on the reduction of risk of infection on children and the risk of infection on with othe...

School closure and home confinement are two of the measures of lockdown chosen by governments and policymakers all over the world to prevent and limit the spread of the infection of COVID-19. There is still an open debate about the real effect of school closure on the reduction of risk of infection on children and the risk of infection on with othe...

In the last two months, school closure has been one of the more used worldwide “not-pharmacological mitigation strategies” to prevent and limit infection from COVID-19, and to delay the outbreak’s peak [...]

Italy is one of the oldest countries in Europe and in the world and now it is also one of the first countries that are fighting against COVID-19. In our country, the increasing life expectancy (80.5 for males and 84.9 for females, with a total life expectancy of 82.9) has led to very positive consequences for health and the well-being of elderly pe...

Abstract AIM: To explore the prevalence of Aberrant Salience (AS, an alleged experiential feature of psychosis-proneness) in Italian young people and corroborate the transcultural validity of the Aberrant Salience Inventory (ASI). METHODS: Young adults attending an Italian university (n = 649) underwent serial evaluations with the ASI together with...

Background Paranoid thoughts are relatively common in the general population and can increase the risk of developing mental health conditions. In this study, we investigate the latent structure of paranoia in a sample of young people. Methods Cross-sectional survey; 243 undergraduate students (males: 44.9%) aged 24.3 years (SD 3.5). The participant...

Derogatis’ Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) is one of the most widely used measures of psychological distress in both the clinical and the research settings, although its factor structure is still debated. In this study, the factor structure of the SCL-90-R has been investigated in two independent samples of Italian adolescents. Two samples...

Spinal cord injury is a disabling disorder, worldwide spread, with important consequences on functioning and health conditions and impacts on physical, psychological, and social well-being. The consequences are related to the lesion itself and to other complications related to the lesion. In the last decades, there have been an increasing of the me...

In the last decades there has been a progressive aging of the population, known as “demographic revolution” or “demographic transition”. As a consequence of the worldwide progressive aging of population and of the increasing of general life expectancy, the relationship between aging and disability became a very important one and received a huge int...

Abstract—In recent years, a new Italian standardization was conducted for Raven’s Progressive colored Matrices with samples from different regions of Italy, but with no Sardinian children. The population of Sardinia represents a peculiar group in the Italian population for specific history, for specific genetic bases and for epidemiological differe...

Background Diagnosing people during the prodromal phase of an incipient psychosis can improve the chance of better outcome. In busy clinical settings, the ideal tool is a brief, easy-to-complete self-report questionnaire. Objective To test the psychometric properties of the Italian version of one of the most used screening tools for the identifica...

The Chapman psychosis-proneness scales-also known as Wisconsin schizotypy scales (WSS)-are among the most used tools to measure schizotypy. The factor structure of the short-form WSS was investigated in a mixed sample of patients with chronic mental disorders and of healthy subjects from the general population. One hundred patients with a chronic m...

Dyslexia is the most studied and the most known learning disorder in the world but there is only a relative agreement on the definition and on the diagnostic criteria used in clinical and research fields. Dyslexia refers mainly to the difficulties in learning to read and, even if it is generally diagnosed in the first years of schooling, it can hav...

The aim of this paper is to analyse how the different conceptual models of disability can help daily work of rehabilitation clinicians. Previous papers described the usefulness in rehabilitation psychology of the International classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) a worldwide-known conceptual model of disability [1-6] In this p...

In the last decades, the worldwide progressive ageing of population has had as a principal consequence to focus attention of researchers on the study of different variables that can help people to age well (1-6). The awareness that ageing is a complex phenomenon, that affects different aspects and dominions of life, has led researchers to analyze i...

Aim: To explore the prevalence of Aberrant Salience (AS, an alleged experiential feature of psychosis-proneness) in Italian young people and corroborate the transcultural validity of the Aberrant Salience Inventory (ASI). Methods: Young adults attending an Italian university (n = 649) underwent serial evaluations with the ASI together with psych...

The purpose of family psychoeducation is to increase patients’ and their families’ knowledge and understanding of their illness and treatment. Improved knowledge of schizophrenia is expected to enable people to cope better with their illness. The aim of this review is to summarize and appraise evidence from published systematic and meta-analytic re...

