Lorenzo Tonetti

University of Bologna | UNIBO · Department of Psychology PSI

Background/Objectives: The aim of this study is to shed light on activity-based prospective memory upon the awakening and its association with motor sleep inertia in different phenotypes of insomnia disorder. Methods: To this end, 67 patients with insomnia and 51 healthy controls took part in the study. After enrollment, previously proposed actigra...

The aim of the present work was to analyze possible differences in the wake–sleep and sleep–wake transition in relation to adolescents’ circadian preference using actigraphy. Overall, 729 participants were enrolled in the research and 443 of them wore actigraphs on the non-dominant wrist for at least three nights. According to the reduced Morningne...

Background: Disrupted 24-h sleep-wake and rest-activity cycles are known common features in Huntington's disease (HD) patients; however, critical periods during the 24-h cycle have been less studied. Objective: To analyze the differences between early-mid stage HD patients and healthy controls (HC) in sleep patterns and 24-h motor activity by using...

The active system consolidation theory assumes that sleep between encoding and retrieval promotes memory consolidation. In the present study, we cued new memories during slow-wave (SWS) or rapid eye movements (REM) sleep stages by presenting an instrumental music stimuli that had been previously presented during a learning session. In a within-subj...

Objective: To investigate the activity-based prospective memory performance in patients with insomnia, divided, on the basis of actigraphic evaluation, into sleep onset, maintenance, mixed and negative misperception insomnia. Methods: A total of 153 patients with insomnia (I, 83 females, mean age + SD = 41.37 + 16.19 years) and 121 healthy controls...

Introduction In two studies we investigated if specific acoustic stimulations could be more effective to induce a relaxation response in comparison to silence. Acoustic stimulations included monaural beats and musical sequences based on a pentatonic scale. Methods In the first study, 47 participants evaluated monaural beats and pentatonic sequence...

While previous studies have described the time course of the dissipation of motor sleep inertia (around 70 min after wake-up time) and motor wake inertia (around 20 min after bedtime) in healthy controls (HCs), the corresponding knowledge for persons with early relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) is lacking. To fill in this knowledge gap,...

The aim of the present work was to compare two circadian questionnaires: the Preference Scale (PS) and the reduced version of the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (rMEQ). A sample of 849 (35.10% men) university students, 421 of whom were Spanish (27.55% men; mean age 21.07 + 2.31) and 428 Italian (42.52% men; mean age 23.26 + 3.01), were admin...

Sleep is fundamental for adolescents' healthy development but undergoes dramatic changes in quantity and quality due to the conflict between biological and social rhythms. Insufficient sleep has been associated with worse physical health status and irregular eating behaviors in adolescents. This review aims to systematically synthesize the longitud...

Prospective memory (PM) is essential in everyday life because it concerns the ability to remember to perform an intended action in the future. Individuals diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often show poor performance in PM. Because age can be confounding, we decided to test PM in ADHD patients (children and adults) and...

The aim of this study was to examine the external validity of the reduced Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaires for Children and Adolescents, using circadian motor activity, assessed through actigraphy, as an external criterion. Overall, 458 participants (269 females), with a mean (standard deviation) age of 15.75 (1.16) years, took part in this s...

Research on joint action has demonstrated that individuals are sensitive to a coactor’s attentional relation to jointly attend stimuli. It has also been suggested that some features are necessary to resolve the discrimination problem (i.e., self-own and other-own actions). In the present study, we aimed to test whether the gender composition of int...

Adolescents’ school experience can be developmentally related to adolescents’ sleep. This study aimed to understand how sleep patterns (i.e., sleep duration and sleep-schedule) and weekend sleep-recovery strategies (i.e., social jetlag and weekend catch-up sleep) are associated with adolescents’ school experience (i.e., educational identity and sch...

The first years of life are characterized by an absence or paucity of memories, a condition known as infantile amnesia (IA). This study examines the distribution of the early memory recall of young adults, considering the distinction between the first (0–3) and the second (4–6) epoch of IA. We used five categories to classify memories: Perceptual-V...

The aim of this study was to explore the potentially different associations between two common aspects of adolescents’ life, namely social jetlag and weekend catch-up sleep, with well-being and physical health, according to the actual sleep duration, i.e., <7 h and ≥7 h. To this end, 504 participants (42.1% males), with a mean age of 16.17 (standar...

