Riccardo Williams

Sapienza University of Rome | la sapienza · Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology

The study of suicidal risk has increasingly emphasized the importance of assessing specific suicidal motivations. Motivations express an elaboration of the condition of psychache, representing an effective perspective on the management of suicidal risk in psychotherapy. This study explores suicidal motivations and personality pathology in a clinica...

Objectives Increasing evidence has supported the mutual relationship between suicidal motivations and personality pathology, especially in adolescence. Distinctive aspects of personality functioning can explain the tendency to resort to suicidal ideation and behaviours, which, in turn, may play a specific role in exacerbating severe impairments in...

Depressive disorders in adolescence pose unique challenges for assessment and treatment, particularly due to their high comorbidity with various personality disorders. Moreover, young depressed patients may elicit very intense and difficult-to-manage emotional responses in therapists (in this context, countertransference). This study aimed at empir...

Introduction Current research points to the importance personality pathology and Major Depression e as relevant psycopathological risk factors for understanding suicidal risk in adolescence. Literature has mainly focused on the role of BPD, however current orientations in personality pathological functioning suggest that BPD may be the representati...

Introduction: Current research points to the importance of diagnosing personality pathology emerging patterns in adolescence for understanding suicidal risk. Studies have mainly focused on the role of BPD and only marginally investigated the interaction of personality disorder (PD) as overall diagnosis and individual PDs and major depression (MDD)...

Background: The passage from pre-adolescence to adolescence is presented as a turning point for the achievement of those abilities in social understanding as they commonly appear in adulthood. Developmental perspectives point to the possible role of neuro-cognitive maturation and social experiences to facilitate this growth. This paper has the goa...

Introduction: Transference (meant in this context, as the patient relational patterns expressed towards the clinician) and therapeutic alliance play a crucial role in the treatment of personality pathology. To date, no empirical study examined the association between these two dimensions of the clinical relationship and patients’ personality malada...

Non-binary people may face specific challenges in psychological settings. Psychotherapists often display a lack of preparation for non-binary gender identities, resulting in overt or subtle forms of prejudice that compromise the therapeutic alliance. The present study aimed to provide data on non-binary clients’ positive and negative experiences wi...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has considerably influenced all domains of people's lives worldwide, determining a high increase in overall psychological distress and several clinical conditions. The study attempted to shed light on the relationship between the strategies adopted to manage the pandemic, vaccine hesitancy, and distinct features o...

The notion of intersubjectivity has achieved a primary status in contemporary psychoanalytic debate, stimulating new theoretical proposals as well as controversies. This paper presents an overview of the main contributions on inter-subjectivity in the field of neurosciences. In humans as well as—probably—in other species, the ability for emotional...

Introduction: Attachment theory has been linked with the caregiving system, acting as a drive for a mother's behavior towards her offspring. The most dramatic consequence of distress following maternity is filicide. Despite this, only few studies addressed the attachment models of women who committed filicide, and very little provided comparisons...

Background: Depressive disorders in adolescence are among the most challenging clinical syndromes to diagnostically identify and treat in psychotherapy. The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, Second Edition (PDM-2) proposes an integration between nomothetic knowledge and an idiographic understanding of adolescent patients suffering from depression t...

Background: Clinical and empirical research evidenced a complex link between pathological narcissism and the suicidal process in adulthood. Given the relevance of suicidality and the peculiar narcissistic vicissitudes of adolescence, the proposed research investigated the relationship between pathological narcissism analyzed from the multi-dimensi...

This work presents a review of research papers examining the role of emerging personality pathology in suicidal ideation and behaviours in adolescence. Initially, 226 studies were selected in line with PRISMA guidelines, and 33 articles were finally included in this review. The data show percentages of any personality disorder diagnosis ranging fro...

Introduction: Suicide is the outcome of a process starting with the experiences of an unbearable pain or hopelessness, passing from suicidal ideation and planning, to possible para-suicidal behaviors or actual attempts. Recent studies have evidenced the necessity to integrate approaches based on the identification of psychopathological diagnoses an...

