Giovanna Nigro

Università degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli · Dipartimento di Psicologia

Research on intertemporal decision-making has often used Strathman et al.’s (1994) 12-item consideration of future consequences scale, or the CFC-14 scale (Joireman et al., 2012). The present studies examined the measurement properties of an Italian CFC-14 scale, and the utility of distinguishing between its two subscales (consideration of future a...

Previous research has demonstrated that adult pathological gamblers (compared to controls) show risk-proneness, foreshortened time horizon, and preference for immediate rewards. No study has ever examined the interplay of these factors in adolescent gambling. A total of 104 adolescents took part in the research. Two equal-number groups of adolescen...

This study investigated the relationship of cognitive distortions, self-reported impulsivity, delay discounting, and time perspective to gambling severity in Italian adolescents. One thousand and thirty high school students were administered the South Oaks Gambling Screen Revised for Adolescents (SOGS-RA), the Gambling Related Cognitions Scale (GRC...

Several studies examining the relationship of affective decision-making and delay discounting in disordered gambling demonstrated that adult pathological gamblers differ from healthy controls on both reward-related decision tasks. To date no study analyzed the relative contribution of these variables in adolescent gambling. This study was designed...

Among many personality traits, impulsivity represents one of the most important traits associated with pathological gambling. Empirical research has highlighted the multidimensional nature of impulsivity, which includes different heterogeneous traits and behavioral tendencies. The present study experimentally examined reward preferences of patholog...

Chasing, or continuing to gamble to recoup previous losses, is a behavioral marker and a diagnostic criterion for gambling disorder. Even though chasing has been recognized to play a central role in gambling disorder, research on chasing is still relatively scarce. This study first empirically investigated the interplay between cognitive distortion...

Background Although previous studies have investigated the role of attentional bias in gambling, the inconsistent findings and the paucity of research require further investigations, as well as the examination of the interrelationships between attentional bias, subjective craving, and gambling severity. Methods The present study comprised 80 male...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted mental health, contributing to increase the feeling of loneliness, the psychological distress, and the gaming involvement. Despite accumulating data in the field of gaming, the research examining the psychological determinants of gaming severity, especially in the unique circumstances of COV...

Objectives: The mainstream position on regret in psychological literature is that its necessary conditions are agency and responsibility, that is, to choose freely but badly. Without free choice, other emotions, such as disappointment, are deemed to be elicited when the outcome is worse than expected. In two experiments, we tested the opposite hypo...

The 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) formally recognized gaming disorder as an addictive health disorder like gambling disorder. The ICD-11 assumes that excessive online gaming can lead to functional/clinical impairments and psychological distress among a minority of individuals. The present study investigated...

Over the past decade, several studies have investigated the relationship between cognitive distortions and emotion regulation among adolescent gamblers, demonstrating the exacerbating role of alcohol consumption when co-occurring with gambling problems. An important construct, that to date has been largely neglected, is mentalizing (i.e. the abilit...

Chasing, or continuing to gamble to recoup losses, is a behavioral marker and a diagnostic criterion for gambling disorder. Research on chasing has focused mainly on adults, whereas the analysis of chasing behavior among adolescents has not received empirical attention in the gambling literature. The aim of the present study was to first investigat...

Background: Previous research has emphasized the importance of attentional bias in the maintenance of both adult and adolescent disordered gambling. There is a substantial body of empirical evidence demonstrating facilitated attention and difficulty in disengagement from gambling stimuli among disordered gamblers, but no study has ever experimenta...

Although gambling disorder (GD) criteria do not explicitly address craving, it has received increased attention because it has been found to be a significant predictor of gambling severity. Furthermore, recent findings have suggested that both alcohol consumption and maladaptive personality traits may be risk factors among adult GD. To date, no stu...

Background and aims: Chasing is a behavioral marker and a diagnostic criterion for gambling disorder. Although chasing has been recognized to play a central role in gambling disorder, research on this topic is relatively scarce. This study investigated the association between chasing, alcohol consumption, and mentalization among habitual gamblers....

Background and aims: Chasing refers to continued gambling in an attempt to recoup previous losses and is one of the diagnostic criteria for gambling disorder. However, research on the topic is still in its infancy. This study investigated whether chasing behavior mediates the relationship between time perspective and gambling severity. Methods:...

Evidences from the extant literature suggest that problem gamblers show higher cognitive distortions and reported experiencing higher levels of negative affective states than recreational gamblers. Furthermore, several studies reported that the more the gambling severity, the poorer the performance in behavioral tasks assessing affective decision-m...

