Umberto Granziol

• Assistant professor/researcher at University of Padua

Background Kidney transplant involves profound psychological, relational, and social changes for both the patients and their family context. Occasionally, the family or social support can be deemed "dysfunctional" as it fails to fully comprehend the patient's needs and requirements. Attachment style, which pertains to the motivation to seek proximi...

Understanding cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying quantity processing is crucial for unraveling human cognition. The existence of a single magnitude system, encompassing non-symbolic number estimation alongside other magnitudes like time and space, is still highly debated since clear evidence is limited. Recent research examined whether spat...

Before conducting statistical analyses, scholars and researchers often have specific hypotheses about differences between groups of means. Their hypotheses are frequently tested by applying post hoc comparisons with statistically significant simple or interaction effects. With the exception of exploratory studies, using post hoc comparisons can inc...

Background and aims: The Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI), based on the components model addictions, is a 6-item instrument used to assess the risk of exercise addiction (REA). Its revised version (EAI-R) was published in 2019 but only differed from the original scale in the response rating range (using a 6-point rather than 5-point Likert scale)...

Introduction Bulimic episodes experienced by patients with Binge Eating Disorder (BED) might be sustained by an enhanced behavioral propensity to approach food stimuli. Methods To test this hypothesis, automatic approach avoidance tendencies toward high-calorie foods (HCF), low-calorie foods (LCF), and neutral objects were assessed in a group of 2...

Indexes for estimating the overall reliability of a test in the framework of knowledge space theory (KST) are proposed and analyzed. First, the possibility of applying in KST the existing classical test theory (CTT) methods, based on the ratio between the true score variance and the total variance of the measure, has been explored. However, these m...

Imagery rescripting (ImR) has shown to reduce negative belief about the self, negative emotions and emotional dysregulation. However, the mechanisms through which this improvement in emotion regulation takes place is currently the object of investigation. An untested hypothesis is that ImR reduces the negative emotional response to primary emotions...

Commonly identified patterns of psychological distress in response to adverse events are characterized by resilience (i.e., little to no distress), delayed (i.e., distress that increases over time), recovery (i.e., distress followed by a gradual decrease over time), and sustained (i.e., distress remaining stable over time). This study aimed to exam...

Every day, we make thousands of finger movements on the touchscreen of our smartphones. The same movements might be directed at various distal goals. We can type “What is the weather in Rome?” in Google to acquire information from a weather site, or we may type it on WhatsApp to decide whether to visit Rome with a friend. In this study, we show tha...

In recent years, different studies highlighted the importance of assessing behavioral tendencies toward different food stimuli in healthy and pathological samples. However, heterogeneities in experimental approaches and small sample sizes make this literature rather inconsistent. In this study, we used a mobile approach-avoidance task to investigat...

Exercise addiction (EA) refers to excessive exercise, lack of control, and health risks. The Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI) is one of the most widely used tools in its assessment. However, the cross-cultural psychometric properties of the EAI could be improved because it misses three pathological patterns, including guilt, exercise despite inju...

Despite the connectome or network “era”, the variety of individual facets (e.g., cognition, personality, mental health) are typically studied as separate watertight compartments. This study adopted advanced methodological approaches to (i) highlight a network depicting distinct domains of human mind and behavior, and to (ii) delineate their possibl...

Simple Summary Scientific evidence has demonstrated that in social contexts the motor system integrates predictions about the actions of others and plans the most appropriate responses. However, it is not yet known how these processes are reflected in the modulation of excitatory and inhibitory corticospinal mechanisms. Our goal was to reveal the b...

Background: Literature showed that the link between right-wing attitudes and ethnocentric attitudes gets stronger under existential threats, but the role exerted by an impersonal threat – as COVID-19 – on right-wing attitudes is still unclear. Aim: This study aimed to highlight the role of anxiety exerted by the impersonal COVID-19 threat on the r...

Discriminating between different quantities is an essential ability in daily life that has been demonstrated in a variety of non-human vertebrates. Nonetheless, what drives the estimation of numerosity is not fully understood, as numerosity intrinsically covaries with several other physical characteristics. There is wide debate as to whether the nu...

Background Although numerous studies have examined associations between personality traits and eating disorders in females, few studies have been conducted on female exercisers. Given the high risk of disordered eating in female exercisers, this study investigated the associations between the Big Five personality traits and disordered eating in fem...

Background: Although numerous studies examined associations between personality traits and eating disorders in females, few studies have been conducted on female exercisers. Given the high risk of disordered eating in female exercisers, this study investigated the associations between the Big Five personality traits and disordered eating in female...

