Elena Cavallini

• PhD
• Reseacrher at University of Pavia

The present study was aimed to cluster sub-groups of patients with varying degrees of cognitive impairment (Subjective Cognitive Decline, mild or Major Neurocognitive Disorder) based on their modifiable risk factors and cognitive reserve with k-means analysis. As a secondary analysis, we described the identified clusters from different perspectives...

The increasing number of dementia cases has determined a growing interest in prevention, with a specific focus on modifiable risk factors (MRFs). In this context, cognitive reserve (CR) may have a role in moderating the association between pathology and neurological symptoms and in buffering the effects of unhealthy MRFs on the clinical manifestati...

Everyday social experiences rely on pragmatic skills, whose disruptions can pose a risk to maintaining relationships and social engagement (Cummings, 2014), and whose quantity and quality are associated with better physical and mental health in older adults (Bailey et al., 2008). Despite the relevance in everyday life of pragmatic skills (such as t...

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to infer one's own and others' mental states. Growing research indicates that ToM is impaired in Chronic Migraine with Medication Overuse (CM + MO). However, the research in this field has been conducted using static scenario-based tasks, often failing to test mentalization in everyday situations and measuring on...

Reciprocity is a fundamental element in social interactions and implies an adequate response to the previous actions of our interactant. It is thus crucial to detect if a person is cooperating, deceiving, or cheating, to properly respond. However, older adults have been shown to have a lower ability to detect reciprocity compared to younger adults,...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic seems to be at its end. During the first outbreak, alfa was the dominant variant, and in the two following years, delta was the dominant variant. Questions remain about the prevalence and severity of post-COVID syndrome (PCS). We compared the medium-term outcomes of a selected group of patients consi...

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to infer one's own and others' mental states. Growing research indicates that ToM is impaired in Chronic Migraine with Medication Overuse (CM + MO). However, the research in this field has been conducted using static scenario-based tasks, often failing to test mentalization in everyday situations and measuring on...

Background Social cognition refers to all mental operations to decipher information needed in social interactions. Here we aimed to outline the socio-cognitive profile of Chronic Migraine with Medication Overuse (CM + MO), given they are recognized to be at risk of socio-cognitive difficulties. Given the multidimensionality of this construct, we co...

Background Social cognition refers to all mental operations to decipher information needed in social interactions. Here we aimed to outline the socio-cognitive profile of Chronic Migraine with Medication Overuse (CM + MO), given they are recognized to be at risk of socio-cognitive difficulties. Given the multidimensionality of this construct, we co...

Objective: To evaluate the subjective experience of the COVID-19 outbreak in healthy older adults and develop a model of the older population's psychological adaptation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A qualitative grounded theory approach was taken to the study design and analysis, using semi-structured interviews to collect data from 19 com...

Several research contributions have depicted the impact of the pandemic environment on healthcare and social care personnel. Even though the high prevalence of burnout depression and anxiety in healthcare settings before COVID-19 has been well documented in the research, the recent increase in psychological distress and mental health issues in heal...

Background The prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases is expected to increase over the next years, therefore, new methods able to prevent and delay cognitive decline are needed.AimsTo evaluate the effectiveness of a combined treatment protocol associating a computerized cognitive training (CoRe) with anodal transcranial direct current stimulation...

Background Research in nursing homes mainly focused on interventions for residents affected by cognitive decline. Few studies have considered healthy older adults living in nursing homes, and this research targeted cognitive functioning. Aims To evaluate whether socio-cognitive abilities can be improved by means of a theory of mind (ToM) training...

Background Studies on age differences in emotional states during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that older adults experienced greater emotional wellbeing compared to younger adults. We hypothesized these age differences to be related to the perception of closeness to family/friends or the engagement in daily activities during the pandemic. Aim To in...

Past literature on prosocial behavior in aging has mainly focused on age-related differences. However, the analysis of the predictors of prosociality in late adulthood is still under investigated. The present study examines how personality traits predict actual and self-reported prosocial behaviors, while considering the mediation effects of empath...