The time course of motor activity sleep inertia (maSI) dissipation was recently investigated through actigraphy in an everyday life condition from middle childhood to late adulthood. Motor activity sleep inertia was dissipated in 70 min, and the sleep inertia phenomenon was more evident in younger participants than in older participants. The aim of...

Motor activity during the first half of nocturnal sleep is lateralized to the non-dominant hand. What remains is to determine which account could explain this phenomenon: the more pronounced homeostatic deactivation of the dominant hemisphere or the circadian asymmetry in the hemispheric activation. To better understand the nature of these motor as...

Sleep inertia (SI) refers to a complex psychophysiological phenomenon observed after morning awakening that can be described as the gradual recovery of waking-like status after a night of sleep. The time course of SI dissipation in an everyday life condition is little studied. The present study aims to investigate the SI dissipation in motor activi...

This study aimed to provide evidence of the validity of the Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children against an external-objective criterion of the 24 h motor activity pattern assessed through actigraphy. A total of 107 children (60 females; mean age 10.25 ± 0.48) were originally enrolled. Children wore the actigraph model Actiwatch AW64 (Camb...

Early multiple sclerosis (MS) predictive markers of disease activity/prognosis have been proposed but are not universally accepted. Aim of this pilot prospective study is to verify whether a peculiar hyperactivity, observed at baseline (T0) in early relapsing-remitting (RR) MS patients, could represent a further prognostic marker. Here we report re...

Animal Welfare Attitudes (AWA) can be defined as the attitudes of humans towards the welfare of animals. Although AWA has been previously associated with demographic factors as gender, one of the main limitations is that few studies applied robust psychometric questionnaire scales. Moreover, some evidence of cross-cultural variations in AWA have bee...

Circadian rhythms are generated by an endogenous circadian timing system. The biological clock, a key component of the circadian timing system, is anatomically located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus and its functioning is grounded on a genetic-based negative feedback loop mechanism. Circadian rhythms are entrained to th...

Sleep inertia (SI) refers to a complex psychophysiological phenomenon, observed after awakening, that can be described as the gradual recovery of waking-like status. The time course of cognitive performance dissipation in an everyday life condition is still unclear, especially in terms of the sleep stage at awakening (REM or NREM-stage 2) and the r...

Sleep quality is an important clinical construct since it is increasingly common for people to complain about poor sleep quality and its impact on daytime functioning. Moreover, poor sleep quality can be an important symptom of many sleep and medical disorders. However, objective measures of sleep quality, such as polysomnography, are not readily a...

Background: Persons living with HIV (PLWH) frequently report sleep complaints, but objective measurements are still lacking regarding sleep continuity, total sleep time per 24 h, and the links with both prospective memory performance and HIV infection parameters. Methods: PLWH (n = 96) and control (n = 96) groups (balanced for gender and age) were...

Prospective memory (PM) is essential in everyday life because it concerns the ability to remember to perform an intended action in the future. This ability could be influenced by poor sleep quality, the role of which, however, is still being debated. To examine the role of sleep quality in PM in depth, we decided to perform a retrospective naturali...

It is reported that sleep enhances prospective memory (PM), but it remains to be understood whether this influence is moderated by age, since sleep changes across the lifespan. To this end, we performed a retrospective study in a naturalistic setting in a large life span sample: 397 healthy participants (227 females) from middle childhood (nine yea...

Background/Objectives This study aimed to examine the variations of circadian activity rhythm of children according to objective body mass index (BMI) values, using a novel statistical framework (i.e., Functional Linear Modeling, FLM), separately for school- and weekend days. Methods One hundred and seven participants (60 females; mean age: 10.25+...

While relapsing–remitting is the most prevalent course of multiple sclerosis, the prognostic/predictive markers of the worsening of symptomatology are still debated. With reference to other diseases, the study of the circadian activity rhythm, according to the theoretical framework of the two-process model of sleep regulation and applying functiona...

A recent study has applied a novel statistical framework (functional linear modeling: FLM) to the study of circadian activity rhythm (CAR) in adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), pointing out the absence of the physiological post-lunch dip. The aim of the present study was to apply FLM to explore the features of CAR in pediatric A...

