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Publications (105)
Introduction
Several developmental changes occur in adolescence, particularly in the metarepresentational domain, which allows and promotes adaptive sociality. We explored the possible relationships between theory of mind (ToM) and definitional competence, both metarepresentational, beyond age and gender effects.
Methods
To reach our goals, we inv...
The question that the authors of this article are collectively concerned with is as follows: how is it possible to protect children without disempowering them? To this end, the authors work to change adultcentric scholarly and social norms that justify rationales that marginalize children. The article begins with a theoretical overview of childism,...
We present the final phase of the validation of the operationalization of Adultcentrism (AD) and Black Pedagogy (BP) constructs, in order to explore in various contexts their usefulness as crucial concepts of reflection to promote children’s well-being and quality in adult-child relationships (Florio et al., 2020b, 2020a, 2022). Parents of primary...
This study proposes a psychometric validation of the Italian version of the Child–Parent Relationship Scale (CPRS) developed by Pianta in 1992. Based on attachment theory, the scale assesses parents’ relationship perceptions with their own child and comprises three scales: Closeness, Conflict, and Dependency. A sample of 501 parents (188 fathers an...
Introduction
Given the vulnerability of children during the COVID-19 pandemic, paying close attention to their wellbeing at the time is warranted. The present protocol-based systematic mixed-studies review examines papers published during 2020–2022, focusing on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children's internalizing/externalizing symptoms a...
After formal school entry, theory of mind development encounters a blooming period of growth intertwined with social and academic achievements and challenges. Within this framework, in last years researchers have proposed training programs to foster mature ToM skills, but also, to test causal pathways for the role that ToM development may have in b...
Background:
The COVID-19 outbreak caused severe changes in school activities over the past two years. Teachers underwent a re-planning of their teaching approaches, shifting from face-to-face teaching formats to remote ones. These challenges resulted in high levels of burnout. The identification of risk/protective factors contributing to burnout i...
Background. The present paper focuses on meta-representational changes occurring in ageing by studying the decline in Definitional Competence, an ability so far little studied in this period of life. Purpose. The paper hypothesises a relation between Theory of Mind (ToM) and Definitional Competence, in a view that posits the former as a preparatory...
The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures to face it have placed children and their caregivers in front of many challenges that could represent sources of stress. This work aims to explore the point of view of children through drawing, as a spontaneous means of expression, relating it to parents’ perceptions of children’s difficulties, strengths, and...
Theory of Mind (ToM), a high-order human social cognition skill, is relevant for mental health and wellbeing and frequently impaired in many clinical conditions. To detect ToM difficulties, validated and standardized measures need to be adopted in clinical practice. The Yoni task provides a comprehensive evaluation of first-order, second-order, aff...
Mentalization is a key social ability that develops from infancy to adulthood, starting from early familiar attachment relationships. Children experience several contexts, in particular, educational ones such as school, where they build new attachment relationships with teachers. Although the amount of research on the links between mentalization an...
Questo lavoro presenta un questionario sviluppato per raccogliere ed esplorare le rappresentazioni e gli atteggiamenti degli insegnanti rispetto al recente e considerevole aumento di diagnosi di Disturbi Specifici dell'Apprendimento (DSA) nelle scuole italiane. Il questionario Rappresentazione e Atteggiamenti rispetto ai DSA (RADSA) è stato elabora...
Mentalization is a useful ability for social functioning and a crucial aspect of mentalizing is emotion regulation. Literature suggests programmes for children and adults to increase mentalizing abilities useful both for emotional and social competences. For this reason, the issue of how to prompt children's mentalization has started to attract res...
This work presents a questionnaire developed to gather and explore teachers’ attitudes and representations in respect to the recent considerable increase of Specific Learning Disability (SLD) diagnoses in Italian schools. The RADSA questionnaire (acronym including the Italian equivalent of SLD: “DSA”) has been constructed on the basis of the refere...
