Marcello Gallucci

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca | UNIMIB · Department of Psychology

Pathological narcissism implies a fragile self-view. The psychological effects of ego-relevant events in people high in pathological narcissism, however, are still uncertain. The study examined the effects of pathological narcissism on psychological reactions to ego-relevant events occurring in private or public settings. Participants (N = 410) com...

Financial well-being is a desirable state as it benefits individuals, families, organizations, and society, and these benefits reach beyond the financial domain. We assessed financial well-being as two components (current financial stress and expected future financial security) and used data from a representative sample of adults in the United King...

Nielsen et al. (1) argue that Van Doesum et al. (2) need to consider three points for their interpretation of a positive association between individual-level social mindfulness (SoMi) and environmental performance (EPI) at the country level (3). The association is weaker when 1) it is controlled for GDP and 2) when the data of three countries are r...

A relevant portion of patients with disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (COVID-19) experience negative outcome, and several laboratory tests have been proposed to predict disease severity. Among others, dramatic changes in peripheral blood cells have been described. We developed and validated a laboratory score sol...

Introduction: Depression is a comorbidity in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). However, its diagnosis is challenged by the co-occurrence of a similar frontotemporal (FT) behavioral symptom—i.e., apathy. Moreover, its psychometric evaluation is confounded by motor disabilities. This study aimed at investigating psychometric properti...

Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost...

Background Patients suffering from stroke in the acute/post - acute phases often present with depressive mood — which negatively impacts on patients’ prognosis. However, psychometric evaluation of mood in acute stroke patients may be challenging due to cognitive deficits. Tools investigating emotional states via a vertical analogue line may overcom...

Objective. Up to 50% of patients affected by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) show behavioral changes within the spectrum of frontotemporal degeneration (FTD). Behavioral dysfunctions in ALS patients negatively impact on management, prognosis and survival. It is, thus, crucial to develop ALS-specific psychometric tools for early detecting altera...

Background Working memory (WM) abilities are frequently impaired in neurological disorders affecting fronto-parietal cortical/sub-cortical structures. WM deficits negatively influence interventional outcomes and everyday functioning. This study thus aimed at the following: (a) developing and standardizing an ecologically valid task for WM assessmen...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.554678.].

The Rivermead assessment of somatosensory performance (RASP) provides a quantitative assessment of somatosensory processing, suitable for brain-damaged patients suffering from stroke. It consists of seven subcomponents: Subtest 1 (sharp/dull discrimination), Subtest 2 (surface pressure touch), Subtest 3 (surface localization), Subtest 4 (sensory ex...

Several studies have used text analysis software such as Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to study how language modification reflects improvements in individuals’ psychophysical health. The aim of this preliminary single‐case study was to evaluate the linguistic changes occurring during EMDR sessions in a patient suffering from anorexia ner...

The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 has forced governments to impose a lockdown, and many people have suddenly found themselves having to reduce their social relations drastically. Given the exceptional nature of similar situations, only a few studies have investigated the negative psychological effects of forced social isolation and how they can be m...

Objectives: To develop predictive criteria for COVID-19-associated cytokine storm (CS), a severe hyperimmune response that results in organ damage in some patients infected with COVID-19. We hypothesised that criteria for inflammation and cell death would predict this type of CS. Methods: We analysed 513 hospitalised patients who were positive f...

The present study used a Solomon four-group quasi-experimental design to examine the short-term effect of a large-scale national financial education program on children’s knowledge and skills in responsible spending and performing transactions effectively. Our study included a representative sample of Dutch pupils in the fifth grade of primary scho...

Background and purpose The number of people suffering from stroke is strongly increasing, giving rise to multiple cognitive deficits which frequently prevent a full recovery. The identification of both spared and impaired cognitive domains has a key role to plan adequate interventions. However, the existing standard tests are either too expensive i...