Background: Smart Aging is a serious game (SG) platform that generates a 3D virtual reality environment in which users perform a set of screening tasks designed to allow evaluation of global cognition. Each task replicates activities of daily living performed in a familiar environment. The main goal of the present study was to ascertain whether Sma...

Studies on age-related differences in risk perception in a real-world situation, such as the recent COVID-19 outbreak, showed that the risk perception of getting COVID-19 tends to decrease as age increases. This finding raised the question on what factors could explain risk perception in older adults. The present study examined age-related differen...

Research has demonstrated that theory of mind (ToM), that is the ability to understand other’s thoughts and feelings, declines with age. However, less is known about older people’s perceptions about their own ability to “read” the mind of others. In the current study, we provide initial evidence on this issue by: (a) examining age-related differenc...

Among all aspects of the linguistic and communicative competence, pragmatics seems especially vulnerable in aging, due also to cognitive decline. However, pragmatics has never been considered as an intervention target in healthy aging. Here we tested the effects of a novel training program to improve pragmatics (PragmaCom) in older adults, compared...

Lombardy was the epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy, and in March 2020 the rapid escalation in cases prompted the Italian Government to decree a mandatory lockdown and to introduce safety practices in mental health services. The general objective of the study is to evaluate the early impact of the Covid-19 emergency and quarantine on the w...

Older adults are assumed to change their affect states in reaction to positive and negative stimuli across the life span. However, little is known about the impact of success and failure events on age-related changes in affect states and, particularly, in self-esteem levels. To fill this gap in the literature, in the present study changes in affect...

Over the past decades, memory training interventions have been developed in an attempt to stabilize or enhance memory functioning in aging. Only recently has attention been paid to individual differences in training gains and consequently to predictors of such gains. The aim of the present study was to identify which specific cognitive mechanisms/p...

Recently, some authors have suggested that age-related impairments in social-cognitive abilities—emotion recognition (ER) and theory of mind (ToM)—may be explained in terms of reduced motivation and effort mobilization in older adults. We examined performance on ER and ToM tasks, as well as corresponding control tasks, experimentally manipulating s...

Jokes understanding is an important part of people's social life, especially in aging. However, little is known about older adults' humor understanding and the role of the cognitive skills underpinning social communication, mainly pragmatics and theory of mind (ToM). To fill this gap, we created the Phonological and Mental Jokes (PMJ) task, a fine-...

Research on decision making and aging has shown that some decision-making skills decrease with age. Despite these age-related declines, no study has yet investigated the possibility of promoting improvements in decision-making skills in older adults. The present study was designed to address this gap in literature by examining the efficacy of a met...

Objectives: Older adults tend to exhibit more prosocial behavior than younger adults. However, little research has focused on understanding the factors that may explain such differences in the social decision-making process. The first aim was to examine if, and to what degree, the content of social information about a recipient has an impact on you...

Objectives: Previous research has shown a decline in Theory of mind (ToM) associated with normal aging. However, very few studies have investigated older people’s ToM using an ecological approach. The present study was designed to fill this gap and examine older people’s frequency of mental state talk (MST) in describing their best friend, together...

Growing evidence indicates that Theory of Mind (ToM) declines in normal aging. However, the majority of this research has used classic and static verbal tasks that present scenarios, which are very different from real life. The present study was designed to fill this gap by administering the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) to yo...

Older adults perform worse than younger adults when applying decision rules to choose between options that vary along multiple attributes. Although previous studies have shown that general fluid cognitive abilities contribute to the accurate application of decision rules, relatively little is known about which specific cognitive abilities play the...

Background Previous research has suggested that there is a degree of variability among older adults’ response to memory training, such that some individuals benefit more than others. The aim of the present study was to identify the profile of older adults who were likely to benefit most from a strategic memory training program that has previously p...

Background: Smart Aging is a Serious games (SGs) platform in a 3D virtual environment in which users perform a set of screening tests that address various cognitive skills. The tests are structured as 5 tasks of activities of daily life in a familiar environment. The main goal of the present study is to compare a cognitive evaluation made with Smar...

