Individual Differences in Risk and Protective Factors: The Role of Self-Compassion Components among Emergency Responders.

This study investigates individual differences in protective and risk factors among rescue workers (RWs), particularly Red Cross members, to optimize well-being and job performance under high-stress conditions. Employing a person-centered approach, two psychological profiles were identified: an adaptively resilient profile and a maladaptively vulnerable profile, characterized by distinct personality traits, coping methods, life events, and social support networks. A notable external criterion, self-compassion, discerned the profiles with maladaptively vulnerable individuals who exhibited higher self-judgment, social isolation, and emotional over-identification. The study also examined the impact of job roles on these profiles, discovering a prevalence of adaptive resilience among drivers, contrasting with team members who displayed maladaptive resilience and lower self-compassion scores. These insights suggest a nuanced method for identifying RWs who require specialized support, proposing tailored interventions, especially those enhancing self-compassion. The study, through an extensive psychological metric analysis, provides a deeper comprehension of resilience and vulnerability among RWs. This research highlights the importance of recognizing individual differences in protective and risk factors, thereby contributing to the enhancement of mental health and resilience in high-stress professions.

Age-dependent changes in the anger superiority effect: Evidence from a visual search task.

The perception of threatening facial expressions is a critical skill necessary for detecting the emotional states of others and responding appropriately. The anger superiority effect hypothesis suggests that individuals are better at processing and identifying angry faces compared with other nonthreatening facial expressions. In adults, the anger superiority effect is present even after controlling for the bottom-up visual saliency, and when ecologically valid stimuli are used. However, it is as yet unclear whether this effect is present in children. To fill this gap, we tested the anger superiority effect in children ages 6-14 years in a visual search task by using emotional dynamic stimuli and equating the visual salience of target and distractors. The results suggest that in childhood, the angry superiority effect consists of improved accuracy in detecting angry faces, while in adolescence, the ability to discriminate angry faces undergoes further development, enabling faster and more accurate threat detection.

Triarchic Model of Psychopathy and Intimate Partner Violence: An Empirical Study on the Italian Community.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious and recurrent phenomenon in many societies with severe physical and psychological consequences. In the present study, we aimed to explore the role of triarchic dimensions of psychopathy (disinhibition, boldness, and meanness) across gender in this occurrence. A questionnaire on inflicted (self) and experienced (partner) IPV and the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure were administered to a sample of 1,149 individuals from the Italian community. In general, self and partner IPV were moderately correlated. Bayesian regression analysis showed that disinhibition was positively correlated to both self and partner IPV (psychological and physical). In addition, boldness was negatively associated with perpetrated psychological IPV. Interactions by gender showed that meanness was positively related to perpetrated IPV in women (psychological and physical), whereas men with disinhibition features inflicted more physical violence than women. A high externalizing tendency (i.e., disinhibition) is therefore an important correlate of both perpetrated and reported IPV; moreover, boldness was associated with less psychological violence in general, whereas the effect of meanness depended on the gender of the individuals involved. Interestingly, the association between IPV and self-reported delinquent activities was low in magnitude (Spearman's Rho around .20) suggesting limited overlap between these two constructs.

Agreement and discrepancies in patient-clinician reports of DSM-5-TR section III maladaptive personality traits: A study on a mixed outpatient sample.

The assessment of personality pathology based on dimensional models may improve self-other agreement, but previous research mainly adopted a categorical approach and overlooked the role of the person of the therapist. Our study examined patient-clinician agreement in a mixed sample of Italian outpatients using the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) and the PID-5-Informant Form (PID-5-IRF). Moreover, the role of clinician personality traits on agreement was preliminary explored. Sixty-eight outpatients (51.4% male, M = 30.30, SD = 12.05 years) and their treating clinicians (N = 22; 77.3% female, M = 43.77 ± 8.45 years) entered the study. Patients completed the PID-5, whereas clinicians filled-in the PID-5-Brief Form (PID-5-BF) and the PID-5-IRF for each patient they involved. A multilevel Bayesian analysis showed that rank-order agreement was large for domains (mean r = .60) and moderate for facets (mean r = .44). As regards mean-level agreement, patient ratings on cognitive/perceptual dysregulation, distractibility, eccentricity, and emotional lability were higher than clinician ratings, whereas patients' scores on depressivity were lower than clinicians' ones. Scores on the PID-5-BF detachment positively predicted agreement on anhedonia, anxiousness, depressivity, distractibility, separation insecurity, and suspiciousness, while scores on the PID-5-BF negative affectivity, antagonism, and disinhibition negatively predicted agreement on few specific facets. Current findings suggest that clinician personality traits may contribute to agreement on maladaptive personality traits, but areas of discrepancies remain in case of low observable internal ones. Since patient-clinician agreement is crucially involved in therapeutic alliance, further research on this issue is highly encouraged. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Breaking (Fake) News: No Personal Relevance Effect on Misinformation Vulnerability.

