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Publications (60)
Background
Vulvodynia, a chronic pain condition affecting 15% of women aged 18–70, significantly impacts daily life and sexual functioning, contributing to self-perception issues, depression, and anxiety. This study aims to explore Italian womens’ experiences, recognizing the influence of cultural background on their perceptions of chronic pain and...
Lo stato vegetativo è una condizione in cui, pur mantenendo le funzioni vitali, una persona rimane priva di coscienza, non avendo la possibilità di fare esperienza di sé e del mondo o di interagire con altri. Creando uno stato intermedio tra presenza e assenza, questa condizione solleva dilemmi con cui si confrontano ogni giorno operatori sanitari...
Lo scopo di questo studio è consistito nell'esplorare più a fondo il Self-Talk degli atleti coinvolti nelle
specialità della maratona durante gli ultimi 12 chilometri di gara, fase dove la fatica e lo sforzo sono
massimali e nella quale i pensieri possono essere influenzati da carenza glicemica. 495 maratoneti (398 maschi, 97 femmine), di cui 17 pr...
Introduction
Parents vary in their gradual adaptation to the demands of caring for an autistic child. Their experiences can be positive, negative, or a combination of both, depending on the severity of the cases and various personal and social factors. Cross-cultural comparisons can aid in understanding how contextual factors, such as the availabil...
Introduction:
Mental health problems seemed to have increased among university students during the COVID-19 pandemic. To deepen our understanding of the pandemic's effects in this population, we conducted qualitative research to investigate any perceived changes in students during the pandemic, differentiating the sample based on the presence or a...
This qualitative exploratory research delves into the intricate life narratives of forcibly displaced individuals residing within the Emergency Transit Mechanism in Niger, employing a methodology grounded in life narrative analysis. The primary objective is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the potential stressors and traumatic experiences e...
Skin picking disorder (SPD) is a body-focused repetitive behavior recently added to the DSM-V. It mainly affects women, with a prevalence ranging from 1.5 to 5.4%. Picking causes skin lesions that can lead to serious infections and permanent skin problems, usually on the face, scalp, arms, and legs. The behavior impairs quality of life and is assoc...
Introduction
Given its profound and transversal impact, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 marked a deep point of division in how people make sense of the world and their lives. The consequences of this event were remarkable, especially for populations already facing vulnerability, exclusion, and discrimination. In Italy, over 3 million people (5.2% of...
Persistently alive but unaware, vegetative state patients are stuck in the transition between life and death - that is, in a liminal hotspot. This condition raises complex ethical and legal dilemmas concerning end-of-life action. Drawing on social representations (SRs) and the liminality framework, our research investigated how the vegetative state...
Objective
Research showed that ovarian cancer poses unique challenges to patients’ care experiences and that patients’ social networks could affect their care path significantly. The present study aimed to analyse the metaphors that patients used to signify the impact of the illness on their social relationships and the role of relationships in dea...
Children's coming out has a significant impact at the family level, and par-ents' reactions can affect their children's well-being. Research investigating parents' perspectives is still limited outside the USA and primarily includes parents involved in LGB associations. Our study investigates coming out within families in Italy, a context character...
The vegetative state is a condition in which a person is wakeful without being aware. To understand a patient who can be considered neither alive nor dead, caregivers and professionals re-define traditional identities, roles, and practices. By drawing on wider research, in the current chapter, we aimed to show how caregivers and practitioners posit...
Polyamory is an umbrella term denoting the practice of having multiple romantic and intimate relationships with the consent of everyone involved. Within a mononormative culture, becoming polyamorous may be associated with uncertainty and a feeling of being suspended. Moreover, the preferential attitude towards monogamy marginalises polyamory as ind...
The aim of the study was to explore the experiences and representations
of Italian parents of TGE (Transgender and Gender-Expansive)
adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria who, for the first time,
attended a gender clinic for psychological consultation. This study
presents findings from fifteen parents of TGE adolescents, mostly (93%) trans bo...
Our present study sought to qualitative explore the perceptions of experts on the meaning of children agency in a context characterized by ongoing colonial violence and structural racism. Namely, we explored culture and context-specific features of agency, experts' perceptions about a decolonized definition, and gaps with the mainstream definition...