Background: Studies investigating attentional biases in gambling have observed that problem gamblers' attention is biased toward gambling cues. Despite the increase of gambling among adolescents, to date, no study has ever examined the role of attentional bias in adolescent gambling, as well as the relationships between adolescent gambling severit...

This study aimed to first investigate the interplay among self-rated ability in both retrospective and prospective memory, time perspective, and negative affectivity to gambling severity. Two hundred and three habitual players took part in the study. Participants were administered the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS), the Consideration of Future C...

Chasing is a central feature of gambling disorder and refers to the attempt by individuals to recover financial losses by continuing to gamble. Although several efforts have been made to individuate the factors involved in the complex phenomenon of chasing, little is known regarding its association with delay discounting and craving, both considere...

This study aimed to first investigate the role that general impairment in mentalization plays in gambling disorder and to analyze the interplay among mentalizing, impulsivity, and time perspective in adolescent gambling. Four hundred and ten late adolescents took part in the study. Participants were administered the South Oaks Gambling Screen Revis...

Chasing, or continuing to gamble in an attempt to recoup losses, is a salient feature of problematic gambling. This study, which controlled for gambling severity and alcohol consumption, investigated the association between chasing and maladaptive personality trait domains among habitual gamblers. Participants comprised 126 adult habitual gamblers...

Background: Chasing losses is a behavioral marker and a diagnostic criterion for gambling disorder. It consists in continuing gambling to recoup previous losses. Although chasing has been recognized playing a central role in gambling disorder, research on this topic is relatively scarce, and it remains unclear whether chasing affects decision-makin...

Abstract The main purpose of this study was to investigate the interplay of functional and dysfunctional impulsivity, delay discounting, time perspective, and emotional negative states on gambling severity in Italian adolescents. A second aim of the study was to analyze the developmental trajectories of gambling involvement, functional and dysfunc...

In the psychological literature, many studies have investigated the neuropsychological and behavioral changes that occur developmentally during adolescence. These studies have consistently observed a deficit in the decision-making ability of children and adolescents. This deficit has been ascribed to incomplete brain development. The same deficit h...

Background and objectives: The etiology of problem gambling is multifaceted and complex. Among others factors, poor decision making, cognitive distortions (i.e., irrational beliefs about gambling), and emotional factors (e.g., negative mood states) appear to be among the most important factors in the development and maintenance of problem gambling....

Background Attentional biases have been recognized as factors responsible for the maintenance of gambling problems. To date, no study has ever assessed the attentional biases among problem gamblers that have discontinued gambling (e.g., abstinent gamblers in treatment). Methods The sample consisted of 75 participants comprising three groups: non-pr...

Background: From a cognitive perspective, attentional biases are deemed as factors responsible in the onset and development of gambling disorder. However, knowledge relating to attentional processes in gambling is scarce and studies to date have reported contrasting results. Moreover, no study has ever examined which component and what type of bias...

Among many personality traits, impulsivity represents one of the most important traits associated with pathological gambling. Empirical research has highlighted the multidimensional nature of impulsivity, which includes different heterogeneous traits and behavioral tendencies. The present study experimentally examined reward preferences of patholog...

This study investigated the effect of helpful contextual information, presented before and after a negative event, on modifying appraisal and emotional reaction. Through the scenario technique, a basic situation of negative outcome (in health or hobby domain) entailing appraisal of high responsibility and low remediability (control condition) was m...

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of alexithymia and cognitive distortions in adolescent gambling. Five hundred and forty-six Italian high school students, between the ages of 17 and 19 years, were administered the South Oaks Gambling Screen Revised for Adolescents (SOGS-RA), the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), and the Gambling...

This study investigated the effect of helpful contextual information, presented before and after a neg-ative event, on modifying appraisal and emotional reaction. Through the scenario technique, a basic situation of neg-ative outcome (in health or hobby domain) entailing appraisal of high responsibility and low remediability (control condition) was...

This paper compares the activation of false memory traces with true memory traces and control items. An incidental learning version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (DRM) is used in conjunction with a Lexical Decision Task (LDT). One hundred participants read 5 DRM lists intermixed with 4 non-word lists. After a delay manipulated into 3 exp...

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of propensity to risk taking, impulsivity, and present versus future orientation in decisionmaking under ambiguity. One hundred and four healthy adults were administered the computer versions of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). They then completed the Barratt...

Contextual Information and Reappraisal of Negative Emotional Events Ivana Baldassarre*, Lucia Abbamonte, Marina Cosenza, Giovanna Nigro, and Olimpia Matarazzo Department of Psychology, Second University of Naples, Italy {ivana.baldassarre,lucia.abbamonte,marina.cosenza, giovanna.nigro,olimpia.matarazzo}@unina2.it Abstract. In this study the effect...

