Giampaolo Nicolais

• Sapienza University of Rome

Objectives Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a leading cause of death worldwide, emerging from a combination of several factors. The aim of this review is to define the psychological factors that are significant in the development and progression of these disorders. Methods Studies published through 2023 concerning adults with psychological vulne...

Many factors have contributed to rendering frailty an emerging, relevant, and very popular concept. First, many pandemics that have affected humanity in history, including COVID-19, most recently, have had more severe effects on frail people compared to non-frail ones. Second, the increase in human life expectancy observed in many developed countri...

Background. The COVID Stress Scales (CSS) assess COVID-related stress experienced in the past week related to danger and contamination fears, socioeconomic consequences, xenophobia, compulsive checking, and reassurance seeking, and traumatic stress symptoms. Our objective was to provide a translation into Italian, replication, and psychometric vali...

Organ donation has a crucial impact on patient care and survival, of which the worldwide gap between organ demand and supply is currently one of the most challenging issues. Brain-dead patients are the main source of organs that can be donated, but donation requires the consent of family members—a choice that is often complex and stressful and lead...

Background: There is evidence of a significant raise in youths' emotional and behavioral difficulties during the pandemic. Only a few studies have addressed parent-adolescent conflict, and none investigated the possible mediating effect of parenting in the association between conflicts with parents and adolescents' symptoms. This study aimed at in...

Background: Although the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the general population, health care workers (HCWs) constituted one of the groups that were most adversely affected by the associated risks, owing to the significant consequences on their mental health. This study examined these psychological effects on HCWs who cared for COVID-19 patients...

Along with physical changes, psychological changes are detectable in patients with COVID-19. In these patients, the stressful experience of intensive care unit (ICU) hospitalization may aggravate psychological conditions. Our study examines the short- and long-term psychological consequences of COVID-19 in ICU patients. COVID-19 patients completed...

The end of the last decade saw record numbers of refugee arrivals to Italy, straining the existing reception and integration systems. Although significant research attention has focused on the prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and suicidal ideation in refugee populations, there are increasing calls to study the interac...

The central tenet of Place Attachment theory states that an individual has an inborn predisposition to form strong bonds with places as well as with people. Our qualitative study applies this theory to understand how, despite loss and adversity, refugees are able to reconstruct a sense of identity, community, and “home”. Participants included 15 fo...

Psychological studies in the field of migration attest that social integration is enhanced by social capital. Communities of origin and the ones of resettlement play different role in the promotion of newcomers’ social integration. Nevertheless, researches highlighted that connections between migrants and resettlement communities are the hardest to...

The highest number of forcibly displaced people has been currently recorded due to war, poverty, and climate change. Recently, a process that recognizes refugees as reliable interlocutors for the improvement of reception policies has started. Refugees are therefore encouraged to start up social enterprises aimed at fostering newcomers’ social integ...

Children around the world are exposed to traumatic events and research confirms that cultural factors play a central role in the psychological experience of trauma and the manifestation of symptoms in trauma and stress-related disorders. The DSM-5 and ICD-11 call on practitioners to consider the role of culture and context in the manifestation, ass...

Type 1 diabetes is a challenge for children, adolescents, and their families as it affects the quality of life and lifestyle of the whole family context. Diabetes onset and its chronic management could be therefore particularly related to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a group of persistent psychological and physiological symptoms due to a...

Recent studies on moral development suggest the existence of a set of innate abilities which foster moral functioning. From a very early age on, children seem to show ability for moral discernment, together with emotions and pro-social motivations based on an innate propensity to empathize with people in difficulty and respect equity; moreover, the...

As suggested by Main et al., to respond to the need for an adaptation of the existing Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) coding system, especially regarding the application to nonnormative samples, this study presents additional criteria that characterize the low-coherence cannot classify (CC) category. Three AAIs were selected from a sample of paren...

We set up a cross-sectional study to investigate how moral core self's mental representations develop from age 3 to 6 years. An ad hoc instrument (Moral Short Played Stories Procedure; MSPSP) was developed to tap into how moral emotions, conducts, and cognitions referred to moral and nonmoral characters. A total of 143 preschoolers completed the MS...