Objective: The aim of the present study was to assess the optimal length of actigraphic recordings in patients with narcolepsy type 1. Methods: A secondary analysis was carried out with the previously collected data in eleven patients with narcolepsy type 1. Ten of the 11 patients were medicated at the time of actigraphic recording. Each patient...

The aim of the present study is to explore the effects of a single short one-minute exposure to blue light on cognitive performance. For this purpose, 32 young adults (16 females, mean age 24.06 ± 1.88 years) took part in a within-subjects research design, under two conditions: blue light and no light. Under both conditions, they performed the lexi...

Objectif L’actimétrie est un outil sous-estimé en clinique capable de différencier des patients atteints de narcolepsie de type 1 (NT1), d’insomnie primaire (IP) ou des bons dormeurs, grâce à une combinaison de paramètres actimétriques nocturnes et diurnes. Méthodes Nous avons cherché à tester cette fonction discriminante (DS ou score discriminant...

The aim of this study was to carry out a comparison of the ability to discriminate between extreme chronotypes, i.e., morning- and evening-types, among the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ) and its reduced version (rMEQ). To this end a secondary analysis of cohort studies, using two different approaches, was carried out. The first, subjec...

Objective/background: It has been shown that actigraphy may have a discriminant function (DS) for the diagnosis of narcolepsy type 1 patients (NT1), based on a combination of nighttime and daytime parameters. Here, we aimed to test those findings using another actigraph model with a different clinical sample as control (ie, primary insomniacs, PI)...

The aim of the present study was to analyze the features of circadian motor activity rhythm of adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) patients, by means of functional linear modeling, within the theoretical framework of the two-process model of sleep regulation. Thirty-two ADHD patients and 32 healthy controls (HCs) participated the...

The shared attention theory suggests that people devote greater cognitive resources to those features co-attended simultaneously with others, determining better performance in several types of tasks. When co-actors performed a go/no-go Navon task attending different features of target letters, the performance was impaired, reflecting a joint Navon...

Two secondary analyses of previously collected data were carried out to detect the best screening strategy for primary insomnia (Study 1) and narcolepsy type 1 (Study 2) between two different approaches: (A) step-by-step (i.e. first step: subjective assessment through mini sleep questionnaire – MSQ; second step: objective assessment through actigra...

Motor asymmetry during the first hours of sleep documented in adults found higher activity in the non-dominant limb. The stage of development at which such asymmetries first appear is unknown. Twenty healthy infants were followed from 7 to 12months of age, at 3-week intervals, comparing motor activity of the right and left legs during sleep using t...

Research on joint attention has demonstrated that individuals are sensitive to a coactor's attentional relation to jointly attended stimuli. Within a chronobiological approach, a study was conducted to assess whether the presence of joint attention, as measured by the joint Navon effect, was influenced by the synchrony effect. Pairs of participants...

Background Attentional complaints are common in narcolepsy patients and can overlap with daytime sleepiness features. Few studies attempted to characterize attentional domains in narcolepsy leading to controversial results. We aimed to assess the impact of hypocretin deficiency on attentional functioning by comparing performances on the attention n...

Demographic, clinical, questionnaire and ANT data of participants. (XLSX)

This study aims to describe the 24-hour activity rhythm in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A total of 18 ADHD patients and 37 healthy controls (HCs) wore an actigraph for 7 days. ADHD patients showed higher motor activity than HCs at 4:00, 6:00, 15:00 and 16:00 hour. Within the theoretical framework of the two-process m...

Aiming to verify which is the most effective screening approach for sleep disorders between the serial (first step: sleep self-report measure; second step only in case of positive outcome at the first: objective tool) and parallel (unique step, with the concurrent use of sleep self-report measure and objective tool), a first secondary analysis of p...

Objective: The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between physical self‐efficacy and body mass index in a large sample of schoolchildren. Methods: The Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children was administered to 1560 children (50.4% boys; 8–12 years) from three different countries. Weight and height were also recorded to obtai...