The primary goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between retrospective memory, episodic future thinking and event-based prospective memory performance in preschool, first, and second grade children. One hundred sixty children took part in the experiment. The study included participants from four age groups: 4-year-olds, 5-year-old...

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of global/local processing style, field-(in)dependence, and personality disorder traits in event-based prospective memory performance. One hundred and fifty participants took part in an experiment, where they were administered a computerized version of Navon’s global–local task. The PM task required...

Two experiments examined whether time-based prospective memory performance is influenced by the continuous or discontinuous nature of an ongoing activity. The first experiment demonstrated that prospective memory performance was not influenced by the engagement in continuous or discontinuous ongoing activity. The second experiment demonstrated that...

The self-performed task (SPT) paradigm was employed to investigate incidental memory for action events, focusing on states of awareness at retrieval (Remembering-Knowing) and source monitoring in performed and observed actions, at delays of 1 and 2 weeks. Recognition was better for performed than observed actions, but this effect was visible only a...

In recent decades, the relationship between Machiavellianism and locus of control has received increasing attention in psychological literature. Presented below are the results of various studies conducted to determine correlations between these variables, complete with statistical information concerning gender-specific differences.

This study aimed at assessing whether and to what extent moral judgment and behaviour were: 1. situation-dependent; 2. selectively dependent on cognitive and affective components; 3. influenced by gender and age; 4. reciprocally congruent. In order to achieve these aims, four different types of moral dilemmas were construed and five types of thinki...

The aim of this study was to analyse prospective memory behaviour when people have to fulfil two different intentions whose retention intervals partially overlapped. More specifically, the purpose of the study was to explore the effects of a secondary PM task (either time-based or event-based) on performance of a main time-based PM task. Four embed...

This study investigated the extent to which the type of task influences children's prospective memory performance. 80 subjects, aged 7 to 11 yr. participated in an experiment in which the type of task (time-based vs event-based) and the retention interval (5 min. vs 10 min.) varied. The prospective memory task was embedded in a principal task lasti...

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which the retention interval between intention formation and the execution of the action affects the occurrence of remembering and its accuracy. 126 subjects (48 men and 78 women) between 18 and 24 years participated in a two-phase experiment. An event-based prospective memory task was assigned...

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which the importance of the action to be performed affects its occurrence in a time-based prospective memory task. In the laboratory the effects of importance of intention were shown by Kvavilashvili in 1987 in an activity-based task, e.g., on a task which does not require the interruption of a...

203 Italian adolescents completed an Italian modified version of the Amirkhan's Coping Strategy Indicator and the Italian version of the Spielberger, et al. State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Three brief stories were presented to the subjects who were requested to put themselves in the protagonist's place and to indicate the extent to which they would...

280 Italian undergraduates (90 men and 190 women), ages 18 to 30 years, rated a warm, cold, jealous, or envious stimulus person on 15 7-point semantic differential scales. Varying the sex of the stimulus person, 8 different versions of the description were obtained. Factor analysis, carried out to identify a smaller set of non-redundant dimensions,...

The hypothesis was tested that generalized self-related cognitions concerning sex-role orientations and locus of control beliefs are more strongly associated with cultural membership than with morphophenotype sex. In addition, it was expected that differences in generalized locus of control orientations between the morphophenotype sexes can be dupl...

Several studies were conducted during the period 1978–1983 to ascertain whether there has been, in recent years, change among Italian undergraduates in perceived control. Six samples of Italian undergraduates completed the Italian version of the Rotter locus of control scale. In 1983 I-E scores, for men as well as for women, were significantly high...

177 Italian undergraduates (83 men and 94 women) completed the Italian version of the Spence, et al.'s Personal Attributes Questionnaire and the Italian version of the Christie's Mach IV Scale. One-way analysis of variance indicated for men that undifferentiated individuals reported significantly higher Mach scores. For women, feminine sex-typed in...

139 Italian undergraduates (61 men and 78 women) responded to the Italian version of the Christie's Mach IV scale and to the Italian version of the Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Positive correlations between Mach IV scores and both State Anxiety and Trait Anxiety scores were found for both sexes. The authors hypothesized that moderat...

148 Italian undergraduates (62 men and 86 women) responded to the Italian version of the Christie's Mach IV scale and to the Italian version of the Rotter's Internal-External (I-E) Control scale. The positive correlation between Machiavellianism and external locus of control of .40 was significant for men as well as for women. The results confirm p...

The locus of control construct has occupied a central position in the psychology literature. Locus of control refers to person’s beliefs about control over life events. People that feel personally responsible for the thing that happens to them are labeled internals. Individuals that feel that their outcomes are determined by forces beyond their con...