In a complex and systemic view of human development, the educational relationship is conceived as the keystone of development (Pianta, 1999; Pianta, 2001). However, harsh discipline practices may still be culturally rooted, thus affecting children’s well-being. Two constructs that may provide useful insights on this topic are Adultcentrism (AD) and...
In order to explore the psychological impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the caregiver–child relationship, we investigated the interplay among COVID-19 exposure and children’s internalizing/externalizing problems during the Italian lockdown, hypothesizing a mediation effect played by maternal distress. Additionally, we included maternal reflective...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249272.].
Background:
When COVID-19 was declared as a pandemic, many countries imposed severe lockdowns that changed families' routines and negatively impacted on parents' and children's mental health. Several studies on families with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) revealed that lockdown increased the difficulties faced by individuals with ASD...
This study proposes a psychometric validation of the Italian version of the Mentalized Affectivity Scale (MAS) developed by Greenberg and colleagues in 2017. The mentalized affectivity construct integrates mentalization ability in the process of emotional regulation. An adult sample (N = 506) completed the 60-items MAS online version. In contrast t...
The present study evaluated: i) the effects of two training programs designed for promoting Theory of Mind (ToM) skills in children aged 7/8, and ii) the relations between second-order recursive thinking (II-order-RT), advanced-ToM (Adv_ToM) and metacognition. Ninety-one 7- to 8-year-old children were assigned to one of three training conditions: a...
The present study focused on the psychological impact that the lockdown due to coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) had on families in Italy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Italian government imposed a strict lockdown for all citizens. People were forced to stay at home, and the length of the lockdown was uncertain. Previous studies analyzed the im...
The present study focused on the psychological impact that the lockdown due to COVID-19 had on families in Italy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Italian government imposed a strict lockdown for all citizens. People were forced to stay at home, and the length of the lockdown was uncertain. Previous studies analyzed the impact of social distance m...
The present contribute focuses on the concept of “Black Pedagogy” (Rutschky, 1977. ISBN: 3548356702), meant as a set of educational practices assimilable into those that nowadays are included in the frame of physical and psychological maltreatment (e.g., corporal punishment, frightening children, etc.). The purpose of this work is to present our op...
The term “adultcentrism” refers to a paradigm of thought that leads adults to provide inadequate or distorted responses to children’s needs (Furioso, 2000), despite the belief of acting in children’s best interest. Our un- derstanding of adult-child relationship could be subjected to such adultcentric bias, thus preventing the acknowledgement of th...
Maintaining social skills such as Theory of Mind (ToM) competences is important to counteract the conversion into dementia in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Multidimensional nonpharmacological interventions demonstrated their potential in improving cognitive and behavioral abilities; however, little is known about the long-term effect of such int...
In the last decade considerable attention has been devoted to the possible contribution of social media, and the Internet generally, to instigating adolescents' engagement in self-harm activities, which are considered the result of a combination of multidimensional variables, such as depression and anxiety. This study aimed to identify, using laten...
Recent evidence showed that it is possible to help children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development during preschool and middle childhood. This study aimed to promote advanced mentalizing skills in children attending Year 2 of primary school through a ToM training programme based on narratives followed by multiple‐choice questions and conversations abou...
The manipulation of the proposer's description in the ultimatum game (UG) using mentalistic labels might influence the final decision along with the sensitivity toward fairness. The present study aimed to investigate neural changes related to the mentalistic description of the proposer in the UG task. For this purpose, 21 healthy adults played the...
The present work investigates the link between attachment relationships, mentalization, and emotional regulation in 10-year-olds children. The aim is to verify if children-teacher attachment relationship could influence children's mentalization style and cognitive/emotional regulation strategies. For this purpose, 110 children were tested with the...
The aim of the study was to explore cognitive and affective dimensions of ToM using the computerized Yoni task in participants with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI=16), early stage of Parkinson’s Disease (PD=14), and healthy controls (HC=18) Results demonstrated that the Yoni task was effective in discriminating between groups in 1th order...
