Gian Vittorio Caprara

University of Southern Mississippi | USM

Background Positivity (POS) indicates the proclivity to see life and experiences in a positive light. There is limited research on its effects on individuals with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders (SSD). Very little is known about the relationship between POS and daily activities in people with SSD. Aim The study aims to compare the POS rated by pa...

Moral disengagement plays an important role in the routinization of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) as a key mediator. What remains unclear are the factors that could attenuate the power of moral disengagement in this process. Building on social-cognitive theory, we hypothesize the moderating role of moral self-efficacy and suggest the import...

Despite several empirical studies on the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic that have highlighted its detrimental effect on individuals’ mental health, the identification of psychological factors that may moderate its impact on individuals’ behavior and well-being remains partly unexplored. The present study was conceived to examine the m...

Shyness in childhood has been linked to socio-emotional difficulties such as anxiety, depression, and loneliness. On the contrary, positivity (i.e., a personal tendency to see oneself, life, and future in a positive light) has been described as a protective factor. Given the challenges experienced by children during the first wave of the COVID-19 p...

Although personal resources support adjustment during hard times at work, social resources can have comparable influence in preventing the negative impact of adverse circumstances (Hobfoll 2001, 2002). This study investigates the contribution of both individual and group level positivity, a personal resource, in perceived intragroup conflict. Data...

Youth unemployment is a relevant issue among most European countries; therefore, it is important to understand its individual and situational determinants. This study aimed to investigate a conceptual model that explains the associations among positivity (POS), perceived support from employment agencies, perceived employability (PE), and employment...

This research investigated the psychometric properties of the Prosociality Scale and its cross-cultural validation and generalizability across five different western and non-western countries (China, Chile, Italy, Spain, and the United States). The scale was designed to measure individual differences in a global tendency to behave in prosocial ways...

A large variety of positive outcomes including social adjustment, psychological well-being and health, have been recently closely associated with positivity (POS). On the assumption that differences in the POS degree might be associated with different individual neuroendocrine assets that enables people to cope effectively with stress, the present...

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) represent a specific class of prosocial behaviors observable in the organizational environment. This study examined the longitudinal relations among regulatory emotional, social and work self-efficacy beliefs, and their relations to Organizational Citizenship Behaviors directed at specific individuals (OC...

The present study examines the extent to which individuals’ self-efficacy beliefs about their capacity to manage distinct emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear, shame and guilt, are associated with negative affect and life satisfaction in a Spanish population of diverse ages. The results attest to the validity of the Multidimensional Negative Emot...

Caprara et al. (European Journal of Social Psychology 39:1002–1020, 2009) criticized existing measures of internal political efficacy for not taking into account psychological theories of self-efficacy and for the resulting low construct validity. As an alternative, they presented a ten-item measure called Perceived Political Self-Efficacy (P-PSE)...

Understanding the dynamics of trustworthiness in ideological contexts could influence human societies, affect electoral campaigns and ultimately impact democracy. We tested trust behaviour towards political leaders in a sample of 121 opposing/supporting voters assigned as trustors in an iterative trust game (TG). In two experiments, a famous Italia...

Background and aims: Previous studies highlighted the importance of prosociality (PRO) to sustain one’s own life satisfaction (LS) across adolescence and adulthood. Yet, the extent to which LS could be explained by stable differences in PRO (trait-like) and/or to momentary increase in PRO (state-like) deserves further investigation. In the present...

Despite the well-established protective functions of positivity (i.e., a dispositional self-evaluative tendency to view oneself, life, and future under a positive outlook) from middle adolescence to old age, its reliable assessment and contribution to a proper psychological functioning have received little attention during previous developmental ph...

In our response, we aim to further contribute to the ongoing discussion of the construct of positivity and of the related research. We believe that each of the three commentaries has something unique to offer to the literature. By this response we take the opportunity to discuss the ideas that they present, and to illustrate some additional thought...

This chapter reviews previous and current research on different psychological characteristics that can influence politicians’ success. Personality is defined as a self-regulatory system that mediates the relationship between a person and their environment, and accounts for features that distinguish individuals from one another in the domains of cog...

Consistent with insights from both trait and social cognitive theories, this study presents a theoretical model positing emotional self‐efficacy beliefs in managing negative emotions at work as a key mechanism that contributes to mediate the negative relationship between emotional stability – a trait highly associated with positive affect and menta...

Earlier findings have shown that positive evaluations about oneself, life, and future are related to each other and can be traced to a common latent dimension originally named positive orientation and then positivity. Further findings have led to the development of an eight‐item scale that allows a direct measurement of positivity. A review is pres...