Purpose: Within a chronobiological perspective, the present study aimed to describe 24 h of sleep-wake cycle, motor activity, and food intake patterns in different body mass index (BMI) categories of children through 7 days of actigraphic recording. Methods: Height and weight were objectively measured for BMI calculation in a sample of 115 Itali...

Decision-making is affected by psychological factors like emotional state or cognitive control, which may also vary with circadian rhythmicity. Here, we tested the influence of chronotype (32 morning-type versus 32 evening-type) and time of day (9 a.m. versus 5 p.m.) on interpersonal decision-making as measured by the Ultimatum Game. Participants h...

Objective: The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between physical self-efficacy and body mass index in a large sample of schoolchildren. Methods: The Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children (PPASC) was administered to 1560 children (50.4% boys; 8-12 years) from three different countries. Weight and height were also record...

A secondary analysis of longitudinal and cohort studies was carried out to quantitatively investigate the motor activity pattern, recorded through actigraphy, during the first six hours of nocturnal sleep. The first study was of longitudinal nature. Ten healthy participants (four females) were monitored three times, at baseline (T1) when they were...

This study aimed to test the concurrent validity of an electronic version (to run on tablet) of a sleep diary derived from the core Consensus Sleep Diary compared with the traditional paper and pencil version. To this end, 15 healthy volunteers (six males; mean age 37.20±17.55 years) every morning, for at least seven consecutive days, filled both p...

The present study aimed to explore for the first time the relationship between circadian preference and different decision-making styles. In total, 501 young adults (330 females), with a mean age of 21.07 ± 1.99 years, took part in the study. The participants completed the reduced version of the morningness–eveningness questionnaire (rMEQ) and the...

This work aimed to evaluate the short-term effectiveness of psychotherapy delivered at the counselling service of the University of Bologna (Italy), by means of a single group longitudinal study including a 6-months follow-up. To this end, sixty-six students completed the 6-months follow-up and filled in the Symptom Questionnaire (SQ) three times,...

Background/objective: This study aimed to examine the association between body mass index (BMI) and school performance in high school students by controlling for relevant mediators such as sleep quality, sleep duration and socioeconomic status. Methods: Thirty-seven high school students (mean age: 18.16 ± 0.44 years) attending the same school ty...

The current study was conducted to provide normative data on actigraphic dichotomy index (I < O) (the percentage of in bed activity counts that are less than the median of out of bed counts) in healthy population and to assess whether the I < O could be an effective index in discriminating the circadian motor activity of cancer patients from health...

The association between circadian preference and academic achievement has been assessed through a systematic review and meta-analysis. The literature searches retrieved 1647 studies; 31 studies, with a total sample size of 27 309 participants, fulfilled the inclusion criteria and were included in the meta-analysis. With reference to all these 31 st...

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of sleep timing, quality and duration on school achievement in adolescents. Thirty-six Italian students (mean age: 18.14 ± 0.49 years) attending their last year of high school participated in the study. They completed the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (MEQ-CA). Th...

Two studies were carried out to explore the relationship between circadian typology and the Alternative Five-Factor Model of personality. In the first study, 379 participants (232 females) were administered the reduced version of the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire and the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire. Evening types reported hi...

The aim of the study was to put forward quantitative criteria for the Consensus Sleep Diary, to differentiate insomniacs from normal sleepers. In this retrospective study, we analyzed 295 sleep diaries of patients with primary insomnia (43% were male, ages ranging between 17 and 76 years) collected in two clinical centers for insomnia and 536 sleep...

Purpose: To review the psychometric properties of the questionnaires commonly filled in by children and adolescents to measure circadian preference. Methods: We examined the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (MEQ-CA), the Morningness-Eveningness Scale for Children (MESC) and the Composite Scale of Morningness (CSM)....

The current study was conducted to provide normative data on actigraphic dichotomy index (I5O) (the percentage of in bed activity counts that are less than the median of out of bed counts) in healthy population and to assess whether the I5O could be an effective index in discriminating the circadian motor activity of cancer patients from healthy co...

This study aimed to explore the relationship between sleep time preference of adolescents and their parents, considering gender separately. To this end, 912 adolescents (501 females) from 10 to 17 years were administered the Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents and their parents filled in the Morningness–Eveningness Qu...