Introduction During the second part of Twentieth Century worldwide there have been an important process of conceptualization on active ageing and healthy ageing, related to the progressive ageing of population in most of the countries, the so called " demographic revolution " or " demographic transition " [1-9,17-21]. We can divide the conceptualiz...

Introduction: Cognitive deficits can precede the onset of psychotic episodes and predict the onset of the illness in individuals with schizotypy traits. In some studies, high levels of schizotypy were associated with impairments in memory, attention, executive functions, and verbal fluency. This review provides a more comprehensive understanding of...

Introduction: The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test (hereafter: Eyes Test) is considered an advanced task of the Theory of Mind aimed at assessing the performance of the participant in perspective-takingthat is, the ability to sense or understand other people’s cognitive and emotional states. In this study, the item response theory analysis was a...

Background: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are a cardinal characteristic of psychosis. Recent research on the neuropsychological mechanism of AVHs has focused on source monitoring failure, but a few studies have suggested the involvement of attention, working memory, processing speed, verbal learning, memory, and executive functions. In thi...

Objectives: To validate the Italian version of the Hypomanic Personality Scale (I-HPS) in a non-clinical sample of young adults. Materials and Methods: Reliability, convergent and divergent validity, and discriminant capacity of the Italian I-HPS were explored in a sample including 456 undergraduate students attending an Italian university (males:...

There is scant evidence that the verbal cognitive deficits observed in patients with psychosis are related to auditory verbal hallucinations. The understanding of metaphors and idiomatic expressions was investigated in a cohort of 90 patients with active psychosis, and in 44 healthy controls. The Psychotic Symptom Rating Scales (PSYRATS: verbal hal...

Introduction and purpose of the study: The aim of this paper is to analyse and describe different conceptual models of successful ageing, active and healthy ageing developed in Europe and in America in the 20° century, starting from Rowe and Kahn's original model (1987, 1997). Methodology: A narrative review was conducted on the literature on su...

The schizotypal personality questionnaire (SPQ) is used to characterize schizotypy, a complex construct helpful for the investigation of schizophrenia-related psychopathology and putative endophenotypes. The SPQ factor structure at item level has been rarely replicated and no study had tested a bifactor model of the SPQ so far. The unidimensional,...

The goal of the study was to estimate the prevalence of current and lifetime mental disorders in a consecutive sample (n=300) of detainees and prison inmates held in an Italian prison and compare it with the prevalence observed in a sample randomized from the community (n=300) within the same age interval (18-55 years) and sex proportion of prisone...

The Annett Hand Preference Questionnaire (AHPQ) is amongst the most widely used self-report measures of handedness. The psychometric properties of the AHPQ have been rarely evaluated outside the Anglo-Saxon culture where the majority of the studies on the AHPQ were done. In this study, 1,023 students (males = 49.5%) from four large high schools ope...

The study of hallucination-like experiences (HLEs) in non-clinical populations is increasingly used to corroborate etiological models of psychosis. This method capitalizes on the absence of confounding factors that typically affect the study of hallucinations in clinical subjects. To estimate the prevalence of HLEs in young adults; validate the mut...

Psychoses within the spectrum of schizophrenia are severe mental disorders with a high chance of long-term disability and a negative impact on the quality of life. Poor adherence to pharmacotherapy negatively affects the course and the outcome of these disorders, enhancing the risk of relapse and readmission. Falloon and coworkers developed a Psych...

The Temperament Evaluation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris and San Diego - Autoquestionnaire (TEMPS-A) is a widely used self-reported tool aimed at measuring the affective temperaments that define the bipolar spectrum, with cyclothymic, depressive, irritable, hyperthymic, and anxious subscales. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was rarely used to confirm...

Background and purpose: The Sheehan Suicidality Tracking Scale (S-STS) is a patient self-report or clinician-administered rating scale that tracks spontaneous and treatment-emergent suicidal ideation and behaviors. This study set out to evaluate the reliability, convergent and divergent validity of the S-STS in a sample of college students, a popu...

The negative attitudes surrounding mental disorders and their treatment are a major obstacle to the correct identification and treatment of emerging psychopathologies. The purpose of this study was to investigate mental health literacy in a large and representative sample of high school students in Italy, via a booklet containing several questionna...