Background: The present study tested Lee et al.’s (2008) model of moral attitudes and cheating behavior in sports in an Italian sample of young tennis players and extended it to predict behavior in actual match play. In the first phase of the study we proposed that moral, competence and status values would predict prosocial and antisocial moral att...

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy has been proven efficacious in restoring affective regulation in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients. However, its effectiveness on emotion processing in children with complex trauma has yet to be explored. High density electroencephalography (hdEEG) was used to investigate the...

Borderline personality disorder can be assessed in adolescence mainly through a dimensional approach that takes into account strengths and weaknesses of emerging personality patterns. Clinical interviews could help clinicians to gather information about adolescent’s functioning, fostering therapeutic alliance and promoting a mentalizing stance duri...

Postnatal depression (PND) is an important health problem of global relevance for maternal health and impacts on the health and wellbeing of the child over the life-course. Multinational data is hard to locate, the economic burden of PND on health care systems have been calculated in several countries, including Canada and in the UK. In Canada, hea...

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a recognized first-line treatment for psychological trauma. However its neurobiological bases have not been disclosed yet.Methods Electroencephalography was used for the first time to fully monitor neuronal activation during whole EMDR sessions including the autobiographical script. Nine clien...

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a recognized first-line treatment for psychological trauma. However its neurobiological bases have yet to be fully disclosed. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to fully monitor neuronal activation throughout EMDR sessions including the autobiographical script. Ten patients with major psych...

The EEGs in a group of ten subjects with major psychological trauma treated with EMDR and in ten controls have been registered both during the listening of the autobiographical narrative of the index trauma (script) and during a whole EMDR session. The EEGs have been performed again during the last EMDR session when patients were free of symptoms....

Abstract: In the field of developmental research, there is a pressing need to develop clinically sounded and empirically grounded tools for the assessment of personality development in adolescence. After a review of the relevant literature on adolescent personality disorders we present through empirical data and clinical material the IPOP-A, a semi...

In the field of developmental research, there is a pressing need to develop clinically sounded and empirically grounded tools for the assessment of personality development in adolescence. After a review of the relevant literature on adolescent personality disorders we present through empirical data and clinical material the IPOP-A, a semi-structure...

Electroencephalography (EEG), due to its peculiar time and spatial resolution, was used for the first time to fully monitor neuronal activation during the whole eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) session, including the autobiographical script. The present case report describes the dominant cortical activations (Z-score >1.5) durin...

- Problem: maltreatment impacts on the quality of interactive exchanges, precociously putting the infant at risk for maladaptive outcomes. Method: research involved 37 mother-infant dyads at risk for maltreatment and 37 non-referred dyads. AAI has been administered to the mothers; furthermore, dyadic interactive exchanges were observed and video-re...

This study aimed to evaluate the role of parental relational styles on the development of psychopathological disturbances in children with Learning Disability (LD). Fifty-six children aged 7-12 diagnosed with LD were evaluated on the basis of the Children Behaviour Check List (CBCL) completed by parents. Parents completed an Attachment Style Questi...

This chapter describes three different services in three different countries that have two things in common: 1. They are directly addressed to and based in a community. 2. They are innovative in terms of the addressed population, in terms of methodology and also in terms of funding.

Goal: The goal of this symposium is to identify ‘state-of-the-art’ strategies for the use of antipsychotic medications in the management of children and adolescents with major psychiatric disorders. Learning objectives: 1. Define pediatric populations for whom second-generation antipsychotics are indicated 2. Identify the role of second-generation...

RIASSUNTO: Premesse teoriche: I traumi precoci hanno effetti sullo sviluppo che non necessariamen-te sono riconducibili alla sequela post-traumatica prevista dai criteri diagnostici del Disturbo Post Trauma-tico da Stress (PTSD). Obiettivo: Obiettivo di questa rassegna è quello di illustrare i recenti tentativi di ri-definizione del PTSD in termini...