Paolo Roma

• PsyD.
• Sapienza University of Rome

Context: In high-stakes assessments, such as court cases or managerial evaluations, decision-makers heavily rely on psychological testing. These assessments often play a crucial role in determining important decisions that affect a person’s life and have a significant impact on society. Problem Statement: Research indicates that many psychological...

According to the main international guidelines, patients with obesity and psychiatric/psychological disorders who cannot be addressed to surgery are recommended to follow a nutritional approach and a psychological treatment. A total of 94 patients (T0) completed a battery of self-report measures: Symptom Checklist-90—Revised (SCL-90-R), Barratt Imp...

In civil and forensic evaluations of psychological damage, depression is one of the most commonly identified disorders, and also one of the most frequently feigned. Thus, practitioners are often confronted with situations in which they must assess whether the symptomatology presented by a patient is genuine or being feigned for secondary gains. Whi...

Previous studies with the eye-tracking technology have predominantly tracked eye parameters in response to a single simple stimulus, and have generated interesting - sometimes inconsistent - results in research on deceptive behavior. The present study analyzed visual patterns in response to a complex image, to investigate potential differences in e...

Current guidelines for conducting symptom validity assessments require that professionals administer multiple symptom validity tests (SVTs) and that the SVTs selected for their evaluations provide nonredundant information. However, not many SVTs are currently available, and most of them rely on the same, (in)frequency-based, feigning detection stra...

The present study tested the influence of stimuli emotional valence, emotional arousal, and typicality on memory recollection in three groups of participants exposed to the same environment through different modalities: in vivo exposure (i.e., real-life), 3D virtual reality (i.e., VR), and 2D pictures. Context-related free-recall, recognition accur...

Homicide–suicide is an event in which an individual murders one or more persons and then takes his/her own life. The present study aimed to assess the incidence of homicide-suicide in Italy over a 10-year period (between 2009 and 2018) and to compare its findings with national and international data. Furthermore, a time series analysis was carried...

Internet addiction and its related variables (i.e., internet gaming addiction, social media addiction, fear of missing out, phubbing) have mostly been investigated in the general population without considering possible gender differences. The present study aimed to investigate the specific characteristics of men and women in the possible developmen...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers faced an emergency that had significant psychological impacts on them. In this study, an investigation regarding work engagement as a protective factor for well-being was conducted on a sample of Italian healthcare workers in the field of mental health. Correlation and linear regression analyses were...

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (Global study on homicide. Booklet 1: executive summary. https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/Booklet1.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2022, 2019; Victims of intentional homicide. https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims. Accessed 5 June 2022, 2020), Italy has the secon...

The COVID-19 pandemic and its protective measures had a tremendous effect on the general population's mental health and deeply affected their lifestyle. The present study carried out a longitudinal analysis to evaluate the long-lasting psychological effects of the pandemic and its impact on the general population's day-today routine. Three points i...

Expressed Emotion (EE) describes the tone of a caregiver’s response to a patient with a mental disorder, and it is used to predict relapse. The Five-Minute Speech Sample (FMSS) is a 5-min interview with a caregiver that evaluates only two EE dimensions. The present study aimed at evaluating HEE (High Expressed Emotion) as a predictor of relapse in...

Bariatric surgery is indicated for treatment of severely obese people and can lead to significant weight loss as well as reduction of comorbidities associated with obesity. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between different psychological factors (e.g., tendency to binge eating, impulsivity, alexithymia), adherence to the nutri...

The present study aimed at understanding the personality features of mothers and fathers engaged in parental alienation—a family dynamic in which one parent behaves in a way that foments a child’s unfounded emotional rejection of the other parent. The process is considered a complex form of child psychological maltreatment, with significant negativ...

The insanity defense represents one of the most controversial and debated evaluations performed by forensic psychiatrists and psychologists. Despite the variation among different jurisdictions, in Western countries, the legal standards for insanity often rely on the presence of cognitive and/or volitional impairment of the defendant at the time of...