To measure the effectiveness on Quality of Life of adjunctive cognitive behavioral counseling in the setting of General Practitioners (GPs) along with the treatment as usual (TAU;) for the treatment of depression. Six month-controlled trial of patients who were referred to randomly assigned GPs (four for experimental group of patients and ten for t...

Introduction: The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test (henceforth, Eyes test) is a simple but advanced Theory of Mind test, and it is widely used across different cultures. This study assessed the reliability and construct (convergent and discriminant) validity of the Eyes test in Italy. Methods: A sample of 18- to 32-year-old undergraduate stud...

Objective: Studies in the general population report that unusual subjective experiences are relatively common. Such experiences have been conceptualized either as extreme personality traits or as vulnerability markers for psychosis, and often grouped under the expression "schizotypal experiences". This study investigates the heterogeneity of schiz...

We discuss recent evidences about schizophrenia (frequency, onset, course, risk factors and genetics) and their influences to some epidemiological myths about schizophrenia diffuse between psychiatric and psychopathology clinicians. The scope is to evaluate if the new acquisitions may change the rehabilitation approaches to schizophrenia modifying...

Handedness has been linked to an enhanced risk of alcohol abuse, while less is known about other drugs. A convenience sample of 1004 male and female Italian participants (females=58%) from the general community (18 to 65 years old: average age = 30; standard deviation = 10, median = 25) was asked about: handedness (preference in writing); lifetime...

Unusual subjective experiences are relatively common in the general population and have been associated with an increased level of vulnerability to psychosis. The current study aimed to a) determine the distribution of hallucination-like experiences (HLEs) in a community sample of young adults, b) investigate their dimensional subtypes, and c) test...

A large number of subjective experiences and beliefs with some degree of affinity with psychotic symptoms can be found in the general population. However, the appraisal of these psychotic-like experiences in terms of associated distress, raised preoccupation, and the conviction with which the experience is held can be more discriminative in disting...

Males were consistently found to be more likely than females to report left-hand preference in single-hand tasks, but the literature reports negative results too. Using data from a large sample in Sardinia, we aimed at testing the links of left-handedness with sex, age, residence, and seasonality of birth. A total of 4239 participants (males = 1589...

The Empathy Quotient (EQ) is a self-report questionnaire that was developed to measure the cognitive, affective, and behavioural aspects of empathy. We evaluated its cross-cultural validity in an Italian sample. A sample of 18- to 30-year-old undergraduate students of both sexes (N=256, males=118) were invited to fill in the Italian version of the...

The aim of this work is to provide a general view of the conceptual elaborations on disablement in the 20th century and to discuss the role of these different contributions in developing the current concepts of disablement. A review of the literature on conceptual models of disablement in the past century has been performed. The 20th century has wi...

Tattoos and body piercing have been linked to risk-taking behaviors, including disordered eating, but the findings have come from selected samples that were at greater risk for bias due to comorbidity. This study set out to explore concurrently the prevalence of tattoos and body piercing, and eating disorder symptoms in a representative adolescent...

Aim of the present paper is to introduce some hints of analysis about the problems encountered using computer science instruments in school to improve the participation and the learning skills in people who are in a situation of disability. The ICF model of the World Health Organization has been explained as a proposal to classify the health condit...

This study set out to explore the frequency and correlates of suicidal ideation in a community sample of school-aged adolescents living in a northeastern area of Italy. The study involved a mixed male-female sample of 1,000 adolescents, corresponding to 10% of the young population aged 15-19 in the district. We investigated psychological distress t...

To explore the links between propensity to aggression and eating disorders in a sample of school-aged adolescents in a northeastern area of Italy. In a mixed male-female sample of 1000 adolescents (10% of the district's population aged 15-19 years) we administered the Eating Attitudes Test, the Bulimic Investigatory Test of Edinburgh and the Body A...

Chrono-epidemiology is the study of the distribution of health events according to time. The time intervals taken into account have cyclic patterns and include circadian, weekly, seasonal, and circannual rhythms. In the behavioural field, chrono-epidemiology can be and has been applied to studies concerning the causes of death (suicide and homicide...