Self-efficacy beliefs in emotion regulation were shown to foster well-being and psychosocial adaptation over time. In this study, we investigated their relationship with daily affect intensity among 199 adolescents aged 15–19. Participants completed the Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale measuring perceived capability to manage the experience...

Left and right are viewed as social constructs that serve to orient and to bind people to political choices over the last two centuries mostly within established Western liberal democracies. Their contents and functions, however, have not been invariant across polities but were largely shaped in accordance with the distinctive characteristics of so...

Previous studies have indicated positivity as a basic trait which lies at the very heart of self-esteem, life satisfaction, and dispositional optimism, and predisposes people to view life and experience from a positive point of view. The present research addresses the extent to which age, positivity and its abovementioned expressions may be associa...

Bidirectional relations among adolescents' positivity, perceived positive school climate, and prosocial behavior were examined in Colombian youth. Also, the role of a positive school climate in mediating the relation of positivity to prosocial behaviors was tested. Adolescents (N = 151; Mage of child in Wave 1 = 12.68, SD = 1.06; 58.9% male) and th...

The current study examines the contribution of left–right (or liberal–conservative) ideology to voting, as well as the extent to which basic values account for ideological orientation. Analyses were conducted in 16 countries from five continents (Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania), most of which have been neglected by previous...

Past research on individual-level differences has revealed associations between affect, positive beliefs and goal realization. Goal realization, however, varies not only between individuals (the individual level) but also within individuals according to goal (the goal level). This study analyzed family-related personal goals at both levels, examini...

Objective: The present study examines the longitudinal association between basic personal values and the Big Five personality traits. Method: A sample of 546 young adults (57% females) with a mean age of 21.68 years (SD = 1.60) completed the Portrait Values Questionnaire and the Big Five Questionnaire at three-time points, each separated by an i...

In this chapter, political engagement is conceptualized as the result of both socialization processes and personal dispositions. Regarding the personality features that have been related to political participation, research findings highlight the role of traits, basic values, and self-efficacy beliefs. Whereas traits and values influence involvemen...

The present study examined in a stringent developmental model whether positivity, conceptualized as a pervasive mode of appraising, viewing, and perceiving life from a positive stance, predicts chronic positive affectivity across time or vice versa. Participants [263 participants (47 % males)], aged 15.5 at the beginning of the study and 23.5 at th...

Objective: Researchers have demonstrated the prediction of academic functioning by children's prosocial behavior (PB). The goal of our study was to examine the contribution of adolescents' PB for middle and senior high school grades after controlling for stability of achievement and for intelligence, Big Five traits, and socio-demographic variable...

The current study examines the contribution of right-left (or conservative-liberal) ideology to voting, as well as the extent to which basic values account for ideological orientation. Analyses were conducted in 16 countries from 5 continents (Europe, North-America, South-America, Asia, and Oceania), most of which have been neglected by previous st...

. Positive orientation (PO) is a basic predisposition that consists in a positive outlook toward oneself, one’s life, and one’s future, which is associated to many desirable outcomes connected to health and to the general quality of life. We performed a lexical study for identifying a set of markers of PO, developed an Implicit Association Test (th...

. Recent research has pointed to the benefits of positive emotions and their appropriate modulation in buffering the impact of negative experience, and in promoting well-being. Two studies examined the psychometric properties of a new scale that was designed to assess perceived self-efficacy in using memories of positive emotional experiences and h...

The present longitudinal study examined the role of positivity in predicting ego-resiliency over a 10-year period. Participants were 373 middle adolescents (46.9% males) assessed during the transition into young adulthood. The mean age of participants was 16.9 years at the beginning of the study and 25.9 years at the end. An autoregressive cross-la...

This study examined the longitudinal reciprocal relationships between positive orientation (i.e. the common latent variable at the core of self-esteem, life satisfaction, and optimism) and anxious and avoidant relationship styles in young adulthood. Four hundred and sixty-seven youths (52% girls) were assessed three times, at intervals of 4 years....

This study examined the development of ego-resiliency from late adolescence to emerging adulthood, using a 10-year cohort-sequential design. Participants were 335 Italian adolescents (173 females and 162 males), living, at the time of the study, in Genzano, a small city near to Rome. Latent growth curve analyses indicated that the developmental tra...

Gaze-following is a pivotal social behaviour that, although largely automatic, is permeable to high-order variables like political affiliation. A few years ago we reported that the gaze of Italian right-wing voters was selectively captured by the gaze of their leader Silvio Berlusconi. This effect was particularly evident in voters who saw themselv...