Purpose: This study aimed at examining the effects of 2 weeks of dawn simulation on attentional performance in adolescents. Methods: On the whole, 56 adolescents (24 females and 32 males) took part to the study, with a mean age of 17.68 ± 0.97 years (age ranging between 15 and 20 years). Each adolescent was requested to participate for 5 consecu...

The reduced version of the Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire (rMEQ) is widely used to study morningness orientation. The fuzzy analysis helps mapping outputs of the questionnaire irrespective of linguistic and cross-cultural aspects in an efficient manner. In the present study, the rMEQ was administered to a convenience sample of university stu...

The aim of the present study was to compare the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioural (CBT) and psychodynamic (PDT) therapies in the treatment of anxiety among university students. To this aim, the Symptom Questionnaire (SQ) was completed by 30 students assigned to CBT and by 24 students assigned to PDT, both at the beginning and at the end of tre...

Primary insomnia is characterized by difficulty in falling asleep and/or remaining asleep, by early morning awakening and/or nonrestorative sleep, and resultant daytime dysfunction in the absence of specific physical, mental, or substance-related causes. However, the studies on daytime cognitive functioning of insomnia patients report inconclusive...

A classical distinction in the time perception field is between intervals above and below 1 sec (Grondin, 2010), which seem to be processed by two different systems. Sub-second intervals are mainly processed by the automatic timing which not requires attentional modulation, whereas supra-second durations is under the control of higher cognitive fun...

The current study was conducted to evaluate psychometric properties and analyze the convergent validity of the Italian version of the Mini Sleep Questionnaire (MSQ). In addition, it was aimed to put forward cut off values to be used in screening protocols. MSQ was administered to 1830 participants (age range 18-87), of whom 1208 filled also the Sle...

A positive sleep effect has been recently observed on prospective memory. In this retrospective study (N = 254, 30.64 ± 13.79 years, 55.10% of females), we investigated the relationship between sleep and prospective memory, comparing the performance of “good” and “bad” sleepers in a naturalistic prospective memory task (to remember to press the eve...

The relationship between seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and subjective quality of sleep/wake cycle in adolescents was explored. The Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (SPAQ-CA) and Mini Sleep Questionnaire (MSQ) were administered to 345 adolescents living in the city of Cesena (Emilia-Romagna region, Italy) (2...

This study adds to the international literature on the assessment of the effectiveness of psychotherapies delivered by university counseling centers. The present study evaluated the effectiveness of psychotherapy in 226 students (179 women, 47 men; M age = 24.8 yr., SD = 4.0) who started psychotherapy treatment at the counseling service of the Univ...

The main goal of the present study was to examine the effects of transition into and out of daylight saving time (DST) on the quality of the sleep/wake cycle, assessed through actigraphy. To this end, 14 healthy university students (mean age: 26.86 ± 3.25 yrs) wore an actigraph for 7 d before and 7 d after the transition out of and into DST on fall...

It is well established that temporal events are represented on a spatially oriented mental time line from left to right. Depending on the task characteristics, the spatial representation of time may be linked to different types of dimensions, including manual response codes and physical space codes. The aim of the present study was to analyze wheth...

The spatial-temporal association indicates that time is represented spatially along a left-to-right line. It is unclear whether the spatial-temporal association is mainly related to a perceptual or a motor component. In addition, the spatial-temporal association is not consistently found using a time reproduction task. Our rationale for this findin...

A previous study has reported a significant month-of-birth effect on mood seasonality in the northern hemisphere. Higher mood seasonality was observed for university students born during spring or summer months (long photoperiod) compared to those born during autumn or winter months (short photoperiod). The aim of this study was to test the hypothe...

We explored the relationship between circadian preference and perceived quality of the sleep/wake cycle in Italian high school students aged between 14 and 18 years. Three hundred and forty-five participants (299 females, 46 males) were administered the Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (MEQ-CA) and the Mini Sleep Q...

The present pilot study aimed to compare sleep estimation with a smartphone accelerometer to that of an actigraph accelerometer in healthy adults. Thirteen volunteers (four females; mean age 22.97 3.44) simultaneously wore Actiwatch actigraphs and put the smartphone close to the pillow for at least four consecutive overnight recordings. On