Commonly identified trajectories of psychological distress in response to adverse events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, include Resilience, Delayed distress, Recovery and Sustained distress. The current study aimed to analyse these four distinct response patterns during the pandemic using network analysis. Anxiety and depression symptom data collecte...

Introduzione: L'assessment psicologico non è più solo una raccolta di informazioni. Soprattutto nell'approccio cognitivo-comportamentale, l'assessment sta diventando sempre più individualizzato. In altri termini, non si basa più solo su un cutoff , ma si focalizza su una raccolta capillare di sintomi specifici per ogni paziente. Per raggiungere que...

Due to pandemic-imposed restrictions on lab-based research, we have recently witnessed a flourishing of online studies in experimental psychology, based on the collection of fine behavioral measures such as reaction times (RTs) and accuracy. However, it remains unclear whether participants’ alerting levels may have a different impact on behavioral...

Guilt plays a role in various forms of psychopathology. However, different types of guilt might be involved in different mental disorders. Obsessive-compulsive (OC) patients are prone to a type of guilt in which the violation of an internalized moral norm is necessary and sufficient, whereas data suggest that depression might be linked to more inte...

Vaccine confidence has emerged as one of the most relevant psychological factors implied in the worldwide affecting the fight against COVID-19—as well as public trust in doctors, medicine, and science. Indeed, the vaccine confidence is crucial to maximize the trust in vaccines and their use for prevention, with several implications for public healt...

Guilt emerges as the emotional result of a conflict between our behavior and internalized morality. Since morality is best conceptualized as a multidimensional construct, guilt results in different phenomena depending on the moral values internalized by the “guilty”. Indeed, mounting evidence supports the distinction between guilt feelings emerging...

The use of observational tools in psychological assessment has decreased in recent years, mainly due to its personnel and time costs, and researchers have not explored methodological innovations like adaptive algorithms in observational assessment. In the present study, we introduce the behavior-driven observation procedure to develop, test, and im...

Background The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7) are self-report measures of major depressive disorder and generalised anxiety disorder. The primary aim of this study was to test for differential item functioning (DIF) on the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 items based on age, sex (males and females), and country....

Due to pandemic-imposed restrictions on lab-based research, we have recently witnessed a flourishing of online studies in experimental psychology, based on the collection of fine behavioral measures such as reaction times (RTs) and accuracy. However, it remains unclear whether participants’ alerting levels may have a different impact on behavioral...

Background and aims. In the last thirty years, the continuously increasing number of studies investigating Exercise Addiction (EA) stimulated interest in developing instruments assessing the risk of exercise addiction (REA). One widely used tool is the Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI) because it is a brief, easy-to-use, time-saving, and psychomet...

Objective: The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7) are self-report measures of major depressive disorder and generalised anxiety disorder. The primary aim of this study was to test for differential item functioning (DIF) on the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 items based on age, sex (males and females), and country.M...

Objectives: To identify predictors and time trends over 10 years of psychiatric consultation or treatment in adolescents and young adults referring to Emergency Department (ED). Methods: Real-world cohort data from 50,056 adolescents and young adults referring 105,596 times to ED between 2007 and 2016. We tested whether gender, age, triage code...

Exercise is overwhelmingly beneficial for physical and mental health, but for some people exercise addiction (EA) can develop and negatively impact an individual. This study sought to (a) compare the latent structure of two instruments assessing EA and (b) examine differences in attitudes toward stopping exercise, if required to on medical grounds,...

Background: People suffering from mental disorders are affected by public stigma in many areas of daily life, including mental health services. Stigma among mental health professionals needs to be addressed. Aims: This study explores the path leading to attitudes toward seclusion and restraint practices among future mental health professionals, con...

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a major stressor for the psychological health of people worldwide. In the UK, the COVID19-Psychological Research Consortium Study (C19PRC) launched to evaluate the psychological impact of COVID-19 in the general population and its implications. The project was then extended to Italy and several other countries. This...

Background: The Covid-19 pandemic represents a major stressor for the psychological health of people worldwide. In the UK, the Covid19-Psychological Research Consortium Study (C19PRC) launched to evaluate the psychological impact of Covid-19 in the general population and its implications. The project was then extended to Italy and several other cou...

The objective of this study is to assess the potential role of Emergency Department (ED) for early detection of mental disorders. Two cohorts (6,759 subjects aged 14 to 24 accessing ED, 165 subjects with mental disorders) were matched by ID and merged. Primary outcome was the proportion of individuals accessing ED before receiving a diagnosis of me...

Systematic reviews and meta‐analyses pool data from individual studies to generate a higher level of evidence to be evaluated by guidelines. These reviews ultimately guide clinicians and stakeholders in health‐related decisions. However, the informativeness and quality of evidence synthesis inherently depend on the quality of what has been pooled i...

