Gianluca Esposito

Università degli Studi di Trento | UNITN · Psicology and Cognitive Science

Background: Mother-infant bonding is the earliest and most critical social relationship of mammalian infants. To promote this bond, infants have innate behaviors to seek maternal proximity and protest upon separation via communication with the mother vocally and through body movement. However, the physiological mechanisms regulating these infant b...

Infant faces elicit caregiving in adults. In previous research on brain responses to images of infant faces, the faces were unknown to participants. This study investigated EEG in primiparous mothers of 3- to 6-month-old infants viewing their own infant's face compared to an unfamiliar but appearance-matched infant's face. Spectral power was calcul...

Infants universally elicit in adults a set of solicitous behaviors that are evolutionarily important for the survival of the species. However, exposure, experience, and prejudice appear to govern adults' social choice and ingroup attitudes towards other adults. In the current study, physiological arousal and behavioral judgments were assessed while...

Parental bonding and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene genotype each influences social abilities in adulthood. Here, we hypothesized an interaction between the two − environmental experience (parental bonding history) and genetic factors (OXTR gene genotype) − in shaping adults’ social sensitivity (physiological response to distress). We assessed heart...

Autistic traits are distributed on a continuum that ranges from non-clinical to clinical condition. Atypical responses to social situations represent a core feature of the Autism Spectrum Disorders phenotype. Here, we hypothesize that atypical physiological responses to social stimuli may predict non-clinical autistic and empathy traits levels. We...

System-justifying ideologies are a cluster of ideals that perpetuate a hierarchical social system despite being fraught with inequalities. Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) are two ideologies that have received much attention in the literature separately and together. Given that these ideologies are considered...

The mother–infant relation is key to infant physical, cognitive and social development. Mutual regulation and cooperation are required to maintain the dyadic system, but the biological foundation of these responses remains to be clarified. In this study, we report the maternal calming responses to infant suckling during breastfeeding. Using behavio...

Objective: The aim of the current study was to examine the potential relationship between sleep patterns, cortisol levels, and anxiety profiles in adolescents with Williams Syndrome (WS) compared to typically developing adolescents. Method: Thirteen adolescents with WS and thirteen TD adolescents (age range 12-18 years) were recruited. Participants...

Food and sleep are critical for human survival. However, for individuals with eating disorders, they face two critical disruptions in terms of abnormal feeding patterns as well as poor sleep. These difficulties are exacerbated as a result of the recent coronavirus pandemic, which caused drastic changes in daily life schedules and living arrangement...

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder that has a high prevalence in the obese population. Studies have established the relationship between OSA and a multitude of adverse health outcomes including cardiovascular diseases and metabolic diseases, indicating the nature of OSA as a disorder with high comorbidity and mortality. Thus,...

Background Intellectual disability (ID) is a condition that requires complex systematic special support, including speech therapy. Speech therapists in Ukraine face professional challenges in working with persons with ID in the conditions of the military conflict with the Russian Federation. This qualitative study offers a representation of the sit...

Background: Developmental disabilities are disproportionately more investigated in higher-income countries. However, global prevalence of developmental disabilities indicate that a large proportion of individuals with disabilities reside in low- and middle-income nations. Aims: The present work therefore aims to conduct a scientometric review to...

Parent-child dyads who are mutually attuned to each other during social interactions display interpersonal synchrony that can be observed behaviourally and through the temporal coordination of brain signals called inter-brain synchrony. Parenting stress undermines the quality of parent-child interactions. However, no study has examined synchrony in...

Micro RNA (miRNA) research has great implications in uncovering the aetiology of neuropsychiatric conditions due to the role of miRNA in brain development and function. Schizophrenia, a complex yet devastating neuropsychiatric disorder, is one such condition that had been extensively studied in the realm of miRNA. Although a relatively new field of...

Attachment is an innate human relational mechanism that develops progressively from early childhood, influences individuals' representations and behaviors, shapes relationships, and affects the social and cultural environment. Parental bonding refers to the ability of parents to be emotionally and behaviorally available to the child during infancy....

The global Covid-19 pandemic has forced countries to impose strict lockdown restrictions and mandatory stay-at-home orders with varying impacts on individual’s health. Combining a data-driven machine learning paradigm and a statistical approach, our previous paper documented a U-shaped pattern in levels of self-perceived loneliness in both the UK a...

The 2019 coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has impacted people’s mental wellbeing. Studies to date have examined the prevalence of mental health symptoms (anxiety and depression), yet fewer longitudinal studies have compared across background factors and other psychological variables to identify vulnerable subgroups in the general population. This st...

Neural underpinnings of addiction have been widely investigated using traditional neuroimaging techniques and paradigms. However, certain mechanisms are still underexplored, and existing studies often do not adopt an ecological assessment. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) emerges as a potential elective tool to assess real-time neural...

Objectives Research on typically developing (TD) children and those with neurodevelopmental disorders and genetic syndromes was targeted. Specifically, studies on autism spectrum disorder, Down syndrome, Rett syndrome, fragile X syndrome, cerebral palsy, Angelman syndrome, tuberous sclerosis complex, Williams-Beuren syndrome, Cri-du-chat syndrome,...