Objective: Recently, motivation has been found to attenuate the age-related decline in Theory of Mind (ToM) performance (i.e. faux pas recognition). However, whether or not this effect could be generalized to other ToM tasks is still unknown. In the present study, we investigated whether and how motivation could enhance older adults' performance a...

Objectives To evaluate whether Medication Overuse Headache patients (MOH) (progressed from migraine) differ from episodic migraine patients (MIG) as regards decision making and whether, within MOH patients, this ability is influenced by the duration of chronification. Methods In order to to explore whether possible differences between groups were...

Age-related effects in working memory updating were investigated by administering a response time-based task to three adult age groups (young, young-old, and old-old). The task differentiated objects to update; participants were asked to update single memory contents or content-context bindings. The data showed an overall delay of response latencie...

Objectives: The goal of the present research was to examine the potential of a learner-oriented approach to improving older adults' performance in tasks that are similar to real-life situations that require strategic deployment of cognitive resources. A crucial element of this approach involves encouraging older adults to explicitly analyze tasks...

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to attribute mental states to the self and others in order to explain and predict social behaviour. Meta-analytic results have shown a decline in ToM abilities in healthy older adults. Recent research has also highlighted the possibility of enhancing older adults' ToM performance through group conversation...

Prospect Theory predicts that people tend to be more risk seeking if their reference point is perceived as a loss and more risk averse when the reference point is perceived as a gain. In line with this prediction, Franken, Georgieva, Muris and Dijksterhuis (2006) showed that young adults who had a prior experience of monetary gains make more safe c...

Objectives: Previous research has shown that individual differences in Theory of Mind (ToM) are crucial for people's social relationships. However, very few studies have investigated this issue in ageing. The present study was designed to fill this gap and examine the associations between ToM and social relationships in elderly adults. In doing so...

Objectives: Theory of Mind (ToM) is a complex human ability that allows people to make inferences on others' mental states such as beliefs, emotions and desires. Previous studies on ToM in normal aging have provided heterogeneous findings. In the present study we examined whether a mixed calculation of different aspects of ToM may have contributed...

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to attribute independent mental states to self and others in order to explain and predict social behavior. Recent research in this area has shown a decline in ToM abilities associated with normal aging that is of a moderate magnitude or greater. Very few studies have investigated whether it is possible to...

Previous research on age-related changes in Theory of Mind (ToM) showed a decline in older adults, particularly pronounced over 75 years of age. Evidence that ToM may be enhanced in healthy aging people has been demonstrated, but no study has focused on the role of age on the effects of ToM training for elderly people. The present study was designe...

Background Cognitive flexibility has repeatedly been shown to improve after training programs in community-dwelling older adults, but few studies have focused on healthy older adults living in other settings. Objectives This study investigated the efficacy of self-help training for healthy older adults in a residential care center on memory tasks t...

Smart Aging, a Serious games (SGs) platform in a 3D virtual environment aimed at the early detection of Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI) in persons ageing between 50 and 80. The navigation in a 3D environment (loft) that simulates in a reduced space the basic elements of interaction of home living, associated with the game approach results in a pow...

Conventional cognitive assessment is based on a pencil-and-paper neuropsychological evaluation, which is time consuming, expensive and requires the involvement of several professionals. Information and communication technology could be exploited to allow the development of tools that are easy to use, reduce the amount of data processing, and provid...

Background music refers to any music played while the listener is performing another activity. Most studies on this effect have been conducted on young adults, while little attention has been paid to the presence of this effect in older adults. Hence, this study aimed to address this imbalance by assessing the impact of different types of backgroun...

This study investigated the relation between theory of mind (ToM) and metamemory knowledge using a training methodology. Sixty-two 4- to 5-year-old children were recruited and randomly assigned to one of two training conditions: A first-order false belief (ToM) and a control condition. Intervention and control groups were equivalent at pretest for...

Given the multi-componential nature of executive functions, we compared 48 outpatients affected by Type 2 diabetes and 49 control subjects on the executive domains of inhibition, updating, shifting, and word fluency. Variables commonly associated with diabetes were considered in explaining the relationship between diabetes and executive functioning...