Despite rapidly increasing knowledge about Trichotillomania (TTM), no gold-standard evidence-based psychological intervention has been identified. In the current study, we evaluated the potential efficacy of an eight-session psychological intervention for TTM, namely the Comprehensive Behavioral Model (ComB) treatment, using a multiple-baseline sin...

In this study, we investigated the effect of global temporal prediction on the brain capability to implicitly adjust proactive motor control. We used the Dynamic Temporal Prediction (DTP), in which local and global predictions of an imperative stimulus were manipulated by using different stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs), presented with several di...

One of the most important sources of predictability that human beings can exploit to create an internal representation of the external environment is the ability to implicitly build up subjective statistics of events’ temporal structure and, consequently, use this knowledge to prepare for future actions. Stimulus expectancy can be subjectively shap...

Human behavior is continuously shaped not just as a function of explicitly responding to external world events but also by internal biases implicitly driven by the capacity to extract statistics from complex sensory patterns. Two possible sources of predictability engaged to generate and update temporal expectancy are the implicit extraction of eit...

Background: The Stanford Integrated Psychosocial Assessment for Transplantation (SIPAT) is a comprehensive instrument developed to accurately assess the main pretransplant psychosocial risk factors that may impact transplant outcomes. Objective: As neither established assessment procedures nor standardized tools designed to perform pretransplant...

Background Stigma is one of the most important barriers to help-seeking and to personal recovery for people suffering from mental disorders. Stigmatizing attitudes are present among mental health professionals with negative effects on the quality of health care. Methods Network and moderator analysis were used to identify what path determines stig...

Although observing other’s gaze and body movements provides a crucial source of information to successfully interact with other people, it remains unclear whether observers weigh differently these cues and whether the convergence of gaze and body’s directions determines facilitation effects. Here we aim to shed more light on this issue by testing t...

Recent studies suggest that both top-down and bottom-up temporal orienting (TO) of attention are established early and show stable trajectories in typical development. Yet, no evidence is available about atypical development of TO. In the present study, we first investigate the interplay between top-down and bottom-up temporal attention mechanisms...

Introduction: Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is characterized by overt and covert symptoms. The co-occurrence of opposite aspects, such as grandiosity and vulnerability, often implies high personal and social burdens. Consequently, the assessment of NPD has a key role to plan the most suitable treatment. The available assessment tools, des...

Direct gaze is a powerful social cue able to capture the onlooker’s attention. Beside gaze, head and limb movements as well can provide relevant sources of information for social interaction. This study investigated the joint role of direct gaze and hand gestures on onlookers corticospinal excitability (CE). In two experiments we manipulated the te...

In the context of an adaptive learning and assessment system, ALEKS, we examine aspects of forgetting and aspects of a `testing effect' (in which the act of simply being presented a problem in an assessment seems to assist in the learning process). Using a dataset consisting of over six million ALEKS assessments, we first look at the trend of student...

Measurement is a crucial issue in psychological assessment. In this paper a contribution to this task is provided by means of the implementation of an adaptive algorithm for the assessment of depression. More specifically, the Adaptive Testing System for Psychological Disorders (ATS-PD) version of the Qualitative-Quantitative Evaluation of Depressi...

Background Early identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is of paramount importance in establishing effective interventions. Currently, the accepted gold standard for ASD diagnosis is the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd Edition (ADOS-2). Methods In our research study, we applied a novel approach to the ADOS-2 known as the Form...

The nonverbal behavior (NVB) of people diagnosed with schizophrenia consistently interacts with their symptoms during the assessment. Previous studies frequently observed such an interaction when a prevalence of negative symptoms occurred. Nonetheless, a list of NVBs linked to negative symptoms needs to be defined. Furthermore, a list of items that...

The assessment of the social anxiety disorder (SAD) is still a debated issue. The diagnostic tools mostly used to assess SAD cover different aspects, but not exhaustively. Consequently, a list of items that allows both detecting and analyzing an exhaustive set of symptoms needs still a better definition. The aim of the present study is to provide s...

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is characterized by preoccupation with perceived defects in physical appearance that are not observable to others. Little is known about BDD prevalence and phenomenology in the Italian context and no data are currently available on its prevalence and phenomenology as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of...

The clinical assessment of mental disorders can be a time-consuming and error-prone procedure, consisting of a sequence of diagnostic hypothesis formulation and testing aimed at restricting the set of plausible diagnoses for the patient. In this article, we propose a novel computerized system for the adaptive testing of psychological disorders. The...