It is widely believed that intensive music training can boost cognitive and visuo-motor skills. However, this evidence is primarily based on retrospective studies; this makes it difficult to determine whether a cognitive advantage is caused by the intensive music training, or it is instead a factor influencing the choice of starting a music curricu...

In this paper we describe and validate a new coordinate-based method for meta-analysis of neuroimaging data based on an optimized hierarchical clustering algorithm: CluB (Clustering the Brain). The CluB toolbox permits both to extract a set of spatially coherent clusters of activations from a database of stereotactic coordinates, and to explore eac...

In this study, we explored vagally-mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) responses, a psychophysiological index of cognitive self-regulatory control, to map the dynamics associated with empathic responses for pain towards an out-group member. Accordingly, Caucasian participants were asked to judge the experience of African and Caucasian actors to...

Gossip is condemned but also ubiquitous and thought to be essential for groups. This triggers the question of which motives explain gossip behavior. Hitherto, negative influence, social enjoyment, group protection, and information gathering and validation are established as motives to gossip. However, venting emotions-discussed as a potentially imp...

Gossip is condemned but also ubiquitous and thought to be essential for groups. This triggers the question of which motives explain gossip behavior. Hitherto, negative influence, social enjoyment, group protection, and information gathering and validation are established as motives to gossip. However, venting emotions—discussed as a potentially imp...

This study explored attachment networks in committed couples who differed in parenting choice and relationship status. Attachment networks were defined in terms of attachment functions, attachment strength, the presence of a primary figure, and full-blown attachments. Participants were 198 couples, married or cohabiting, either expecting their firs...

OBJECTIVE Surgery for low-grade gliomas (LGGs) aims to achieve maximal tumor removal and maintenance of patients’ functional integrity. Because extent of resection is one of the factors affecting the natural history of LGGs, surgery could be extended further than total resection toward a supratotal resection, beyond tumor borders detectable on FLAI...

Background: Positron emission tomography (PET) is a valuable tool for the characterization of brain tumors in vivo. However, few studies have investigated the correlation between carbon-11-methionine (11C-METH) PET metrics and the clinical, radiological, histological, and molecular features of patients affected by lower grade gliomas (LGGs). The p...

Power analysis is an important tool to use when planning studies. This contribution aims to remind readers what power analysis is, emphasize why it matters, and articulate when and how it should be used. The focus is on applications of power analysis for experimental designs often encountered in psychology, starting from simple two-group independen...

The psychological literature has shown that sharing one’s emotions with loved ones does not alleviate distress. We challenge this notion. In four studies (N=2581), participants were asked to recall an emotional episode (Studies 1a-2: sadness, fear, affection, joy, anger) and write about this episode. Not replicating prior work, participants shared...

Social exclusion is a painful experience that is felt as a threat to the human need to belong and can lead to increased aggressive and anti-social behaviours, and results in emotional and cognitive numbness. Excluded individuals also seem to show an automatic tuning to positivity: they tend to increase their selective attention towards social accep...

Random effects included in the main analysis on Accuracy in Experiment 1. (XLSX)

Random effects included in the analysis using gender as moderator on Accuracy in Experiment 1. (XLSX)

Random effects included in the analysis using gender as moderator on Response Times in Experiment 2. (XLSX)

Random effects included in the main analysis on Response Times in Experiment 1. (XLSX)

Fixed effects included in the main analysis on Accuracy in Experiment 2. (XLSX)

Random effects included in the main analysis on Response Times in Experiment 2. (XLSX)

Fixed effects included in the analysis using gender as moderator on Accuracy in Experiment 2. (XLSX)

Information about packages employed in statistical analyses. (DOCX)

Random effects included in the analysis using gender as moderator on Response Times in Experiment 1. (XLSX)

Random effects included in the main analysis on Accuracy in Experiment 2. (XLSX)

Fixed effects included in the main analysis on Accuracy in Experiment 1. (XLSX)

Random effects included in the analysis using Empathy Quotient scores as moderator on Response Times in Experiment 1. (XLSX)

Fixed effects included in the analysis using gender as moderator on Accuracy in Experiment 1. (XLSX)

Random effects included in the analysis using gender as moderator on Accuracy in Experiment 2. (XLSX)

Growing evidence suggests that the cerebellum plays a critical role in non-motor functions, contributing to cognitive and affective processing. In particular, the cerebellum might represent an important node of the "limbic" network, underlying not only emotion regulation but also emotion perception and recognition. Here, we used transcranial magnet...