Purpose:
This study explores the disease experience of adolescents and young adults with T1DM focusing on the barriers and facilitators that characterise their disease self-care. Self-care requires complex decision making and cooperation between patients, their families, the healthcare team, and the social support system. Personal and social facto...
Breast cancer patients are primary users of Internet Health Forums, virtual self‐help communities where they find and share information, preoccupations, and support. Previous literature has mainly focused on analysing the contents and the outcomes of breast cancer forums' participation. In light of the Community of Practice theoretical model, our r...
Our research explored the social representations of the “vegetative state” across different cultural (India, Italy, and the UK) and social milieus (left-leaning, right-leaning, and religious/tabloid newspapers). The aim was to discover how public discourse engages liminality between life and death. Qualitative and quantitative text analyses were co...
Background & Aims
Several symptoms impair the quality of life (QoL) of patients with primary biliary cholangitis (PBC). They are reported to vary significantly in different countries. Aim of our study was to explore whether there is a geographical clustering that accounts for symptoms in PBC.
Methods
Data was analysed from four cohorts of PBC pati...
Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus can cause serious complications; it has a severe impact on the quality of life and high costs. One of the key strategies to manage diabetes is self-care, a complex multifactorial process influenced by personal, cultural, and systemic factors, that comprises self-care maintenance, self-care monitoring, and self-care manageme...
This article provides a description of the presence of qualitative research in Italian social and organisational psychology. The first section of the article identifies three major phases of qualitative methods and the factors that, from the 1990s, played a major role in their development: the legitimisation of qualitative research in sociology, th...
We applied conversation analysis in an unselected continuous series of 70 patients to discriminate patients with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) from patients with epilepsy. Two psychologists examined the patients' recorded reports. Patients were also submitted to an extensive neuropsychological battery in order to verify whether specific...
Experiences of social exclusion, including ostracism and rejection, can last anywhere from a few seconds to many years. Most research focused on short-term social exclusion, whereas virtually no empirical work has investigated the experiences of long-term social exclusion. Williams theorized that prolonged experiences of social exclusion (i.e., ost...
A text analysis of dreams and waking-life narratives let us detect typical dream contents. The sample is composed of 1,000 subjects, from early adolescents to young adults, including males and females. For each subject, we collected a dream and a waking-life episode according to "the most recent dream" (Hartmann, Elkin, && Garg, 1991) and "a recent...
Mutual aid groups have become a common form of help in the mental health field. Although self-help groups are associated with a range of health and social benefits, they remain poorly understood in terms of the dynamics of their interactions. Adopting an ethnographic-discursive approach, we conducted a 6-month observation of the meetings of a self-...
Objective:
The premature birth of their infant can constitute a sudden interruption of the transition to motherhood that requires a reorganisation of the process. The present study aimed to analyse the experience of the transition to motherhood of preterm infants' mothers, framing it within Stern's transition to motherhood theory (Stern, 1995).
M...
The analysis of discourses involves problems and choices related to the integration of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the formalisation of qualitative analysis, the software used and the identification of the units of analysis. These are issues that can be solved considering the typology of discourses analysed and the topic under exami...
Teachers' perceptions of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can influence the diagnostic rates of the disorder and the management of children in schools. This study investigated the knowledge and perceptions of ADHD in a sample of 589 Italian primary school teachers using a self-report questionnaire that included the ADHD perceptions q...
Research suggests that ostracism increases susceptibility to indirect forms of social influence (e.g., conformity). Yet, no study to date has explored whether the effects of ostracism extend to the most direct form of social influence—obedience. We investigated whether ostracized individuals would be more likely to obey a direct command to do somet...
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most common diagnosis given to children. In recent decades, there has been an increase in the diagnosis of ADHD and in methylphenidate use. This research analyses the discursive construction of ADHD in the Italian context, focusing on the positioning of the child. The study addresses the discou...
The research analyses media discourse on migration in Italy, regarded as a means of reproducing and maintaining a racist interpretation of inter-group relations. The theoretical framework is the Critical Discourse Analysis approach. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on data consisting of headlines and articles from the Italian ne...