Over the last few years, the phenomenon of fake news has become an important issue, especially during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, and also a serious risk for the public health. Due to the huge amount of information that is produced by the social media such as Facebook and Twitter it is becoming difficult to check the produced contents manually...

Previous evidence showed abnormal parietal sources of resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) delta (< 4 Hz) and alpha (8-12 Hz) rhythms in treatment-Naïve HIV (Naïve HIV) subjects, as cortical neural synchronization markers in quiet wakefulness. Here, we tested the hypothesis that these local abnormalities may be related to functional cortical...

Internet addiction (IA) has mostly been investigated with the fear of missing out and difficulties in emotional regulation. The present study examined the link between IA and variables related to problematic social media use (i.e., fear of missing out, social media addiction), together with emotional (dys)regulation and personality traits, providin...

Background: Sleep disorders are common in perinatal women and may underlie or trigger anxiety and depression. We aimed to translate and validate and evaluate the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Insomnia Symptom Questionnaire (ISQ), in a sample of women during late pregnancy and 6-months postpartum according to the DSM-5 crite...

An increase of domestic violence is described since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Childhood maltreatment is a risk factor potentially predictive of negative parental behaviors. Parents with high levels of neuroticism and parental burnout could engage in child abuse. According to the literature, stressed parents could act the same abusive...

Deliberate attempts to portray oneself in an unrealistic manner are commonly encountered in the administration of personality questionnaires. The main aim of the present study was to explore whether mouse tracking temporal indicators and machine learning models could improve the detection of subjects implementing a faking-good response style when a...

In Italy, at the end of 2020, a voluntary immunization plan against COVID-19 was introduced, involving elderly among the first target categories. The aim of this study was to assess, through an online questionnaire, the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination in a sample of older adults from southern Italy. Of a total of 1041 respondents (41.7% males, m...

Background: Control measures adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic had a considerable impact on human daily life and lifestyles. Adherence to the recommended measures is influenced by knowledge and attitudes towards the disease. This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the level of knowledge regarding COVID-19, the related control measures, and l...

The global pandemic caused by a new strain of Coronavirus has brought the Italian government to adopt quarantine, isolation, and lockdown strategies as restrictive measures to reduce the virus spread. Being forced to stay at home could significantly increase the likelihood of episodes of home-based violence and could also be accompanied by a limite...

Literature stressed the importance of using valid, reliable measures to assess anxiety in the perinatal period, like the self-rated Perinatal Anxiety Screening Scale (PASS). We aimed to examine the psychometric properties of the Italian PASS version in a sample of Italian women undergoing mental health screening during their third trimester of preg...

At the end of 2020, the Italian Ministry of Health launched a national vaccination campaign to counteract the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study aimed at appraising levels of knowledge about and acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination in a sample of Italian undergraduates during the first phase of the immunization plan. A web-based questionnaire was a...

The current study aimed at increasing our understanding of the psychological impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on undergraduate students, particularly with respect to the association between personality traits; defense mechanisms (DMs); depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms (DASSs); and compliance with the government recommended health measures. A...

The COVID-19 outbreak has exposed healthcare professionals (HPs) to increased workloads and a high risk of contagion. The present study aimed at examining the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on the mental health of HPs in Italy, investigating the role of attachment style, personality traits, and sociodemographic variables. An online survey was adm...

The Italian lockdown following the spread of COVID‐19 exposed residents to a long and unexpected period of managing offspring at home. Throughout this time, most parents continued to work remotely. The present research aimed at assessing multiple sociodemographic and psychological variables for parental well‐being during the lockdown. An online sur...

In the present study, we applied machine learning techniques to evaluate whether the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS) can be reduced in length yet maintain accurate discrimination between consistent participants (i.e., presumed truth tellers) and symptom producers. We applied machine learning item selection techniques on dat...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) health crisis is strongly affecting the psychological well-being of the general population. According to a very recent literature, the imposed lockdown and social distancing measures have generated a series of negative outcomes, including fear of the future, anxiety, and somatization symptoms. Few studies hav...