The massive spread of fake news (FN) requires a better understanding of both risks and protective psychological factors underlying vulnerability to misinformation. Prior studies have mostly dealt with news that do not bear any direct personal relevance to participants. Here, we ask whether high-stakes news topics may decrease vulnerability to FN. Data were collected during the national lockdown in Italy (COVID-19 news) and one year later (political news). We compared truth discrimination and overall belief for true news (TN) and FN concerning COVID-19 and political topics. Our findings indicate that psychological risk and protective factors have similar effects on truth discrimination, regardless of whether the news topic is highly or minimally personally relevant. However, we found different effects of psychological factors on overall belief, for high and low personal relevance. These results suggest that, given a high level of cognitive dissonance, individuals tend to rely on proximal or emotional sources of information. In summary, our study underscores the importance of understanding the psychological factors that contribute to vulnerability to misinformation, particularly in high-stakes news contexts.

Validation of the Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder Inventory (MDDI) among Italian Women Practicing Bodybuilding and Powerlifting and in Women Practicing Physical Exercise.

Studies pertaining to muscle dysmorphia (MD) have concentrated the most on males. However, a new body ideal for women is emerging: a very toned, athletic body with flat, smooth muscles. The emphasis on the level of muscularity represents a contribution to the growth of MD symptoms in women. The aim of this study was to evaluate the factorial structure and psychometric properties of the muscle dysmorphic disorder inventory (MDDI) in two samples of physically active Italian women. One-hundred and sixty-five women practicing non-competing bodybuilding/powerlifting and 353 women practicing physical exercise completed the MDDI and measures of features associated with MD. Findings of the confirmatory factor analysis showed a three-factor structure with acceptable fit and invariant across groups. Omega coefficients revealed adequate internal consistency for all the scales and for the total score of the MDDI. Furthermore, convergent and divergent validity as well as retest reliability emerged to be good. MDDI represents a reliable measure of MD symptoms in physically active Italian women.

Measurement Invariance of the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience Across 13 Countries.

The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE) is widely used to measure emotional experiences, but not much is known about its cross-cultural utility. The present study evaluated the measurement invariance of the SPANE across adult samples (N = 12,635; age range = 18-85 years; 58.2% female) from 13 countries (China, Colombia, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, and the United States). Configural and partial scalar invariance of the SPANE were supported. Three items capturing specific negative emotions (sad, afraid, and angry) were found to be culturally noninvariant. Our findings suggest that the SPANE's positive emotion terms and general negative emotion terms (e.g., negative and unpleasant) might be more suitable for cross-cultural studies on emotions and well-being, whereas caution is needed when comparing countries using the SPANE's specific negative emotion items.

Facing distress in Coronavirus era: The role of maladaptive personality traits and coping strategies.

The aim of the current study was to investigate the intersecting roles of dysfunctional personality traits and coping styles in relation to psychological distress during the Italian national lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants included 633 adults who completed questionnaires of maladaptive personality traits, coping styles, and psychological distress. Results indicated that all the maladaptive traits were associated with psychological distress with magnitude of associations strongest for Negative Affect and weakest for Antagonism. Maladaptive traits were also generally positively associated with avoidant/maladaptive and negatively associated with acceptance and positive reframing, forms of coping. A series of path analyses further demonstrated that coping strategies partially explained associations between maladaptive personality traits and psychological distress. All told, results suggest that during an unprecedented stressful time, associations between maladaptive personality traits and psychological distress may be, at least in part, explained by maladaptive coping strategies.