The aim of this study is to test the effectiveness of using symmetrisation to correct already automated motor patterns. The hypothesis for this study is that the correction of a motor error occurs more quickly and with a more solid outcome when corrected with exercises using the non dominant hand compared to using only the dominant hand. For that r...

The perception of faces and bodies is mediated by holistic mechanisms, which allow the perception of these two categories of visual stimuli as a whole. Holistic mechanisms are not available for the perception of upside-down faces (Face Inversion Effect; FIE; Yin, 1969) and bodies (Body Inversion Effect; BIE; Reed et al., 2003). The neurophysiologic...

This contribution provides both a theoretical framework and a quantitative summary of the empirical evidence on a recent evaluative learning procedure, namely the Self-Referencing (SR) task. The SR task is introduced by describing its key features, with emphasis on the intersecting regularities principle as its underlying learning mechanism and on...

Converging neuroimaging and patient data suggest that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is involved in emotional processing. However, it is still not clear whether the DLPFC in the left and right hemisphere is differentially involved in emotion recognition depending on the emotion considered. Here we used transcranial magnetic stimulation...

Headache and psychopathology (especially anxiety and mood disorders) are comorbid across the life span. The present study is a clinical contribution in the direction of studying the familial recurrence of headache, and the interplay of headache and psychopathology in children. The clinical sample is composed by 130 headache patients (53 boys and 77...

Background Living with a disabled child has profound effects on the entire family. With a prevalence of developmental disabilities around 2,5 %, there is a considerable need to promote improvements in the health care system. Little is known about changes and adaptations in the lives of affected families and this paucity of information hinders the i...

Objective: Whilst the relationship between narcissism and self-esteem has been studied for a long time, findings are still controversial. The majority of studies investigated narcissistic grandiosity (NG), neglecting the existence of vulnerable manifestations of narcissism. Moreover, recent studies have shown that grandiosity traits are not always...

Social exclusion is felt as a threat to the human “need to belong” and activates the brain areas related to physical pain. Social exclusion has been proven to drive aggressive behaviours, to create emotional numbness and it also seems to facilitate implicit processing of positive emotions and enhance re-inclusion finalised behaviours (so-called “tu...

In a prior study (Cattaneo et al, 2011. Neuroscience. 183:64-70), we demonstrated that anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the left inferior frontal gyrus enhanced verbal fluency in healthy young adults. Although our data are in line with the results of other published studies, another research group recently failed to report...

Background: While the association between anxiety and postpartum depression is well known, few studies have investigated the relationship between these two states and parenting stress. Furthermore, a number of studies have found that postpartum depression affects mother-infant emotion regulation, but there has been only one study on anxiety and em...

The ability to emphatically share feelings with those of someone in pain is affected by the racial difference between the target and the onlooker. A differential empathic activation for race (DEAR effect) in favor of in-group members has been documented in the brain pain matrix. However, we are also capable of unbiased responses that manifest polit...

Right-brain-damaged patients may show a reading disorder termed neglect dyslexia. Patients with left neglect dyslexia omit letters on the left-hand-side (the beginning, when reading left-to-right) part of the letter string, substitute them with other letters, and add letters to the left of the string. The aim of this study was to investigate the pa...

