
Gabriella SantangeloUniversità degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli · Dipartimento di Psicologia
Gabriella Santangelo
Professor
About
233
Publications
64,900
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
6,612
Citations
Introduction
She is: Full Professor for the scientific-disciplinary field of Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology (SSD: M-PSI/02) at the Department of Psychology of the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”; Coordinator of PhD in "Sciences of the Mind" and Director of the Postgraduate School in Neuropsychology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”. Her research activity focuses on neural correlates of non-motor symptoms of several neurological disorders.
Publications
Publications (233)
Apathy is a neuropsychiatric symptom in Parkinson's Disease (PD) which has a negative impact on quality of life and might be related in part to damage of presynaptic dopaminergic system. Little is known about relationship between striatal dopamine levels and apathy in PD patients without dementia and/or depression. The aim of the present study was...
The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a rapid screening battery, also including subtests to assess frontal functions such as set-shifting, abstraction and cognitive flexibility. MoCA seems to be useful to identify non-amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and subcortical dementia; it has high sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing M...
Background and purposeApathy may be either a symptom of major depression or a behavioral disturbance occurring in concomitance with depression or alone in Parkinson's disease (PD). The aim of the present study was to determine the progression of cognitive impairment in drug-naïve untreated PD patients with or without clinically significant apathy.M...
Apathy has been defined as lack of motivation. It has been traditionally considered as a symptom of psychiatric disorders, such as major depression and schizophrenia, but more recently it has been recognized as a specific neuropsychiatric syndrome associated with neurodegenerative such as Parkinson's disease (PD). As a consequence the reported prev...
In two studies, we used the Gottschaldt’s Hidden Figure Test (GHFT) for assessing figure disembedding ability in children aged 7–11. Study 1 demonstrated in a large sample of typically developing children that GHFT accuracy and time scores differed across age groups, without sex and socioeconomic differences. Thus, we provided normative data only t...
Atypical Parkinsonism (AP) syndromes are characterized by a wide spectrum of non-motor symptoms including prominent attentional and executive deficits. However, the cognitive profile of AP and its differences and similarities with that of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) are still a matter of debate. The present meta-analysis aimed at identifying patterns...
Background
Psychometric instruments assessing behavioural and functional outcomes (BFIs) in neurological, geriatric and psychiatric populations are relevant towards diagnostics, prognosis and intervention. However, BFIs often happen not to meet methodological-statistical standards, thus lowering their level of recommendation in clinical practice an...
The neural correlates of action language processing are still debated within embodied cognition research and little is known about the flexible involvement of modality-specific pre-motor system and multimodal high-level temporo-parietal regions as a function of explicit and implicit tasks. A systematic review and the Activation likelihood estimatio...
Introduction:
The information regarding neuropsychiatric symptoms associated with the main subtypes of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is inadequate. Indeed, it is unclear whether patients with amnestic MCI (aMCI) and those with non-amnestic MCI (naMCI) are characterized by a different behavioral profile and whether the decline in the activities o...
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic led to psychological consequences on people’s mental health, representing a condition of increased vulnerability for the weakest sections of population, including elderly patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD).
This longitudinal study aimed at exploring the impact of the most frequent non-motor symptoms and their...
Background
. Cognitive dysfunctions are highly prevalent in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and negatively impact occupational and social functioning.
Objective
. In the present longitudinal study, we aimed at modeling cognitive changes and at assessing whether apathy could be a predictor of cognitive decline in MS.
Methods
. We assessed 67 people with M...
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a noninvasive neuromodulation technique that is increasingly used as a nonpharmacological intervention against cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other dementias. Although rTMS has been shown to modify cognitive performances and brain functional connectivity (FC) in many neuro...
Introduction
The Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS) is a questionnaire employed to measure impulsivity, which is associated with risky behaviors and mental disorders. We aimed to assess the psychometric properties of the BIS in the Italian general population and provide normative data for clinical use.
Materials and methods
A cross-sectional survey...