The study aims to explain the mechanisms of entrepreneurs’ goal realisation in the work and family domains. It contributes to the understanding of the role of positive and negative goal-related affect and positive orientation in personal goal realisation. A multilevel perspective is applied, as goal realisation varies not only between but also with...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the longitudinal relationship between Positivity (POS), defined as a stable disposition to view at experience under a positive outlook, and physical and psychological functioning in a sample of cancer patients immediately after diagnosis and one year later. Methods: 110 patients (40% males) wit...

This study has been designed to investigate, from a multilevel perspective, the relations among positivity and job performance. Analyses were conducted on a sample of 232 participants from three Italian organizations with the Group Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (Kenny & Garcia, 2012). Results corroborate previous findings attesting to the ben...

Observing someone rapidly moving their eyes induces reflexive shifts of overt and covert attention in the onlooker. Previous studies have shown that this process can be modulated by the onlookers' personality, as well as by the social features of the person depicted in the cued-face. Here, we investigated whether individual's preference for social...

Observing someone rapidly moving their eyes induces reflexive shifts of overt and covert attention in the onlooker. Previous studies have shown that this process can be modulated by the onlooker's personality, as well as by the social features of the person depicted in the cued face. Here, we investigated whether an individual's preference for soci...

The goal of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Perceived Parental Self-Efficacy (PPSE) and Perceived Family Collective Efficacy (PFCE) revised scales in the Portuguese and Italian contexts. To this aim two studies were conducted: the first reported the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with Portuguese samples, w...

Prosocial behaviors are considered integral to intervention goals that seek to promote successful youth development. This study examines the effect of a school-based intervention program entirely designed to promote prosocial behaviors called Promoting Prosocial and Emotional Skills to Counteract Externalizing Problems in Adolescence (Italian acron...

The present study investigates cortical structures associated with personality dimension of positivity (POS) by using a standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA), which provides EEG localization measures that are independent of the recording reference. Resting EEG and self-report measures of positivity, self-esteem, lif...

This study examined the longitudinal relations of participants' self-reported ego-resiliency to internalize and externalize behavioural problems during the early adulthood. Participants were divided in two cohorts: 144 young adults (59.7% of females; mean age of 20 years at Time 1—T1 and 28 years at Time 3) were included in the first cohort and 119...

Previous findings have shown that individual differences in basic values (e.g., universalism, power) and core political values (e.g., equality, free enterprise) account for substantial variation in political preferences. The present study goes beyond earlier studies that focus exclusively on values differences among voters of opposite ideologies. I...

We investigated age and gender effects on “Positive Orientation” (POS)—an individual's tendency to view life with a positive outlook—using a genetically informed design. Study subjects were 1016 twins aged 22–75 from the Italian twin registry. We assessed POS by the recently developed P-scale. First, we used confirmatory factor analysis to investig...

The present prospective study examined the prediction of prosociality from effortful control and ego-resiliency from late adolescence to emerging adulthood. Participants were 476 young adults (239 males and 237 females) with a mean age of 16 years (SD = .81) at T1, 18 years (SD = .83) at T2, 20 years (SD = .79) at T3, 22 years (SD = .81) at T4, and...

The present study aims to develop a short form of the Perceived Political Self-Efficacy scale (PPSE-S). The psychometric properties of the short form were first investigated in an Italian sample (n = 697), and compared with those of the extended version. The cross-cultural replicability of the short form was then investigated in Spain (n = 354), an...

Objective The present study examined the longitudinal relations of adolescents’ self-reported ego-resiliency to their emotional self-efficacy beliefs in expressing positive emotions and in managing negative emotions as they moved into early adulthood.Method Participants were 239 females and 211 males with a mean age of 17 years (SD = .80) at T1, 19...

Objective The present longitudinal study examined the role of quality of friendship in mediating the relation of prosociality to self-esteem over time.Method Participants were 424 Italian young adults (56% females) assessed at two waves (Mage = 21.1 at Time 1 and Mage = 25 at Time 2). An autoregressive cross-lagged panel model was used to test the...

The present study examined the longitudinal relations between prosociality and self-esteem. Participants were 386 (50.3% males) middle adolescents (Mage = 15.6) assessed over a 10-year period until they entered into young adulthood (Mage = 25.7). First, multivariate latent curve analysis indicated that the developmental increase of prosociality was...

Erratum to: J Happiness Stud DOI 10.1007/s10902-014-9533-4The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake (the presentation of Figure 2 was incorrect; in fact a duplication of Figure 3). The corrected Fig. 2 is given below.Fig. 2Graphical representation of simple slope of the effect of P-OR on Job performance at different val...

