Nicolò Gaj- Phd
- Professor (Assistant) at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Nicolò Gaj
- Phd
- Professor (Assistant) at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Researcher in Philosophy of Science
About
41
Publications
13,264
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Introduction
I am a researcher in Philosophy of Science, Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Milan, Italy, and a member of the Research Unit for Philosophical Psychology at the same University. I teach Philosophy of psychology and History of the psychological thought at the Faculty of Psychology, Catholic University of Milan. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. My research interests range from theoretical and philosophical psychology to psychological practice and psychotherapy.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
March 2020 - present
November 2008 - February 2020
March 2020 - present
Education
January 2009 - April 2013
June 2005 - November 2008
September 1998 - February 2004
Publications
Publications (41)
The purpose of science is to provide an account of what is going on behind the phenomena we experience. In psychology, such a task may be approached from two different perspectives. For those espousing a naturalistic–monistic approach, it implies accounting for human behavior via an appeal to explanations by causes. To exponents of a humanistic–plu...
Concerns about the epistemological unity of psychology may be attributed to the plurality of outlooks and methods, as well as to an ostensible gap between scientific psychology and professional practice. Such a gap threatens the identity of psychology and also hinders the adequate development of its practical dimension. Scientific psychology mainly...
The COVID-19 outbreak has seen people in many countries asked to radically modify their way of life in compliance with sweeping safety measures. During the current crisis, technology is turning out to be key, in that it allows practitioners to deliver psychological services to people who would otherwise be unreachable. However, professionals cannot...
Over the course of time, a fundamental methodological dissent about the borders and features of psychology has developed. One of the main roots of this dissent may be found in the dispute over the primacy of an objective–subpersonal versus a subjective–personal outlook regarding human beings. Another controversial aspect that has emerged in the rec...
Psychology has always defined itself as a science and yet it has lacked the theoretical and methodological unity regarded as characteristic of the natural sciences. Nicolò Gaj explores the topical question of unification in psychology, setting out a conceptual framework for considerations of unity and disunity, and exploring the evidence of its fra...
Il volume si propone di presentare le principali teorie di filosofia e psicologia del benessere, nonché di porre in risalto i legami tra le due discipline. L’indagine svolta dagli autori vuole essere di natura didattica, ragione per la quale essa viene realizzata con stile semplice e piano. Nell’introduzione alla prima parte, dedicata alla filosofi...
In their remarkable article, Salvatore and colleagues present a grand theory of affect and meaning making. The intellectual effort invested is considerable, given the breadth of the authors’ proposed framework, which spans from psychoanalysis to semiotic-cultural psychology. The APER model seeks to elucidate the bodily bases of meaning-making proce...
The authors of the target article (Salvatore et al., 2022) provided an in-depth analysis of the features and the causes of professional psychology’s fragmentation, generally referred to as compartmentalization. The present contribution is a critical reflection on the three approaches aimed at over-coming it. In conclusion, some preliminary remarks...
In a scenario characterized by unpredictable developments, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiological models have played a leading part, having been especially widely deployed for forecasting purposes. In this paper, two real-world examples of modeling are examined in support of the proposition that science can convey inconsistent as wel...
The presentation will tackle some philosophical issues concerning non-invasive brain stimulation techniques
Unsurprisingly, science has been conferred growing expectations in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, the issue of dissemination and popularization of scientific outcomes has come to the fore. The article describes the main features of the so-called dominant view in popular science, which is claimed to be implicitly connected to sci...
There is considerable evidence suggesting strong limits and weak impact on mental health of accounts of human distress exclusively relying on physical (i.e., cerebral) impairments.
Accordingly, it has been hypothesized that biomedical models of disease risk to be methodologically inadequate to account for the complexity of mental health issues, in...
Objective: Group Experience Therapy (GET; Visintini et al., 2019) is a structured treatment for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) features. The study aimed at evaluating GET effectiveness in a longitudinal, single-blind, two-arm parallel design, comparing GET with Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT; Linehan, 1993, 2014). The indivi...
In questo capitolo prenderemo in considerazione alcune questioni etiche relative all’utilizzo di Internet e delle tecnologie informatiche, sia nella pratica professionale sia nella ricerca. Il contributo non pretende di essere esaustivo, data la vastità del tema, ma si propone di fornire occasioni di riflessione su aspetti professionali e di ricerc...
La Universal Declaration of Ethical Principles for Psychologists, il documento
di regolamentazione etica redatto dall’International Union of Psychological Science (iupsys, 2008), conclude illustrando due aspetti valoriali ritenuti fondamentali per la comunità psicologica internazionale. Si tratta, da una parte, dell’obiettivo di insegnare ai propri...
Design is about active, intentional change; thus it may be relevant for framing psychological practice. In this presentation, I will deal with the description of the main design features, as illustrated by H.G. Nelson and E. Stolterman (2012) in their The Design Way. Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World. Second Edition. Cambridge MA, MIT Pr...
Professional psychology achieved great and sudden exposure in Western societies. This situation left little room for a careful reflection concerning the discipline and its methods. This resulted in a state of poor theoretical development which could be detrimental to the transformative power of the discipline, leaving important philosophical proble...
One of the most common dichotomies in psychology is that of consciousness and unconscious- ness. Various theoretical proposals dealing with this dichotomy are available and this diversity re ects a certain elusiveness of these concepts. Such a situation turns out to be problematic, in that critical analyses of this dichotomy rarely progress towards...