The unprecedented proliferation of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) in the illicit drug market has been a public health concern since their emergence in the 2000s. Their consumption can pose a severe health risks as their mechanism of action is poorly understood and their level of toxicity is high mainly due to the diffusion of very potent synth...

The term “hyperscanning” refers to the simultaneous recording of multiple individuals’ brain activity. As a methodology, hyperscanning allows the investigation of brain-to-brain synchrony. Despite being a promising technique, there is a limited number of publicly available functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning recordings. In t...

Sleep duration and disturbances in typically developing (TD) children have been found to vary across countries. Given the impact of culture on sleep patterns in TD children, it is also necessary to examine the impact of culture on sleep patterns in children with atypical development. However, previous studies have often relied only on parent report...

Genetic research in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has progressed tremendously in recent decades. Dozens of genetic loci and hundreds of alterations in the genetic sequence, expression, epigenetic transformation, and interactions with other physiological and environmental systems have been found to increase the likelihood of developing ASD. There i...

Background:The globalCOVID-19 pandemic has forced countries to impose strictlockdown restrictions and mandatory stay-at-home orders with varying impacts on individual's health. Combining a data-driven machine learning paradigm and a statistical approach, our previous paper documented a U-shaped pattern in levels of self-perceived loneliness in both...

Background Sleep is crucial for child development, especially for children with ASD. While it is known that children with ASD experience more severe sleep problems and that these problems tend to persist compared to their typically developing counterparts, these findings tend to come from only Western countries. A cross-cultural study is important...

Social Media Disorder (SMD) is characterised by the intense and excessive use of social media. Although previous studies have shown that SMD was associated with poor mental health, research across types of usage and platforms remain limited. Here, we conducted an initial investigation of social media usage across platforms and its relation to anxie...

The empirical studies of aesthetic properties of images relies on the extraction of features from pictures. While several tools offer the capabilities to study aesthetic features, softwares are generally limited in the number of estimable features, and oftentimes are released under a closed source license, preventing the addition of novel feature e...

Approximately 20%–30% of infants cry excessively and exhibit sleep difficulties for no apparent reason, causing parental stress and even triggering impulsive child maltreatment in a small number of cases.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 While several sleep training methods or parental education programs may provide long-term improvement of infant cry and sle...

Few habilitation strategies for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) consider their sleep-related problems. Together with the fact that caregivers of children with ASD also face issues with sleep, there may be yet-to-be uncovered relationships between caregiver-child sleep patterns and sleep quality, offering a key opportunity for clinician...

Interoception is the perception of internal bodily signals. It is considered fundamental to developing emotional awareness. For this reason, interoceptive deficits are often associated with alexithymia, a condition characterized by difficulty identifying feelings (DIF), difficulty describing feelings (DDF), and an externally-oriented style of think...

Despite a rise in the use of functional Near Infra-Red Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study neural systems, fNIRS signal processing is not standardized and is highly affected by empirical and manual procedures. At the beginning of any signal processing procedure, Signal Quality Control (SQC) is critical to prevent errors and unreliable results. In fNIRS a...

Purpose Among the growing interest towards market segmentation and targeted marketing, the current study adopted a scientometric approach to examine the literature on wine selection and preferences. The current review specifically attempts to shed light on the research that explores the determinants of wine preferences at multiple levels of analysi...

Criticism is commonly perceived as hurtful and individuals may respond differently to criticism originating from different sources. However, the influence of an individual’s perception of criticism in their social relationships on negative emotional reactions to criticism has not been examined across different relational contexts. The present study...

There are concerns regarding sleep deprivation among adolescents, especially with mount- ing evidence for the importance of sleep during puberty, and its effects on health and families. The present study aimed to characterise sleep in typical development (TD) adolescents in Saudi Arabia, and compare their sleep profiles to TD adolescents in the UK,...

\hl{\textbf{Background:} The global} COVID-19 \hl{pandemic has forced countries to impose strict} lockdown restrictions \hl{and mandatory stay-at-home orders with varying impacts on individual's health}. Combining a data-driven machine learning paradigm and a statistical approach, our previous paper documented a U-shaped pattern in levels of self-p...

Specific facial features in infants automatically elicit attention, affection, and nurturing behaviour of adults, known as the baby schema effect. There is also an innate tendency to categorize people into in-group and out-group members based on salient features such as ethnicity. Societies are becoming increasingly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic,...

Background: There is a growing body of research studying the impact sleep has on attention among typically developing (TD) children, but research is lacking among autistic children. Aims: The present study aimed to explore, for the first time, differences in (1) attention, (2) sleep parameters among primary school-aged Singaporean autistic child...

Adolescents typically engage in unhealthy lifestyle habits including short sleep and high academic stress. These in turn may have serious impacts on their development. The present study examines the effect of demographic characteristics on sleep patterns and academic stress in adolescents. A sample of 244 (119 females) junior high school adolescent...

The increased popularity of social media has brought clinicians and researchers to question the potential problematic outcomes of such Internet-based applications. Over the past two decades, an increasing number of studies identified the so-called problematic use of social media (PUSM), which led to the development of various assessment tools requi...