Most studies on well being during the COVID 19 pandemic have focused on the mental health of the general population; far less attention has been given to more specific populations, such as patients with mental illness. Indeed, it is important to examine the psychiatric population, given its vulnerability. The present study aimed at assessing the ps...

The present study aimed at identifying psychological and psychosocial variables that might predict weight gain during the COVID-19 lockdown in patients affected by overweight/obesity with and without a psychiatric diagnosis. An online survey was administered between 25 April and 10 May, 2020, to investigate participants’ changes in dietary habits d...

Interrogative suggestibility (IS) describes the extent to which an individual behavioral response is affected by messages communicated during formal questioning within a closed social interaction. The present study aimed at improving knowledge about IS in the elderly (aged 65 years and older), in particular about its association with both emotive/a...

The global SARS-CoV-2 outbreak and subsequent lockdown had a significant impact on people's daily lives, with strong implications for stress levels due to the threat of contagion and restrictions to freedom. Given the link between high stress levels and adverse physical and mental consequences, the COVID-19 pandemic is certainly a global public hea...

Objective Worldwide, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has generated significant worry, uncertainty, anxiety, sadness, and loneliness. In Italy, these effects have been particularly pronounced. While research on the COVID-19 outbreak has mainly focused on the clinical features of infected patients and the psychological impact on the...

In the wake of the sudden spread of COVID-19, a large amount of the Italian population practiced incongruous behaviors with the protective health measures. The present study aimed at examining psychological and psychosocial variables that could predict behavioral compliance. An online survey was administered from 18–22 March 2020 to 2766 participan...

On January 30th 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 pandemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Italy has been one of the most affected countries in the world. To contain further spread of the virus, the Italian government has imposed an unprecedented long-period lockdown for the entire country....

Since the initiation of the COVID-19 lockdown, Italian parents have been forced to manage their children at home. The present study aimed at investigating the psychological distress of parents during the lockdown, identifying contributing factors. An online survey was administered to 833 participants from 3 to 15 April 2020. Mediation and moderated...

The COVID-19 health crisis is strongly affecting the mental health of the general population. In particular, the pandemic may be producing psychological distress and collateral concerns for parents in lockdown, due to unstable financial circumstances, school closures, and suspended educational services for children. A call for measures to increase...

BACKGROUND In the wake of the sudden spread of COVID-19, much of the Italian population practiced behaviors that were incongruous with the protective health measures promoted by the Italian government. OBJECTIVE The present study aimed at examining psychological and psychosocial variables that could potentially predict behavioral compliance. METH...

Parental alienation (PA) describes a family dynamic in which a parent engages in behaviors that are likely to foster a child’s unjustified rejection of the other parent. PA is considered a particular form of child psychological maltreatment with both short- and long-term negative consequences. Parents who attempt to turn a child against the other p...

The uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has called for unprecedented measures, to the extent that the Italian government has imposed a quarantine on the entire country. Quarantine has a huge impact and can cause considerable psychological strain. The present study aims to establish the prevalence of psychiatric symptoms a...

The aim of the present study was to explore whether kinematic indicators could improve the detection of subjects demonstrating faking-good behaviour when responding to personality questionnaires. One hundred and twenty volunteers were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups (honest unspeeded, faking-good unspeeded, honest speeded, and...

The Inventory of Problems-29 (IOP-29; Viglione, Giromini, & Landis, Journal of Personality Assessment, 99(5), 534–544, 2017) is a 29-item, recently published, self-administered test aimed at assessing the credibility of various symptom presentations. Although available research strongly supports the use of this symptom validity test in malingering-...

Aims: We aimed at analyzing homicide trends and patterns in Italy over the period 1980-2014. Methods: We collected data from the Italian Mortality Database (Italian National Institute of Statistics), for the study period. Temporal trends were analyzed using joinpoint regression analysis, with estimated annual percentage change computed for each...

The Parents Preference Test (PPT) is a graphical test comprised of 24 easy to understand images of daily family life, which is widely used in forensic assessments of parenting skills. Nevertheless, the PPT lacks validity scales to detect participants' attitudes toward the test; this is an important oversight, as the tendency to demonstrate faking-g...