Health Anxiety Predicts the Perceived Dangerousness of COVID-19 over and above Intrusive Illness-Related Thoughts, Contamination Symptoms, and State and Trait Negative Affect.

This study sought to evaluate the specificity of health anxiety, relative to other forms of psychopathology, in perceptions of COVID-19 as dangerous. Measures of health anxiety, COVID-19 perceived dangerousness, negative affect, anxiety, depression, stress, contamination-related obsessions and compulsions, and intrusive illness-related thoughts were administered online to 742 community individuals during the Italian national lockdown. Results showed that, after controlling for demographic variables and other internalizing problems, health anxiety was the single most important factor associated with the perceived dangerousness of COVID-19. Moreover, a comparison between the current sample's scores on various symptom measures and scores from prepandemic Italian samples revealed that, whereas other internalizing symptoms increased by a large or very large magnitude during the pandemic, levels of health anxiety and negative affect increased by a medium amount. This result may indicate that health anxiety is relatively trait-like, increasing the likelihood that our correlational data support the model of health anxiety as a vulnerability rather than an outcome. Together, these results indicate that health anxiety may be a specific risk factor for COVID-related maladjustment and support the distinction of health anxiety from other psychological problems.

Psychopathy and COVID-19: Triarchic model traits as predictors of disease-risk perceptions and emotional well-being during a global pandemic.

This study extended recent research showing that perceptions of disease risk are associated with emotional well-being during COVID-19 by examining how psychopathic traits of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition influence these perceptions and psychological outcomes. During the Italian national lockdown, a large community sample (M age = 31.3 years) completed online questionnaire measures of the triarchic psychopathic traits, perceptions of disease susceptibility and danger, and recent well-being. Path analyses revealed differing roles for the triarchic traits: boldness and meanness predicted greater well-being (lower stress, higher positive affect) and disinhibition predicted lower well-being. Further, boldness and meanness were linked to well-being through distinct indirect pathways of low perceived susceptibility to infection (boldness) and low perceived dangerousness of COVID-19 (boldness and meanness). Findings speak to the triarchic model's utility in explaining socioemotional phenomena during times of crisis and support the distinct biobehavioral conceptualizations of boldness as low threat sensitivity, meanness as low affiliative capacity, and disinhibition as deficient affective and behavioral control.

Measuring cognitive vulnerability to depression: Further evidence on the factorial and predictive validity of negative cognitive style.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Previous research has provided insufficient evidence on the factorial validity of the negative cognitive style questionnaires, which is a problem for the validity of the total score's computation. In Study 1, we focused on the relationship between internality and the other dimensions of negative cognitive style. In Study 2, we explored the predictive validity of negative cognitive style for negative interpretation bias. METHODS: In Study 1, 770 participants completed the Cognitive Style Questionnaire - Short Form (CSQ-SF). In Study 2, from a prescreening data collection (N = 300) we selected participants with low (N = 40) and high (N = 32) cognitive vulnerability to depression who were primed with negative mood induction and who completed a generative interpretation task. RESULTS: In Study 1, a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) indicated that the best fitting model for the CSQ-SF was a bifactor model without the internality dimension. In Study 2, a CFA replicated the factorial structure of Study 1 and individuals with a high negative cognitive style exhibited a negative interpretation bias after controlling for depressive symptoms. LIMITATIONS: The university-age sample limited the generalizability of our results to different populations, and the lack of longitudinal data prevented us from discussing further implications on the relationship between the negative interpretation bias and negative cognitive style in predicting depression. CONCLUSIONS: Together, the results of our two studies support the construct validity of the CSQ-SF and recommend the use of a composite score of negative cognitive style without internality.

Tolerance to spatial-relational transformations in unfamiliar faces: A further challenge to a configural processing account of identity recognition.