Human faces capture attention, provide information about group belonging, and elicit automatic prepared responses. Early experiences with other-race faces play a critical role in acquiring face expertise, but the exact mechanism through which early experience exerts its influence is still to be elucidated. Genetic factors and a multi-ethnic context...

The world can be represented by two layers of information: how it appears on the outside (appearance) and what it is on the inside (reality). The relationship between appearance and reality has been conceptualised as the convergence and divergence theories of appearance, which posits that appearance is a reliable (convergence) or unreliable (diverg...

This study examined maternal mental health in mothers of children with neurodevelopmental and genetic disorders in Pakistan; maternal education and affiliate stigma were also tested. It was hypothesised that mothers of children with neurodevelopmental and genetic disorders would experience high levels of depression, anxiety and affiliate stigma, an...

Background The 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted people’s mental wellbeing. Studies to date have examined the prevalence of mental health symptoms (anxiety and depression), yet fewer longitudinal studies have compared across background factors and other psychological variables to identify vulnerable sub-groups in the general populat...

Mother–child shared play provides rich opportunities for mutual symmetrical interactions that serve to foster bond formation in dyads. Mutual gaze, a symmetrical behaviour that occurs during direct eye contact between two partners, conveys important cues of social engagement, affect and attention. However, it is not known whether the prefrontal cor...

Parental rejection has been consistently empirically implicated in a wide array of developmental, behavioural and psychological problems worldwide. However, the interaction effect between parental rejection in childhood and the oxytocin receptor genotype on psychological adjustment has yet to be investigated. The present study aimed to investigate...

Human social interactions ensure recognition and approval from others, both in offline and online environments. This study applies a model from behavioral genetics on Instagram sociability to explore the impact of individual development on behavior on social networks. We hypothesize that sociable attitudes on Instagram resulted from an interaction...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant effects on people worldwide, yet the psychological impact of collective traumas may differ at the individual and societal level. Parents may be exposed to greater pandemic-related stressors, yet also are more likely than non-parents to have social interactions during social distancing mandates. Furthermore,...

“Sharenting” is an internet trend in which parents report detailed information or repeatedly post pictures, videos, and other content about their children on social media. Due to the duality of sharenting, which takes place online but has offline consequences, it is essential to understand the implications of sharenting for real-world parenting and...

Objective: To test three competing models of the nature and structure of maternal parenting practices with infants in U.S. national and multiple international samples. The three models were a one-factor dimensional model, a multi-factor style model, and a hybrid two-factor/six-domain model. Undertaking this evaluation of parenting with national an...

Caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience poorer sleep, but studies have not yet used objective measures to investigate how child and caregiver sleep affect each other. In this study, 29 mothers and their child with ASD aged between 6 and 16 years were recruited. Questionnaires measuring child autism, maternal depression...

Youths who are negatively affected by social determinants of health suffer adverse effects like increased risks of chronic health conditions and mental health issues. Part 1 of this series describes many underserved communities and the various ways their status affects their health. Available for purchase at https://shop.aap.org/pediatric-collectio...

The coronavirus pandemic affected the life of those suffering from addic- tive behaviors often confined to prolonged periods of self-isolation. To explore the variation of symptoms related to gambling, 46 outpatients of the mental health services in the Trento Province were invited to take part in a phone interview at the start of the national lock...

The aesthetic appearance of websites can influence the perception of their usability, reliability, and trustworthiness. A majority of studies investigating the relationship between aesthetic features of web pages and their user perception consider only a limited number of web pages’ visual features and focus exclusively on explicit aesthetic judgme...

With the global COVID-19 pandemic, governments from many countries in the world implemented various restrictions to prevent the SARS-Cov-2 virus's spread, including social distancing measures, quarantine, in-home lockdown, and the closure of services and public spaces. This led to an increased use of social media platforms to make people feel more...

The fear of public speaking is a prevalent phobia that has a damaging impact on the lives of many phobic patients. One method to treat this phobia is the use of virtual reality (VR). A Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol was used to report how the publications that have examined the role of VR in tre...

Parent-child dyads who are mutually attuned to each other during social interactions display interpersonal synchrony that can be observed overtly, in the form of joint behaviours, and biologically, such as through the temporal coordination of brain signals called inter-brain synchrony. Joint play provides ample opportunities for parent-child dyads...

The long-standing hypothesis that emotions rely on bodily states is back in the spotlight. This has led some researchers to suggest that alexithymia, a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness, reflects a general deficit in interoception. However, tests of this hypothesis have relied on heterogeneous assessment methods, le...

Digital collaborative storytelling can be supported by an online learning-management system like Moodle, encouraging prosocial behaviors and shared representations. This study investigated children’s storytelling and collaborative behaviors during an online storytelling activity throughout the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 home confinement in Spain. From 1st to...

Psycho-sociological research has historically shown a lack of representation towards Low- and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), yet the issues faced by these countries, especially in the domains of child development and public health, are much more severe and prevalent. To close this research gap, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) is an ap...