Objective:
Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to infer others' mental (Cognitive) and emotional (Affective) states, both being impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the clinical, neuropsychological, and neuropsychiatric features underlying Affective and Cognitive ToM deficits in PD are unclear. Therefore, we performed a meta-analytic stu...
Background
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is frequent in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and represents a risk factor for the development of dementia associated with PD (PDD). Since PDD has been associated with disability, caregiver burden, and an increase in health-related costs, early detection of MCI associated with PD (PD-MCI) and its biomarkers is c...
Introduction:
The Parkinson's Disease-Cognitive Rating Scale (PD-CRS) is a comprehensive PD-specific cognitive scale which assesses both fronto-subcortical and cortical functions. The original version of the PD-CRS is a valid and reliable instrument to screen for and diagnose PD-MCI. Although this battery was translated and validated into Italian...
Drawing is a multi-component process requiring a wide range of cognitive abilities. Several studies on patients with focal brain lesions and functional neuroimaging studies on healthy individuals demonstrated that drawing is associated with a wide brain network. However, the neural structures specifically related to drawing remain to be better comp...
A relationship between sleep disorders and cognitive dysfunctions was reported in Parkinson’s Disease (PD), however, some studies did not confirm the link. A meta-analytic study was performed to investigate the relationship between sleep disorders and cognitive dysfunctions, and to clarify the evolution of cognitive status in PD patients with sleep...
Objective
Individuals experienced psychological symptoms in response to quarantine for the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the possible effect of age and gender on the evolution of mental health status after the quarantine in the Italian population and the baseline predictors of post-traumatic stress symptoms.Methods
An online...
Emerging evidence suggests that memory deficit in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease with varying impairment of motor abilities and cognitive profile, may be independent from executive dysfunction. Our multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) approach, including resting state functional MRI (RS-fMRI), diffusion tens...
Background:
Sensorineural hearing loss in beta-thalassemia is common and it is generally associated with iron chelation therapy. However, data are scarce, especially on adult populations, and a possible involvement of the central auditory areas has not been investigated yet. We performed a multicenter cross-sectional audiological and single-center...
Interoception, the sense of the physiological state of the body, and perspective-taking, the ability to take another’s point of view, are two fundamental components contributing to our perception and interaction with the external world. However, whether the perception of our inner body influences how we perceive the external world and other people...
Cervical Dystonia (CD) and Parkinson’s disease, particularly tremor-dominant motor phenotype (TD-PD), showed a selective deficit of time-based prospective memory (TBPM). The two movement disorders are mainly characterized by dysfunctions of basal-ganglia and prefrontal cortex but it is reported that cerebellum also plays a key role in their pathoge...
Background:
The elderly are more vulnerable to COVID-19 and therefore need to adopt long-term social distancing measures. The duration of quarantine impacts the psychological status of the general population. However, until now no study has explored the psychological impact of the pandemic and quarantine together with longitudinal changes in the m...
Few studies have investigated the neuropsychological profile of Hearing Loss (HL) subjects and the effects of hearing-aid on cognitive decline. We investigated the neuropsychological profile of HL patients at baseline and compared the neuropsychological profiles of patients with and without hearing-aid at 6 month. Fifty-six HL patients and 40 healt...
Objective
The quarantine/self-isolation measures implemented to retard the spread of the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) may negatively affect the mental health of the population. The present study aimed to explore the impact of the psychological symptoms on the occurrence of cognitive failures in a large sample of home-dwelling Italian individ...
Initial changes in Parkinson’s disease (PD) are marked by loss of automatic movements and decline of some cognitive functions. Yet, the exact profile and extent of cognitive impairments in early stages of PD as well as their mechanisms related to automatic motor dysfunction remain unclear. Our objective was to examine the neuropsychological changes...
Background
Activities of daily living (ADL) are fundamental skills required to independently care for oneself and are categorized in basic (BADLs) and instrumental (IADLs) activities of daily living. ADL evaluation is of paramount importance in clinical practice to discriminate between healthy individuals (HC) and patients with mild cognitive impai...
