Sara Dell’Erba’s research while affiliated with University of Bath and other places

Introduction: Visual experience has a substantial effect on how individuals construct a template of their own bodies in space. Whether the absence of total or partial visual exposure in individuals of both genders allows the buffering of harmful effects has yet to be tested. This study examined the role of vision among congenitally blind and later blind subjects for the expression of body esteem and sociocultural attitudes toward appearance. Methods: Participants comprised 101 subjects, 53 sighted and 48 visually impaired men and women. For the purpose of the study, we took into consideration congenitally blind, late blind, and typically sighted individuals. The Sociocultural Attitudes toward Appearance Questionnaire-3 (SATAQ-3) and the Body-Esteem Scale Questionnaire (BESQ) were used as measures. Results: Although congenitally blind, late blind, and typically sighted individuals showed similar awareness of media content and beauty ideals, typically sighted women displayed higher pressure to conform and had higher levels of social comparison. Congenitally blind women placed less emphasis on mass media as an influential aspect of their body perception and showed reduced internalization of beauty ideals and higher levels of body esteem. Moreover, men with visual impairments considered siblings and family to be the most influential information sources for their own body perception, while showing reduced levels of athlete internalization. Discussion: In this research, it was identified that the absence of sight influences an individual's body image beyond its physical, metric representation. Susceptibility to detrimental messages linked to sociocultural standards of attractiveness is interiorized by individuals with and without visual impairments, regardless of their gender. Implications for Practitioners: Further studies on body esteem and sociocultural pressures could enable practitioners to better understand how to support individuals with visual impairments in coping with an unhealthy social environment and with feelings of unhappiness related to their appearance.

Background: The aim of the study was to compare psychological characteristics of adolescent patients with Juvenile Fibromyalgia Syndrome (JFM) with individuals suffering from chronic pain (CP) due to headache or joint pain in the lower limbs unrelated to oncological, inflammatory or autoimmune diseases. Methods: The study was conducted on 37 patients aged 13 to 18 years old, monitored at the Pain Therapy Outpatient Clinic of the "Bambino Gesù" Pediatric Hospital in Rome. 21 patients were suffering from CP (headache and recurrent arthralgia) and 16 from JFM, diagnosed according to the criteria of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). All subjects were evaluated by a pain therapy specialist, a rheumatologist and a clinical psychologist for the following psycho-emotional areas and/ or characteristics: cognitive abilities, attention, memory, learning, alexithymia, somatisation, anxiety, depression, coping skills. A clinical psychologist interviewed all patients to assess: school absences, the use of analgesic medication, the presence of sleep disorders (e.g. non-restorative sleep) and the intensity of perceived pain. Results: Similarities emerged between the two groups in the presence of depression, anxiety, somatisation, alexithymia, school absenteeism, medication use and reported pain level. The peculiar characteristics of the JFM group, which emerged from our pilot study, were the higher prevalence of the illness among women, a higher incidence of sleep disturbances, and a better cognitive endowment, despite some attention and mnemonic deficiencies. Conclusions: To conclude, the present study suggests that the clinical and psychological characteristics of JFM appear to be similar to those found in the CP population.

This case report offers rare insights into crossmodal responses to psychedelic drug use in a congenitally blind (CB) individual as a form of synthetic synesthesia. BP's personal experience provides us with a unique report on the psychological and sensory alterations induced by hallucinogenic drugs, including an account of the absence of visual hallucinations, and a compelling look at the relationship between LSD induced synesthesia and crossmodal correspondences. The hallucinatory experiences reported by BP are of particular interest in light of the observation that rates of psychosis within the CB population are extremely low. The phenomenology of the induced hallucinations suggests that experiences acquired through other means, might not give rise to "visual" experiences in the phenomenological sense, but instead gives rise to novel experiences in the other functioning senses.

Vision is the dominant sense for perception-for-action in humans and other higher primates. Advances in sight restoration now utilize the other intact senses to provide information that is normally sensed visually through sensory substitution to replace missing visual information. Sensory substitution devices translate visual information from a sensor, such as a camera or ultrasound device, into a format that the auditory or tactile systems can detect and process, so the visually impaired can see through hearing or touch. Online control of action is essential for many daily tasks such as pointing, grasping and navigating, and adapting to a sensory substitution device successfully requires extensive learning. Here we review the research on sensory substitution for vision restoration in the context of providing the means of online control for action in the blind or blindfolded. It appears that the use of sensory substitution devices utilizes the neural visual system; this suggests the hypothesis that sensory substitution draws on the same underlying mechanisms as unimpaired visual control of action. Here we review the current state of the art for sensory substitution approaches to object recognition, localization, and navigation, and the potential these approaches have for revealing a metamodal behavioral and neural basis for the online control of action.