This work describes the construction of family-couple-parenting (FCP) questionnaire, a new measure of three aspects related to the developmental path toward parenting choices, within the perspective of the family life cycle and attachment theory. Two studies are reported. Study 1 reports the development of the FCP questionnaire and its psychometric...

Although the existence of an association between numbers and space has been largely documented in educated adults, the origin of this association still remains debated. Recent evidence suggests that associations between numbers and space might originate during the preschool years from the repeated action of counting in peripersonal space. However,...

OBJECT Intraoperative language mapping is traditionally performed with low-frequency bipolar stimulation (LFBS). High-frequency train-of-five stimulation delivered by a monopolar probe (HFMS) is an alternative technique for motor mapping, with a lower reported seizure incidence. The application of HFMS in language mapping is still limited. Authors...

Social exclusion has been proven to drive aggressive behaviours and to create emotional numbness. It also seems to facilitate implicit processing of positive emotions and enhance re-inclusion finalised behaviours. These effects seem to be mediated by the individual’s empathy. Nevertheless, the effects of social exclusion on emotions and social info...

Research has indicated that beliefs about inflated responsibility, beliefs about perceived control over anxiety-related events and reactions (anxiety control) and metacognitive beliefs about the need to control thoughts are associated with obsessive compulsive symptoms. In the current study we tested a mediation model of the interactions between th...

A pre-registered experiment was conducted to examine psychophysiological responses to being lied to. Bridging research on social cognition and deception detection, we hypothesized that observing a liar compared to a truth-teller would decrease finger skin temperature of observers. Participants first watched two targets while not forewarned that the...

Findings from the deception detection literature suggest that although people are not skilled in consciously detecting a liar, they may intuit that something about the person telling a lie is off. In the current proposal, we argue that observing a liar influences the observer's physiology even though the observer may not be consciously aware of bei...

An essential first step in planning a confirmatory or a replication study is to determine the sample size necessary to draw statistically reliable inferences using power analysis. A key problem, however, is that what is available is the sample-size estimate of the effect size, and its use can lead to severely underpowered studies when the effect si...

Background Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is used to cope with negative affect states. We investigated the association between impulsivity and this affect-regulation process.Method Affect states associated with NSSI and impulsivity traits were evaluated in 30 Italian adolescent self-injurers (63.3% female, mean age = 16.63, SD = 0.56).ResultsNonsui...

Past research has found that measuring individuals’ fear of pain predicts their physical pain perceptions: those reporting higher levels of fear of pain report higher levels of pain. We investigated links between fear of social threat and fear of physical pain, testing whether these fears predict responses to social distress and physical pain. In 3...

Emotion recognition is mediated by a complex network of cortical and subcortical areas, with the two hemispheres likely being differently involved in processing positive and negative emotions. As results on valence-dependent hemispheric specialisation are quite inconsistent, we carried out three experiments with emotional stimuli with a task being...

Prism adaptation improves a wide range of manifestations of left spatial neglect in right-brain-damaged patients. The typical paradigm consists in repeated pointing movements to visual targets, while patients wear prism goggles that displace the visual scene rightwards. Recently, we demonstrated the efficacy of a novel adaptation procedure, involvi...

In the present article, we present a re-examination of data originally published by Kashima and Kashima (1998, 2003). In their 2003 article, Kashima and Kashima show a moderation effect of temperature on the relation between personal pronoun drop and cultural values. Based on new insights from the grounded cognition literature, we propose an altern...

Over the last 20 years, reading has been the focus of much research using functional imaging. A formal assessment of the implications of this work for a more general understanding of reading processes is still lacking. We performed a new meta-analysis based on an optimized hierarchical clustering algorithm which automatically groups activation peak...

Background / Purpose: It has been shown that a novel approach of prism adaptation, the so-called “ecological” approach, is as effective as the traditional repeated pointing procedure in inducing temporary amelioration of neglect symptoms (1). In order to have quantitative measures of the aftereffects (proprioceptive, visuo-proprioceptive and visu...