Background and Purpose: A psychological assessment of parents in post-divorce child custody disputes highlighted parents’ motivation to appear as adaptive and responsible caregivers. The study hypothesized that personality self-report measures completed by child custody litigants (CCLs) during a parental skills assessment would show underreporting,...

Despite growing attention to the ability of patients to provide informed consent to treatment in different medical settings, few studies have dealt with the issue of informed consent to major orthopaedic surgery in those over the age of 60. This population is at risk of impaired decision-making capacity (DMC) because older age is often associated w...

Background and Purpose. The use of machine learning (ML) models in the detection of malingering has yielded encouraging results, showing promising accuracy levels. We investigated the possible application of this methodology when trained on behavioral features, such as response time (RT) and time pressure, to identify faking behavior in self-report...

Speeded answering to items on a personality test has long been considered a factor in the validity of the results obtained. In this study, to better understand the utility of time pressure in the evaluation of faking-good behavior, we assessed four groups of volunteers in "honest versus faking-good" and "without time pressure versus speeded" condit...

Few studies have addressed the issue of psychopathology and personality of individuals with problematic use of internet. In this study we research psychopathological symptoms, personality traits and predictive variables associated with problematic internet use. The study was conducted on a total of 343 students from four Italian Universities using...

Road traffic injuries are the ninth cause of death across all age groups, globally (WHO, 2015). Many road traffic crashes are caused by Driving Under the Influence (DUI) of alcohol by persons who have previously had their license suspended for the same reason. The aim of this study was to identify specific risk factors and personality characteristi...

Skeweness and kurtosis. (XLS)

Coercive treatments are often regarded as an inevitable and yet highly debated feature of psychiatric care. Perceived coercion is often reported by patients involuntarily committed as well as their voluntary counterparts. The Admission Experience Survey (AES) is a reliable tool for measuring perceived coercion in mental hospital admission. We devel...

Parental alienation (PA) is a family dynamic in which a parent engages in behaviors that are likely to foster a child’s unjustified rejection of the other parent. The developmental mechanism of PA has been explained with hypotheses that range from specific behaviors of one parent to an interaction of many factors including behaviors of both parents...

Background and Purpose: Research on the relationship between response latency (RL) and faking in self-administered testing scenarios have generated contradictory findings. We explored this relationship further, aiming to add further insight into the reliability of self-report measures. We compared RLs and T-scores on the MMPI-2-RF (validity and res...

Objective: Here we evaluated the hypothesis that resting state electroencephalographic (EEG) cortical sources correlated with cognitive functions and discriminated asymptomatic treatment-naïve HIV subjects (no AIDS). Methods: EEG, clinical, and neuropsychological data were collected in 103 treatment-naïve HIV subjects (88 males; mean age 39.8 ye...

Objective: Cortical sources of electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythms were investigated in two sub-populations of naïve HIV subjects, grouped based on clinical criteria to receive different combination anti-retroviral therapies (cARTs). These EEG sources were hypothesized to reflect beneficial effects of both regimes. Methods: Eyes-closed resting...

Objective: Here we tested the effect of combined antiretroviral therapy (cART) on deviant electroencephalographic (EEG) source activity in treatment-naïve HIV individuals. Methods: Resting state eyes-closed EEG data were recorded before and after 5 months of cART in 48 male HIV subjects, who were naïve at the study start. The EEG data were also rec...

The paper deals with the diagnostic and descriptive validity of MMPI family questionnaires in the forensic field. The validity scales of the MMPI-2, MMPI-2-RF, and MMPI-A, are compared, grouping the same in response styles. The issue of how to discriminate between simulation, concealment and authenticity of the subject is addressed. The future deve...

Objective Naïve patients with immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are characterized by diffuse abnormalities of resting state cortical electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythms (Babiloni et al., 2012). Here we tested the hypothesis that these EEG rhythms vary as a function of the systemic immune activity and antiretroviral therapy (ART) in HIV patients. Meth...