Una delle più diffuse e accettate distinzioni che possiamo trovare in psicologia è quella tra conscio e inconscio. Numerosi psicologi tendono a considerare come elemento fondamentale di molte loro teorie il fatto non apparentemente controverso che ci siano due sistemi mentali (o due modalità di funzionamento mentale), dotati di caratteristiche diff...
In questo breve commento mi soffermerò sui rapporti tra teoria e pratica e tra psicologia scientifica e pratica professionale, nella convinzione che la relazione tra formazione e professione, e tra i luoghi istituzionali dove esse si sostanziano, in larga misura riflettano importanti questioni epistemologiche irrisolte che necessitano di essere app...
Emotional problems figure prominently in many psychopathological conditions. Difficulties in emotion regulation are associated with problems concerning attentional deployment and, consequently, with dysfunctional ways of addressing problematic situations. According to the DBT framework, it is conceivable that functional behavioral skills can be lea...
GET (Gruppi Esperienziali Terapeutici) è stato originariamente sviluppato all’interno di un setting ospedaliero (day-hospital). GET è un nuovo trattamento psicologico multilivello per pazienti con disturbo di personalità borderline (BPD) o gravi sintomi di disregolazione emotiva. GET è un trattamento centrato sul gruppo. Verranno qui riportati i ri...
Introduction
The paper aims at describing the structure of a new multilevel psychological treatment (Group Experience Therapy: GET) for patients with severe Borderline Personality Disorders (BPD) traits, and its early implementation in a long-term inpatient unit for young women with social maladjustment.
GET has been developed six years ago in a d...
Introduction
The aim of the study is to test the efficacy of two structured therapeutic programs, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Group Experience Therapy (GET) on emotional and behavioral dysregulation in patients with severe Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) features.
Methods
The study is a randomized and interventional trial; experim...
Preliminary research findings about my PhD dissertation on the unity/disunity of psychology
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a severe disorder marked by a pervasive pattern of instability in affect, self-image, interpersonal relationships, and goal-directed behavior (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT; Linehan, 1993) is an evidence-based treatment forBPD, founded on the assumption that defic...
Recenti studi hanno evidenziato che l’addestramento alla mindfulness è correlato a un aumento delle capacità mnestiche e attentive in diversi tipi di popolazioni. Inoltre, l’aumento di tali capacità sembra essere correlato a un miglioramento nella capacità di gestione di stati affettivi negativi. Come è noto, aspetti primari del BPD sono la diffico...
Introduction
Emotional dysregulation is commonly considered as a core feature of borderline personality disorder. Many studies ascertain that difficulties in managing emotions and their resulting behavioral urges are at the basis of impulsive behaviors, such as non suicidal self injuries (Selby et al., 2013) and suicidal behaviors (Hamza et al., 20...
La DBT compie ormai i suoi maturi vent’anni di applicazione e numerose sono le prove di efficacia e gli studi controllati che ne attestano l’utilità applicativa in diversi settori della clinica (Dimeff & Koerner, 2007).
Obiettivo di questo contributo è tracciare un quadro sinottico dello stato dell’arte della Dialectical Behavior Therapy, illustrar...
The progressive transformation of society and the stronger scientific set up have been demanding psychologists to deal with problems of social significance and to sturdily define the discipline’s coordinates. Clinical psychology, as an applied branch of psychology, held an essential role in this process. In psychology, the adjective ‘clinical’ unde...
Il consumo di sostanze illecite si è andato delineando fin dagli anni ’60 come una realtà specificatamente adolescenziale e giovanile (14-25 anni). La progressiva diffusione, sia in forma occasionale che abituale in questa fascia d’età ha prodotto un cambiamento radicale nel modo incui il fenomeno è stato concettualizzato. Nel nostro campione il co...
Recently, psychologists’ attention has been drawn to the procedures of theory construction, that is to say, to the processes involved in the quest for sound explanations of psychological phenomena [see, for example, Haig (2005); Johnson-Laird (2006); Capaldi & Proctor (2008); Journal of Clinical Psychology – Special Issue (2008)]. It is a matter of...
La psicologia clinica in Italia si è sviluppata sotto l’influenza di svariate sollecitazioni scientifiche e culturali. Come nel resto d’Europa, la spinta della filosofia neo-positivistica permise il delinearsi di una disciplina autonoma, minacciata però da istanze filosofiche e ideologiche proprie del nostro panorama culturale. La progressiva trasf...
Libet si propone di studiare sperimentalmente la relazione tra cervello ed esperienza soggettiva conscia.
Con l’espressione ‘coscienza’ Libet si riferisce alla capacità di rispondere a stimoli ambientali in uno stato di consapevolezza soggettiva. Pur avendo condotto molte indagini di laboratorio su questo tema, l’Autore si è sempre attenuto al mede...
The practice in clinical psychology needs to specify a notion of competence as an ability to create, together with the client/patient, the object of the psychological work, in order to define its autonomy, in comparison with other kinds of practices (in particular, the medical practice). In this attempt to define the specificity of clinical practic...
Questions
Question (1)
I am working on the science/technology distinction. To me, this is connected to the need for a theory of pratice in psychology, i.e., a reflection on the fundamentals of those practices oriented to solve problems of psychological relevance.