We investigated the benefits of strategy-adaptation training for promoting transfer effects. This learner-oriented approach—which directly encourages the learner to generalize strategic behavior to new tasks—helps older adults appraise new tasks and adapt trained strategies to them. In Experiment 1, older adults in a strategy-adaptation training gr...

This study examined cultural differences in stereotypes and attributions regarding aging and memory. Two subcultures belonging to the same country, Italy, were compared on general beliefs about memory. Sardinians live longer than other areas of Italy, which is a publically shared fact that informs stereotypes about that subculture. An innovative in...

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to humans' ability to recognize the existence of mental states, such as beliefs, emotions, and desires. The literature on ToM in aging and on the relationship between ToM and other cognitive functions, like executive functions, is not homogenous. The aim of the present study was to explore the course of ToM and to invest...

This study examined age and cultural differences on both personal and general beliefs about memory by comparing three age groups within two subcultures belonging to the same country: Milanese and Sardinian. Two innovative instruments on general and personal beliefs with graphic-rating-scale format (General Beliefs about Memory Instrument and Person...

In nonpathological elders, cognitive decline is more evident by middle age and depends on different factors, such as speed of processing, nature of the task (i.e., storing versus processing), and type of stimuli (i.e., verbal versus visual and spatial) to be recalled. The present study aimed to investigate the impact of age and environmental factor...

According to the task-affordance hypothesis, people will be more likely to use a specific strategy as tasks more readily afford its use. To evaluate this hypothesis, we examined the degree to which older and younger adults used a self-testing strategy to learn items, because previous studies suggest that age-related differences in the use of this p...

Many studies have focused on memory training in aging, showing that older adults can improve their performance. Unfortunately, the benefits of training can rarely be generalized to other tasks for which adults were not specifically trained. We investigated the benefits of instruction-based training in promoting transfer effects in older adults. In...

Differences in professional choice and experience may explain age differences in working memory performance of elderly people. The aim of this study was to examine whether expertise and prolonged practice in verbal and visuo-spatial abilities reduce age differences in laboratory working memory tasks. The effects of age and expertise on working memo...

In this study, we investigated whether computer familiarity could regulate the efficacy of a computer-based memory training intervention in an Italian sample of older adults. Participants were randomly assigned to either the training or the waiting-list control group and were tested on four computerized neuropsychological memory tasks and one paper...

The effects of different types of memory training in young and older adults reported in a previous study [Cavallini, E., Pagnin, A., Vecchi, T., 2003. Aging and everyday memory: the beneficial effect of memory training. Arch. Gerontol. Geriatr. 37, 241-257] were again investigated from a longitudinal perspective 2 years after the original memory tr...

We describe a self-monitoring approach for improving older adult learning that older adults can use in conjunction with more traditional mnemonic-based interventions. According to the self-monitoring approach, older adults can improve the effectiveness of learning by accurately monitoring their progress toward a learning goal and by using the outpu...

In a passive task participants recall material in the format in which it was presented, whereas in an active task they transform or manipulate the material. Experiment 1 describes an active visuo-spatial task that is vulnerable to the effects of ageing, and Experiment 2 shows that it is more sensitive to the effects of ageing than a passive task ca...

The authors investigated elderly people's ability to benefit from specific memory training. Empirical evidence of cognitive aging shows a deterioration in working memory ability but also suggests that elderly people maintain the ability to acquire new information and strategies. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of two dif...

The Corsi block tapping task has been widely used in the past 20 years to assess nonverbal/visuo-spatial abilities. However, there have been considerable inconsistencies in the administration and scoring of this measure and, from a theoretical point of view, little effort has been put to interpret this task from a more general model of cognitive fu...

This study examined the characteristics of strategic memory training, which could be employed to treat both young and old people. The aim of the research was twofold: to investigate the efficacy of the training and to evaluate the recuperation possibilities for the aged suffering from cognitive decline. Sixty participants (20 young, 20 young elderl...

This study examined the characteristics of strategic memory training, which could be employed to treat both young and old people. The aim of the research was twofold: to investigate the efficacy of the training and to evaluate the recuperation possibilities for the aged suffering from cognitive decline. Sixty participants (20 young, 20 young elderl...