Objective: We tested the hypothesis that 5months of combined anti-retroviral therapy (cART) affect cortical sources of resting state cortical electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythms in naïve HIV subjects. Methods: Eyes-closed resting state EEG data were recorded at baseline (i.e. pre-treatment; T0), T1 (after 4weeks of cART), T2 (after 8weeks of c...

In recent years, several studies have addressed the issue of positive self-presentation bias in assessing parents involved in postdivorce child custody litigations. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) is widely used in forensic assessments and is able to evaluate positive self-presentation through its Superlative Self-Present...

Objective We tested the hypothesis that 5 months of combined anti-retroviral therapy (cART) affect cortical sources of resting state cortical electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythms in naïve HIV subjects. Methods Eyes-closed resting state EEG data were recorded at baseline (i.e. pre-treatment; T0), T1 (after 4 weeks of cART), T2 (after 8 weeks of cA...

Homicide followed by suicide (H-S) is a lethal event in which an individual kills another individual and subsequently dies by suicide. This article presents a review of research carried out in Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States of America over the past 60 years on the prevalence of mental illness among the perpetrators of H-S. A...

We describe a case of shibari, a double hanging sexual asphyxia practice, which ended fatally for one of the two women involved. We present the autopsy findings and a psychiatric and psychometric evaluation of the surviving participant. The survivor had a borderline personality disorder, had suffered sexual abuse as a child, and had a history of il...

The aim of the study was to test the hypothesis that cortical sources of resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythms show peculiar frequency/spatial features in naïve human subjects with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) compared to healthy control subjects. Resting-state eyes-closed EEG data were recorded in 18 naïve HIV subjects (15 male...

HIV is often related to psychological distress, after the diagnosis and the beginning of HAART. Brief Psychological approaches are important but they give only support, enhancing the relationships of the patients. In many cases these relationships are disfunctional too. Psychotherapies don´t focus on the indidvidual´s autonomy but on the support fr...

Murder - suicide is an event where a person kills another and then suicide. Murder - suicide is more rare than other forms of violent deaths, but it is certainly mostly tragic and usually more shocking than homicide or suicide when taken individually, especially when the event involves a mass murder. This chapter will present an overview of the mai...

This study investigates the prevalence of post partum depression (PPD) in a sample of Roman women, and the role of socio-demographic variables, personality structure and maternal attachment patterns, in order to identify primary and secondary prevention strategies. Data were collected in two phases. During the third trimester of pregnancy, a sample...

Objective: The reliability of child witness testimony in sexual abuse cases is often controversial, and few tools are available. Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) is a widely used instrument for evaluating psychological credibility in cases of suspected child sexual abuse. Only few studies have evaluated CBCA scores in children suspected of b...

Homicide-suicide is an event in which the murderer commits suicide after the homicide. There are at least 14 epidemiological studies on the topic, and all have found that homicide-suicide is more common among family members. The murderers are most often males and the victims females. There is no recent research on this phenomenon in Italy. The purp...

Susceptibility of children to leading questions and interrogative pressure is an important forensic issue. The most used techniques for assessing interrogative suggestibility are the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scales (GSS) and the Bonn Test of Statement Suggestibility (BTSS). Apart from minor differences, the two tests, investigate the same dimensio...

Stalking behaviour may find its roots in an individual's psychological development and culture-related factors that facilitate it. Psychiatric disorders may underlie some stalking cases, but no reports exist of the relationship of actual psychiatric status with the expression of stalking behaviour. A 22-year-old adoptive woman perpetrated stalking...

This article discusses the treatment of the mentally ill offenders in italy. Al-though some progress has been made, a satisfying theoretical or practical solution has yet to be found in how to treat this population. efforts are needed to develop efficient models of care that respect the personal dignity of psychiatric patients in detention faciliti...

The Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ) assesses defensive behavior by empirically evaluating conscious derivatives of defense and coping mechanisms in everyday life. It was developed on the assumption that defenses can be ordered along a maturity-immaturity continuum and tend to group into clusters, or defensive styles. The original factor analytica...