One of the most important questions in face perception research is to understand what information is extracted from a face in order to recognize its identity. Recognition of facial identity has been attributed to a special sensitivity to "configural" information. However, recent studies have challenged the configural account by showing that participants are poor in discriminating variations of metric distances among facial features, especially for familiar as opposed to unfamiliar faces, whereas a configural account predicts the opposite. We aimed to extend these previous results by examining classes of unfamiliar faces with which we have different levels of expertise. We hypothesized an inverse relation between sensitivity to configural information and expertise with a given class of faces, but only for neutral expressions. By first matching perceptual discriminability, we measured tolerance to subtle configural transformations with same-race (SR) versus other-race (OR) faces, and with upright versus upside-down faces. Consistently with our predictions, we found a lower sensitivity to at-threshold configural changes for SR compared to OR faces. We also found that, for our stimuli, the face inversion effect disappeared for neutral but not for emotional faces - a result that can also be attributed to a lower sensitivity to configural transformations for faces presented in a more familiar orientation. The present findings question a purely configural account of face processing and suggest that the role of spatial-relational information in face processing varies according to the functional demands of the task and to the characteristics of the stimuli.

Delta plots do not reveal response inhibition in lying.

The role of response inhibition in lying is debated. By using the delta-plot method applied to the Sheffield Lie Test, Debey, Ridderinkhof, De Houwer, De Schryver, and Verschuere (2015) provided evidence supporting the role of inhibition in lying. In the study of Debey et al., inhibitory skill was measured in terms of the size of the lie effect. However, to provide convincing evidence that delta plots highlight the role of response inhibition in lying, inhibitory ability must be evaluated independently from the size of the lie effect. After replicating original findings, this article shows that a delta plot analysis does not differentiate individuals with different inhibitory abilities, when inhibitory skill is measured by means of the Stop Signal Task, instead of the size of the lie effect. This suggests that researchers should be cautious when making conclusions about cognitive mechanisms based on the sole analysis of delta plots.

Facial expression movement enhances the measurement of temporal dynamics of attentional bias in the dot-probe task.

The facial dot-probe task is one of the most common experimental paradigms used to assess attentional bias toward emotional information. In recent years, however, the psychometric properties of this paradigm have been questioned. In the present study, attentional bias to emotional face stimuli was measured with dynamic and static images of realistic human faces in 97 college students (63 women) who underwent either a positive or a negative mood-induction prior to the experiment. We controlled the bottom-up salience of the stimuli in order to dissociate the top-down orienting of attention from the effects of the bottom-up physical properties of the stimuli. A Bayesian analysis of our results indicates that 1) the traditional global attentional bias index shows a low reliability, 2) reliability increases dramatically when biased attention is analyzed by extracting a series of bias estimations from trial-to-trial (Zvielli, Bernstein, & Koster, 2015), 3) dynamic expression of emotions strengthens biased attention to emotional information, and 4) mood-congruency facilitates the measurement of biased attention to emotional stimuli. These results highlight the importance of using ecologically valid stimuli in attentional bias research, together with the importance of estimating biased attention at the trial level.

"Not Just Right Experiences" as a psychological endophenotype for obsessive-compulsive disorder: Evidence from an Italian family study.

The heart of the obsessional process may be considered the subject's underlying impression that "something is wrong" or "that something is not just as it should be". This phenomenon, labeled "not just right experiences" (NJREs), has increasingly been receiving attention as a possible marker of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The present study sought to add to the evidence that NJREs may be a putative endophenotype of obsessional symptoms. To this aim, measures of NJREs, obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms and psychological distress were compared in offspring of parents with and without OC symptoms. The offspring of parents with OC symptoms (N=120) reported higher frequency and severity of NJREs compared to offspring of parents without OC symptoms (N=106). Such differences remained significant for NJREs frequency and close to significance for NJREs severity, when general distress (i.e., anxiety and depression) was controlled. The possible role of NJREs as an endophenotype for OCD is discussed in reference to Gottesman and Gould criteria and the National Institute of Mental Health RDoC initiative.

The Role of Familiarity on Viewpoint Adaptation for Self-Face and Other-Face Images.

An adaptation method was used to investigate whether self-face processing is dissociable from general face processing. We explored the viewpoint aftereffect with face images having different degrees of familiarity (never-before-seen faces, recently familiarized faces, personally familiar faces, and the participant's own face). A face viewpoint aftereffect occurs after prolonged viewing of a face viewed from one side, with the result that the perceived viewing direction of a subsequently presented face image shown near the frontal view is biased in a direction which is the opposite of the adapting orientation. We found that (1) the magnitude of the viewpoint aftereffect depends on the level of familiarity of the adapting and test faces, (2) a cross-identity transfer of the viewpoint aftereffect is found between all categories of faces, but not between an unfamiliar adaptor face and the self-face test, and (3) learning affects the processing of the self-face in greater measure than any other category of faces. These results highlight the importance of familiarity on the face aftereffects, but they also suggest the possibility of separate representations for the self-face, on the one side, and for highly familiar faces, on the other.