During adolescence and early adulthood, individuals deal with important developmental changes, especially in the context of complex social interactions. Previous studies demonstrated that those changes have a significant impact on the social decision making process, in terms of a progressive increase of intentionality comprehension of others, of th...
In this study, we seek to widen our understanding of the developmental processes underlying bargaining behaviour in children addressing the concept of prospective thinking. We argue that the emergence of the capacity to think prospectively about future outcomes or behaviours in response to current actions is a required precedent to strategic decisi...
Background
Decision making is a complex psychological process driven by emotions. Among the most unpleasant ones are the situations when the obtained outcome is not the one expected. This emotional experience is influenced by sense of agency, i.e. the feeling that we voluntarily control our actions and, through them, events in the world. Negative c...
Borderline intellectual functioning (BIF) is characterized by heterogeneous cognitive difficulties, with an intelligence quotient (IQ) between 70 and 85 points, and a failure to meet the developmental and sociocultural standards for personal independence and social responsibility required in daily life. The fact that this population still remain a...
Mentalization research focuses on different aspects of this topic, highlighting individual differences in mentalizing and proposing programs of intervention for children and adults to increase this ability. The “Thought in Mind Project” (TiM Project) provides training targeted to adults—teachers or parents—to increase their mentalization and, conse...
Financial education for children involves the transmission of—and contributes to modify—knowledge and behaviours in and in relation to the economic domain, in different ways at different ages. From a psychological perspective, to make financial education for young people effective it is necessary to consider two related matters: the nature of the d...
Background: Two case reports of patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) are presented with the aim to study Theory of Mind (ToM) in the evolution from successful to unsuccessful neurocognitive aging.
Methods: A 75-year-old man, six years of education, who converted to Alzheimer's Disease (AD) (Case 1), and a 60- year-old woman, five years of...
A topic of common interest to psychologists and philosophers is the spontaneous flow of thoughts when the individual is awake but not involved in cognitive demands. This argument, classically referred to as the “stream of consciousness” of James, is now known in the psychological literature as “Mind-Wandering.” Although of great interest, this cons...
The Mind-Reading ability through the eyes is an important component of the affective Theory of Mind (ToM), which allows people to infer the other’s mental state from the eye gaze. The aim of the present study was to investigate to which extent age-associated structural brain changes impact this ability and to determine if this association is relate...
Il presente lavoro si occupa del tema dell’educazione economico-finanziaria in ottica psicologica, con particolare attenzione alle abilità e alle conoscenze che i soggetti devono possedere per comprendere i concetti economico-finanziari e acquisire nuove competenze in merito. L’educazione economico-finanziaria in età evolutiva consiste infatti sia...
Un argomento di interesse comune a psicologi e filosofi è il fluire spontaneo dei pensieri quando l’individuo è sveglio ma non coinvolto in compiti cognitivi. Questo argomento, classicamente riferito allo “stream of consciousness” di James, è oggi noto in letteratura come “Mind-Wandering “(MW). Sebbene di rilevante interesse, tale costrutto è rimas...
This study explores the development of theory of mind, operationalized as recursive thinking ability, from adolescence to early adulthood (
N
= 110; young adolescents = 47; adolescents = 43; young adults = 20). The construct of theory of mind has been operationalized in two different ways: as the ability to recognize the correct mental state of a c...
The sensitivity to fairness undergoes relevant changes across development. Whether such changes depend on primary inequity aversion or on sensitivity to a social norm of fairness is still debated. Using a modified version of the Ultimatum Game that creates informational asymmetries between Proposer and Responder, a previous study showed that both p...
Intertemporal choice is a decision-making dilemma related to outcomes of different entity located at different time points. Economic and psychological literature on this topic showed the phenomen of temporal discounting, i.e., the proclivity to devalue the outcome distant in time on the basis of the time delay necessary to obtain it. The goals of t...