Background
Anxiety, depression and reduction of quality of life (QoL) are common in people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS). Fear of getting sick from COVID-19, government’s lockdown and the imposed social distancing might have had an impact on psychological distress and QoL.Objectives
The aim of our study was to investigate anxiety, depression and Q...
Interoception and impulsivity are two multi-dimensional constructs and although the role of interoception in impulsiveness has been previously reported, it is not clear whether their different facets are related to each other. In the present study, we aimed at bridging this gap by investigating the relationships between interoception and impulsivit...
Theory of mind (ToM) refers to an individual's ability to attribute mental states to predict and explain another person's behavior. It has been shown that patients with cervical dystonia (CD) present impaired ToM ability supporting the idea that CD is a network disorder. An emerging hypothesis is that different phenotypes of CD reflect distinct key...
Subjective memory complaints are defined as concerns about one's own memory (or other cognitive) abilities that may or may not be associated with actual impairment on objective testing. They are often reported in elderly individuals, with a prevalence ranging from approximately 25%–50%. Because of their possible relationships with increased risk fo...
Subjective memory complaints are often reported in the elderly (but also in middle-aged) adults. In some cases, they can be part of neurocognitive disorders such as mild cognitive impairment. Several studies investigated the association between subjective memory abilities and objective memory functioning in older age showing that negative perceptio...
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is associated with a high prevalence of emotional and mood disorders. Emotional disorders may worsen during illness progression and affect the quality of life of patients and their families. MS is often associated with depression, with an increased risk of suicide, poor adherence to treatment, decreased functional status, an...
Previous imaging studies suggested that impairments of prefrontal-striatal and limbic circuits are correlated to excessive gambling. However, the neural underpinnings of gambling disorder (GD) continue to be the topic of debate. The present study aimed to identify structural changes in GD and differentiate the specific brain activity patterns assoc...
Introduction: Mild Cognitive Impairment in Parkinson's Disease (PD-MCI) is a transitional state between normal cognition and dementia. Cross-sectional studies revealed that low Vitamin D levels were associated with worse performance on cognitive tests in Parkinson's Disease. The present longitudinal study aimed to examine the relationship between s...
Background
Caregivers of people with dementia (pwD) are at risk of depression, anxiety and burden. COVID-19 pandemic and government-imposed lockdown as a preventive measure might increase psychological symptoms in caregivers. We performed a study to measure the change of psychological symptoms during quarantine/self-isolation for COVID-19 in a samp...
Mental rotation has attracted the interest of cognitive research on dystonia, but at the moment, contrasting data are available on whether this complex cognitive ability is impaired in the disorder. Here, we assessed spatial and egocentric mental rotation in patients with cervical dystonia (CD). Patients with CD and healthy controls were required t...
IntroductionThe O’Donnell–Luria–Rodan (ODLURO) syndrome, caused by heterozygous mutation in the lysine N-methyltransferase2E (KMT2E) gene in chromosome 7q22, has been recently described. Mutation of KMT2E produces a protein-truncating variant gene that may be responsible for both developmental delay and intellectual disability disorders commonly de...
Borderline intellectual functioning (BIF) is highly prevalent in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD), but their relationship remains poorly understood. This retrospective study aimed to investigate the cognitive profile of BIF among people diagnosed with BPD. Clinical, demographic, and neuropsychological data of fifty-five outpatien...
Background: Anxiety, depression and reduction of quality of life (QoL) are common in people with multiple sclerosis (pwMS). Fear of getting sick from COVID-19, government’s lockdown and the imposed social distancing might have an impact on psychological distress and QoL.
Objectives: The aim of our study was to investigate anxiety, depression and Qo...
Gender differences have been described in several neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. The effects of gender on cognitive and behavioral manifestations in multiple system atrophy and the changes of cognitive functions over time according to gender have not been investigated so far. Fifty-five patients wi...