Predicting Reading and Spelling Disorders: A 4-Year Prospective Cohort Study.

In this 4-year prospective cohort study, children with a reading and spelling disorder, children with a spelling impairment, and children without a reading and/or spelling disorder (control group) in a transparent orthography were identified in third grade, and their emergent literacy performances in kindergarten compared retrospectively. Six hundred and forty-two Italian children participated. This cohort was followed from the last year of kindergarten to third grade. In kindergarten, the children were assessed in phonological awareness, conceptual knowledge of writing systems and textual competence. In third grade, 18 children with a reading and spelling impairment and 13 children with a spelling impairment were identified. Overall, conceptual knowledge of the writing system was the only statistically significant predictor of the clinical samples. No differences were found between the two clinical samples.

Task-irrelevant emotion facilitates face discrimination learning.

We understand poorly how the ability to discriminate faces from one another is shaped by visual experience. The purpose of the present study is to determine whether face discrimination learning can be facilitated by facial emotions. To answer this question, we used a task-irrelevant perceptual learning paradigm because it closely mimics the learning processes that, in daily life, occur without a conscious intention to learn and without an attentional focus on specific facial features. We measured face discrimination thresholds before and after training. During the training phase (4 days), participants performed a contrast discrimination task on face images. They were not informed that we introduced (task-irrelevant) subtle variations in the face images from trial to trial. For the Identity group, the task-irrelevant features were variations along a morphing continuum of facial identity. For the Emotion group, the task-irrelevant features were variations along an emotional expression morphing continuum. The Control group did not undergo contrast discrimination learning and only performed the pre-training and post-training tests, with the same temporal gap between them as the other two groups. Results indicate that face discrimination improved, but only for the Emotion group. Participants in the Emotion group, moreover, showed face discrimination improvements also for stimulus variations along the facial identity dimension, even if these (task-irrelevant) stimulus features had not been presented during training. The present results highlight the importance of emotions for face discrimination learning.

Posterror speeding after threat-detection failure.

Cognitive control enables individuals to rapidly adapt to changing task demands. To investigate error-driven adjustments in cognitive control, we considered performance changes in posterror trials, when participants performed a visual search task requiring detection of angry, happy, or neutral facial expressions in crowds of faces. We hypothesized that the failure to detect a potential threat (angry face) would prompt a different posterror adjustment than the failure to detect a nonthreatening target (happy or neutral face). Indeed, in 3 sets of experiments, we found evidence of posterror speeding, in the first case, and of posterror slowing, in the second case. Previous results indicate that a threatening stimulus can improve the efficiency of visual search. The results of the present study show that a similar effect can also be observed when participants fail to detect a threat. The impact of threat-detection failure on cognitive control, as revealed by the present study, suggests that posterror adjustments should be understood as the product of domain-specific mechanisms that are strongly influenced by affective information, rather than as the effect of a general-purpose error-monitoring system.

Individual differences in cognitive control on self-referenced and other-referenced memory.

Self-referenced information is better recalled than other-referenced information - a mnemonic advantage known as the "self-reference effect" (SRE). By using a modified version of the "think/no-think" (TNT) paradigm (Anderson & Green, 2001), this study examined the effects of cognitive control on the SRE after the encoding stage. The results indicate that individual differences in personality traits and affective states strongly modulated the SRE after the TNT phase. For individuals high in negative cognitive style, an ironic enhancement of negative self-referenced memory produced a "maladaptive" SRE: better memory for negative self-referenced information than for negative other-referenced information, when trying to suppress that information. Before the TNT phase, instead, the SRE was characterized by the opposite bias. These results indicate that (1) the SRE is strongly affected by cognitive control after encoding, and (2) also in the non-clinical population, dysfunctional cognitive control can transform the SRE into a "maladaptive" memory bias.