The goal of this clinical case study is to investigate the possibility of training communication abilities in people with Rett Syndrome (RS). Usually, girls with RS never exceed the sensorimotor stage of development, but the inter-individual variability typical of RS may lead us to doubt the irrevocability of that developmental limit, especially fo...
The study aimed to advance the traditional issue of identifying decision strategy by analyzing the information processing in terms of visual exploration patterns. Twenty-seven participants played as responders in a computerized ver-sion of Ultimatum Game with an anonymous virtual partner. Responders tended to reject unfair offers, probably due to t...
This study investigated two different expressions of the so-called curse of knowledge in primary school children: hindsight bias and outcome bias. Further, it explored the possible predictive function of false belief understanding in reducing these biases. Ninety-one children aged 7, 9, and 11 years (middle- to upper-middle class) were administered...
The aim of this research paper is to investigate Theory of Mind (ToM) capacities with Rett Syndrome (RS), which is similar to autism yet with more significant impairments. RS patients can best be described as hardly ever advancing past the sensorimotor stage, or the period described by Piaget between birth and eighteen months during which an infant...
Theory of Mind (ToM) is involved in decision making in strategic games with adults, while its results with children are still controversial, probably because the literature to date has not directly assessed children's concept of fairness. The goal of this research is to investigate what constitutes fairness across different age groups (children age...
The aim of this research paper is to investigate Theory of Mind (ToM) ca- pacities with Rett Syndrome (RS), which is similar to autism yet with more significant impairments. RS patients can best be described as hardly ever advancing past the sensorimotor stage, or the period described by Piaget between birth and eighteen months during which an infa...
This chapter is a combined effort, and it is distinct in two ways. On the one hand, it proposes the most recent theoretical perspectives on Theory of Mind development within a contextual view. On the other hand, the following pages discuss the work of those people who, over the last fifteen years, have collaborated with Olga Liverta Sempio, to whom...
Il presente lavoro intende fornire alcuni dati preliminari a supporto della validazione italiana della Scala di Consapevolezza Emotiva – versione bambini (LEAS-C; Bajgar et al., 2005; Lane et al., 1990). Obiettivo della scala e valutare la consapevolezza dei propri e degli altrui stati emotivi in bambini di eta scolastica. La ricerca prevede la som...
Theory of Mind (ToM) undergoes changes at the behavioral level in pathological aging (Alzheimer's disease (AD)) and at the neural level in physiological aging. The aim was to determine if there are changes in ToM in the behavioral and neural domains in old subjects with high risk of switching from successful to unsuccessful neurocognitive aging. Pa...
In social decision-making individuals make choices in an interactive context and their decisions may therefore be influenced by information they receive about features of the other player. These features may 'frame' the other player in particular ways and generate expectations about the outcome. This research examines the impact of information abou...
Research on Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand behaviour based on mental state representation, has shifted towards a life span perspective in typical and atypical conditions (dementia).
The aim of this study is to investigate the presence and the features of ToM decay in early Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients compared to healthy contr...
Few studies have addressed the role of different aspects of the Theory of Mind (ToM) (intentionality and false belief understanding)
in decision-making by adults playing strategic games where the importance of fairness is crucial. Even more interesting, this
topic has been less investigated with children. The goal of this research was to explore th...
Theory of Mind--ToM, the capacity to understand one's own and other people's mental states and to refer to them to foresee and explain the behaviour--relies upon a circumscribed neural system: the posterior end of the superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), the adjacent temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), the temporal pole (TP), the medial prefrontal cortex...
The study of selective attention and its influence on communication in patients with Rett Syndrome (RS), in which communication abilities are impaired is particularly relevant. The aim of this study was to analyse attention and communication abilities in RS. A sample of 20 children (10 girls with RS and 10 control girls, matched on mental age) were...