Background A mother’s ability to attune with her child is crucial in structuring one’s attachment style and personality. Both dimensions shape mother-child interactions, and they are therefore likely to impact on the risk of filicide. Numerous risk factors for filicide have been identified, but personality and attachment look relatively understudie...

Introduction: Filicide is an act of terrible violence that generates dismay and astonishment and invites everybody to ask: why? Aim: As the transition to motherhood is a critical period for any woman, requiring the activation of deep personality resources, the aim of this study was to deepen our knowledge of the personality profiles of new mothe...

Several studies focused on mothers' psychopathological and environmental risk factors linked to filicide, to understand the genesis of this violent act. Considering the transition to motherhood a critical period for any woman, requiring the activation of deep personality resources, the aim of this study was to detect, in a sample of 16 filicide wom...

Several studies focused on mothers’ psychopathological and environmental risk factors linked to filicide, but few studies explored personality characteristics of these women. Considering that the transition to motherhood requires the activation of deep personality resources, aim of this report is to describe the personality profile and attachment s...

Believing in conspiracy theories is a common phenomenon that is attracting attention from the scientific community because of its important individual- and social-level implications. Here we examine the association between attachment styles and conspiracy ideation. We anticipated that avoidant attachment style, because of its emphasis on self-relia...

Anger is probably one of the mostly debated basic emotions, owing to difficulties in detecting its appearance during development, its functional and affective meaning (is it a positive or a negative emotion?), especially in human beings. Behaviors accompanied by anger and rage serve many different purposes and the nuances of aggressive behaviors ar...

Background It is widely recognised that there are associations between headache, psychiatric comorbidity and attachment insecurity in both adults and children. The aims of this study were: 1) to compare perceived attachment security and anxiety in children and adolescents with migraine without aura and a healthy control group; 2) to test whether th...

Although several studies have highlighted the relationship between attachment states of mind and personality disorders, their findings have not been consistent, possibly due to the application of the traditional taxonomic classification model of attachment. A more recently developed dimensional classification of attachment representations, includin...

Background: The DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) provides the opportunity to integrate the needed developmental perspective in the assessment of personality pathology. Based on this model, Krueger and colleagues (2012) developed the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5), which operationalizes the proposed DSM-5 traits. Me...

In this paper, two main aspects of Cristina Meini’s From Cradle to Internet. The Social Nature of Personal Identity are taken into consideration. In the first place, Meini’s argument concerning the structuring role for self development of caregivers’ communicative mirroring is analysed in the light of current literature concerning the multi-layered...

Deficits in emotional reactivity are frequently reported in Disruptive Behavior Disorders (DBDs). A deficit in prosocial emotions, namely the callous unemotional traits (CU), may be a mediator of emotional reactivity. Our aim is to investigate subjective emotional reactivity towards visual stimuli with different affective valence in youths with DBD...

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a common concern among hospitalized adolescents, and can have significant implications for short and long-term prognosis. Little research has been devoted on how personality features in severely ill adolescents interact with NSSI and "attitude toward life and death" as a dimension of suicidality. Developing more s...

Unlike most of his contemporaries, Jervis felt it was necessary to give new answers to last century's clinical psychology crisis. He managed to show the relevance that psychological knowledge coming from other sectors (such as philosophy, evolutionary biology, cybernetics, ethology and, nowadays, neuroscience) could have for clinical psychology. He...

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...

Il gruppo di ricerca che attualmente opera presso il Dipartimento di Psicologia Dinamica e Clinica, ha orientato il proprio lavoro fondamentalmente attorno a due tematiche: lo studio multidimensionale del processo terapeutico (in una prospettiva tanto empirica quanto di ricerca concettuale); la rilevanza della teoria dell’attaccamento e dei sistemi...

Our research group, currently operating at the Department of Dynamic and Clinic Psychology, have mainly focused on two topics: the study on therapeutic process (in the perspectives of both empirical and conceptual research); the relevance of attachment theory for the understanding of abnormal personality development and its manifestations within th...

- In this work we describe two evaluation methods (PIGA and AIMIT) we used in analysis of interactions between adolescents and their own parents. In our opinion it's very important in Adolescence to take in account and analyze how interpersonal motivational systems can define the parent-adolescent interactions to understand what kind of situation c...