Anxiety is a common neuropsychiatric symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD). Until now, anxiety has been consistently related to cognitive deficits and severity of motor symptoms, whereas the association between anxiety and motor subtypes (TD-PD, tremor dominant and PIGD-PD, postural instability/gait disturbances dominant) revealed contrasting results...
Theory of Mind is defined as the ability to attribute mental state and emotions to other people and is relevant to social relationships. The cortical and subcortical regions involved in Theory of Mind are damaged by neurodegenerative processes of Parkinsonian syndromes, so the aim of the present study was to explore, for the first time, possible de...
Research and development in socially assistive robotics have produced several novel applications in the care of senior people. However, some are still unexplored such as their use as psychometric tools allowing for a quick and dependable evaluation of human users' intellectual capacity. To fully exploit the application of a social robot as a psycho...
Objective
Advanced neuroimaging techniques may offer the potential to monitor disease progression in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative, multisystem disease that still lacks therapeutic outcome measures. We aim to investigate longitudinal functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) changes in a cohort of patient...
Social cognition includes mental operations essential for functional social interactions, and several studies revealed an impairment of social cognition abilities in patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). These deficits have been related to global and focal gray matter atrophy as well as microstructural white matter damage. Although some studies re...
The aim of this study is to explore the existence of specific personality traits related to patients with blepharospasm (BSP), treated with injections of botulinum neurotoxin (BTX). Sixteen patients with BSP, 22 with facial hemispasm (HFS), 20 with essential hyperhidrosis (EH) and 20 healthy controls (HCs) completed the Temperament and Character In...
Background
The MIG-SCOG is a questionnaire to assess self-reported subjective cognitive symptoms during migraine attacks, consisting of 9 items evaluating executive functions and language. The aim of the study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the MIG-SCOG (I-MIG-SCOG) in patients with migraine without aura.
Met...
Objectives:
To investigate the effects of cholecalciferol supplementation on the progression of motor disability in a cohort of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients with low blood 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 [25(OH)D] levels, on the basis of the hypothesis of potential neuroprotective effects of vitamin D supplementation.
Methods:
Forty-eight A...
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients often express cognitive and behavioral dysfunctions within the so-called “frontotemporal spectrum disorders.” Guidelines recommend screening of such dysfunctions, albeit only ALS dedicated tools are eventually suitable, due to the profound motor limitations induced by the disease. ALS Cognitive Behaviora...
Apathy is commonly reported in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FTD) and Parkinson’s Disease (PD). In our meta-analysis we analysed a total of 41 studies to identify brain patterns associated with apathy. For these purposes we used activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses. Our main overall analysis showed that apathy is ass...
Background:
Despite the clinical importance of psychological factors in migraine, the relationship between personality traits, depression, and migraine has been poorly investigated.
Objective:
To delineate the personality profile distinctive for migraineurs and to explore the relationship between personality traits and depression in migraineurs...
Introduction:
Cognitive deficits and neuropsychiatric symptoms occur in parkinsonian and cerebellar subtypes of Multiple System Atrophy (MSA-P and MSA-C). These symptoms have been investigated mainly in cross-sectional studies. The present 1-year follow-up study aimed at evaluating the evolution of cognitive and neuropsychiatric profile in patient...
Mild cognitive impairment associated with Parkinson's disease (PD) is a risk factor for the development of dementia. Despite the importance of early identification of mild cognitive impairment in PD, its prevalence and clinical correlates are still debated. The present meta‐analysis provides a robust estimate of prevalence rate of mild cognitive im...
Background
Prospective memory (PM) deficits are often reported in multiple sclerosis (MS), but their relationship with neuropsychological characteristics and personality traits remains to be explored.
Objective
To systematically investigate both time-based and event-based PM abilities in a sample of MS without clinically relevant disability or glo...
Background
Prospective memory (PM) is defined as memory for future intentions and it is typically divided into time-based and event-based PM. Deficit of PM has been reported in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) but no study has yet explored the association between motor subtypes (tremor dominant and rigidity/bradykinesia dominant) and performa...