The literature documents that personality characteristics are associated with healthy lifestyles, including smoking. Among positive traits, Positivity (POS), defined as a general disposition conducive to facing experience under a positive outlook has shown robust associations with psychological health. Thus, the present study investigated the exten...

The goal of this study was to identify heterogenic longitudinal patterns of change in prosocial behavior from adolescence to early adulthood and their association with change in Big Five Factor (BFF) personality traits from adolescence until early adulthood. Participants were 573 Italian adolescents aged approximately 13 at the first assessment and...

Using data from 28 countries in four continents, the present research addresses the question of how basic values may account for political activism. Study 1 (N = 35,116) analyses data from representative samples in 20 countries that responded to the 21-item version of the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ-21) in the European Social Survey. Study 2...

This research investigated the nature of the method effect associated with positively worded items of the Life Orientation Test-Revised. In a first cross-sectional study (N=11,028) the best fitting model posits 2 factors, representing general optimism and a specific factor associated with positive items. In a second longitudinal study (N=203), a un...

The present study examines the longitudinal relations between self-esteem and perceived affective self-regulatory efficacy (i.e., self-efficacy beliefs in managing negative emotions and in expressing positive emotions). Participants were a group of 206 late adolescents (47% males) aged 16, 18, 20 and 24 years at T1, T2, T3 and T4, respectively. Fin...

Positive orientation (POS) is the name given to the latent dimension common to self-esteem, optimism and life satisfaction. Earlier findings attest to the trait-like nature of POS and to its unique contribution to well-adjustment across domains of functioning. The present study investigates the extent to which POS accounts for individuals' tendency...

This study examines the role of moral disengagement in fostering engagement in aggression and violence through adolescence to young adulthood in accordance with a design in which the study of individual differences and of their relations is instrumental to address underlying intraindividual structures and process conducive to detrimental conduct. P...

Do the political values of the general public form a coherent system? What might be the source of coherence? We view political values as expressions, in the political domain, of more basic personal values. Basic personal values (e.g., security, achievement, benevolence, hedonism) are organized on a circular continuum that reflects their conflicting...

Political psychology applies what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. It examines citizens’ vote choices and public opinion as well as how political leaders deal with threat, mediate political conflicts, and make foreign policy decisions. The second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology gathers together a dist...

Personality types reflect typical configurations of personality attributes within individuals. Over the last 20 years, researchers have identified a set of three replicable personality types: Resilient (R), Undercontrolled (U), and Overcontrolled (O) types. In this study, we examined the cross-cultural replicability of the RUO types in Italy, Polan...

The contribution to academic achievement of personality traits, self-esteem, and self-efficacy beliefs has been ex-amined in high school. SEM analysis showed that conscientiousness, openness, and self-esteem were positively inter-related, with both traits and self-esteem increasing students' perceived academic self-efficacy, which in turn mediated...

The contribution to academic achievement of personality traits, self-esteem, and self-efficacy beliefs has been examined in high school. SEM analysis showed that conscientiousness, openness, and self-esteem were positively inter-related, with both traits and self-esteem increasing students' perceived academic self-efficacy, which in turn mediated t...

This paper examined empirically the value of a conceptual model in which emotional stability and agreeableness contribute to engagement in aggression and violence (EAV) indirectly through irritability, hostile rumination and moral disengagement. Three hundred and forty young adults (130 male and 190 female) participated in the study. The average ag...

Although considered a predominantly automatic social behaviour, gaze following (GF) is sensitive to complex social factors like political affiliation and ideology. The present study aimed to determine whether the differential proneness to in-group leaders' gaze is related to attitudes towards politicians as measured by other implicit procedures. A...

The beliefs that people hold about themselves, their life and future are important and mutually related constituents of psychological functioning and well-being. In this paper, we investigated the relationship between positive orientation and generalized self-efficacy. The sample consisted of 672 participants aged 15-72 years (274 males). The resul...

The contribution of positive orientation to organisational behavior has been assessed in three studies. Positive orientation has been conceptualised as a basic disposition to view life and experience from a positive outlook and operationalised as the common latent factor at the core of self-esteem, life satisfaction, and optimism. In Study 1 (n= 20...

Objective: The present longitudinal study examined the development of self-reported prosociality (i.e., the tendency to enact prosocial behaviors) from adolescence to early adulthood and its prediction from teacher-reported effortful control (i.e., dispositional regulation) at age 13. Method: Participants were 573 (276 girls) Italian adolescents...

Perceived self-efficacy in emotion regulation facilitates various aspects of psychosocial adjustment. The Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy scale (RESE) by Caprara and Gerbino (2001) measures perceived capabilities to express positive emotions (POS) and to manage negative emotions, namely, despondency/distress (DES) and anger/irritation (ANG). The...