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder is currently the most debated childhood psychiatric diagnosis. Given the circulation of competing perspectives about the 'real' causes of children's behaviour and the 'best' way to treat them, we aim to analyse the interactions of the central social actors' discourses about attention deficit/hyperactivity di...
Objective:
This study explores the underlying values and beliefs that guide women's reasoning on prenatal genetic test (PGT) uptake, as framed by their own words, during a group discussion, in a Catholic country such as Italy.
Methods:
Women's reasoning was explored by means of five focus group consisting of seven pregnant women and 13 new mothe...
Studies regarding health care professionals' representations of pain indicate that doctors and nurses tend to concentrate on the organic origin of pain, and to view pain as subordinate to diagnosis and treatment of the disease; they also tend to underestimate the psychological and psychosocial components of pain, which means that they generally vie...
This study investigates the sense of community and interethnic relations in two different metropolitan areas that vary in ethnic heterogeneity. The study was conducted in Milan, Italy using a sample of 318 participants living in different city districts that vary in ethnic heterogeneity (low vs. high). The participants completed a questionnaire tha...
This study investigates the illness experience of women who are affected by primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), a rare chronic liver disease which mostly affects women. Despite the fact that PBC is medically recognised, it shares many characteristics with other chronic and controversial conditions which may lead to delegitimation of the patient's expe...
Research on decision making suggests that a wide range of spontaneous processes may influence medical judgment.
We considered an easily accessible strategy, anchoring and insufficient adjustment, which might contribute to health care professionals' miscalibration of patients' pain.
A sample (n=423) of physicians, nurses, medical students, and nursi...
The ability to detect facial expressions of pain is crucial in eliciting prosocial behaviors towards the individual experiencing pain. Previous studies have shown that the sufferers' gender can affect the observers' explicit judgment of the pain face, thus suggesting its possible influence on pain decoding. The present study investigates whether th...
Nella ricerca sul genere, la proposta di una prospettiva teorica innovativa - centrata sulla critica al riduzionismo biologista e all'essenzialismo - si č accompagnata a una riflessione critica sull'approccio cognitivo
e sulla sua caratterizzazione di genere, il
. Tale riflessione viene discussa nell'articolo in relazione a temi epistemologici - il...
This article presents two experiments aiming to investigate the adoption of a graduated measure to describe credibility attribution by observers who evaluate patients' pain accounts. A total of 160 medical students were required to express a credibility judgment on the pain intensity level of hypothetical patients. We used 16 vignettes based on a f...
The available self-report questionnaire for the quality of life in patients with primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC-40) is currently validated only in the British population but it lacks an evaluation of its dimensionality.
To validate the Italian and Japanese versions of PBC-40 and to assess the dimensionality of the original structure of PBC-40 by a...
- Pain is a symptom often associated with disease, but several studies indicate that hospital pain management continues to be inadequate. This fact seems to depend on representations of the problem and professional practices which are not likely to change. The purpose of this qualitative study, conducted in two hospitals in the north of Italy, is t...
Fatigue is considered to be a specific symptom of primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), while the prevalence of fatigue in Japanese PBC patients remain unclear, probably due to lack of objective scales for assessment of fatigue in Japanese. In this study, we developed the Japanese version of Fisk Fatigue Severity Score (FFSS), frequently employed in the...
Background: The available self-report questionnaire for the quality of life in patients with primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC-40) is currently validated only in the British population but it lacks an evaluation of its dimensionality. Aims: To validate the Italian and Japanese versions of PBC-40 and to assess the dimensionality of the original structu...
We present a lexical correspondence analysis supported by T-lab (Lancia, 2004) of the Italian parliamentary plenary debates on immigration (Turco-Napolitano and Bossi-Fini laws) held at the Italian Camera during two periods (1996-2001 and 2001-2006). The Turco-Napolitano draft bill was supported by the left-wing parties while the Bossi-Fini draft b...
In this research, we suppose that the Di Bella case showed a separation, that is at the basis of the relation between people and the "official medicine", in an emblematic way: the separation between the reified universe--that is the scientific research with its necessary and universal rules, the medical practice, the medical and governmental instit...
