The network structure of psychopathological and resilient responses to the pandemic: A multicountry general population study of depression and anxiety.

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 examine these response patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anxiety and depressive symptom data collected across four European countries over the first year of the pandemic were analyzed (N = 3,594). Participants were first categorized into groups based on the four described patterns. Network connectivity and symptom clustering were then estimated for each group and compared. Two thirds (63.6%) of the sample displayed a resilience pattern. The sustained distress network (16.3%) showed higher connectivity than the recovery network (10.0%) group, p = .031; however, the resilient network showed higher connectivity than the delayed network (10.1%) group, p = .016. Regarding symptom clustering, more clusters emerged in the recovery network (i.e., three) than the sustained network (i.e., two). These results replicate findings that resilience was the most common mental health pattern over the first pandemic year. Moreover, they suggest that high network connectivity may be indicative of a stable mental health response over time, whereas fewer clusters may be indicative of a sustained distress pattern. Although exploratory, the network perspective provides a useful tool for examining the complexity of psychological responses to adverse events and, if replicated, could be useful in identifying indicators of protection against or vulnerability to future psychological distress.

The mediating role of scientifical-medical satisfaction between COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and vaccine confidence: a two-waves structural equation model.

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 health. This study aimed to analyse the relationships among between vaccine confidence, conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19, and satisfaction with science and medicine in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. A longitudinal observational survey was administered to a convenience sample (n = 544; mean age 52.76 y.o., SD = 15.11; females 46.69%) from the Italian general population. A two-waves mediation model-a structural equation model technique-was used. The survey was part of a larger international project ( https://osf.io/qy65b/ ). The model highlighted that the conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 had a negative effect on the satisfaction with medicine and science (ß = - 0.13, se = 0.03, p < .001). The latter, in turn, had a positive effect on vaccine confidence (ß = 0.10, se = .05, p < .001). Interestingly, the effect of conspiracy beliefs on vaccine confidence was completely mediated by the scientifical-medical satisfaction (ß = - 0.02, se = 0.01, p < .05). These results highlight how the scientifical-medical satisfaction can fully mediate the relationship between conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 and vaccine confidence. These findings about vaccine hesitancy and confidence and disclose have implications for psychological and social interventions that could promote vaccine confidence by targeting the satisfaction with science and medicine.

The role of the COVID-19 impersonal threat strengthening the associations of right-wing attitudes, nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiments.

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. This study aimed to highlight the role of anxiety exerted by the impersonal COVID-19 threat on the relationship between right-wing attitudes and ethnocentric attitudes, as nationalism and anti-immigrants' sentiments. As part of an international project to evaluate the impact of COVID-19, this study administered an online survey to a representative sample (n 1038). The anxiety generated by an impersonal threat as COVID-19 - thus not exerted by any outgroup - can moderate the relationship among personal Right-Wing Authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and ethnocentric attitudes. This is the first study demonstrating that existential threat is effective also when exerted by an impersonal agent (as COVID-19) rather than by an outgroup. Second, these findings disclose useful implications for preventive psychological interventions and for social policy makers. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04305-w.

Measurement invariance of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7) across four European countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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. METHOD: Data from nationally representative surveys in UK, Ireland, Spain, and Italy (combined N = 6,054) were used to fit confirmatory factor analytic and multiple-indictor multiple-causes models. RESULTS: Spain and Italy had higher latent variable means than the UK and Ireland for both anxiety and depression, but there was no evidence for differential items functioning. CONCLUSIONS: The PHQ-9 and GAD-7 scores were found to be unidimensional, reliable, and largely free of DIF in data from four large nationally representative samples of the general population in the UK, Ireland, Italy and Spain.

Moral judgment, decision times and emotional salience of a new developed set of sacrificial manual driving dilemmas.

The growing interest in the subject of moral judgment in driver and autonomous vehicle behavior highlights the importance of investigating the suitability of sacrificial dilemmas as experimental tools in the context of traffic psychology. To this aim a set of validated sacrificial trolley problems and a new set of trolley-like driving dilemmas were compared through an online survey experiment, providing normative values for rates of participants' choices; decision times; evaluation of emotional valence and arousal experienced during the decision process; and ratings of the moral acceptability. Results showed that while both sets of dilemmas led to a more frequent selection of utilitarian outcomes, the driving-type dilemmas seemed to enhance faster decisions mainly based on the utilitarian moral code. No further differences were observed between the two sets, confirming the reliability of the moral dilemma tool in the investigation of moral driving behaviors. We suggest that as moral judgments and behaviors become more lifelike, the individual's moral inclination emerge more automatically and effectively. This new driving-type dilemma set may help researchers who work in traffic psychology and moral decision-making to approach the complex task of developing realistic moral scenarios more easily in the context of autonomous and nonautonomous transportation.

Assessment of perceived support in the context of emergency: Development and validation of the psycho-social support scale.

In research and clinical contexts, it is important to briefly evaluate perceived Psychological and Social Support (PSS) to plan psychological interventions and allocate efforts and resources. However, an appropriate brief assessment tool for PSS was lacking. This study aimed at developing a brief and accurate scale to specifically measure PSS in clinical and emergency contexts, with specific, relevant, targeted, and irredundant items. Experienced clinicians developed the perceived Psycho-Social Support Scale (PSSS) and administered it to a clinical sample (N = 112) seeking psychological help during the COVID-19 emergency. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis examined the PSSS internal structure, and a Multiple Indicator and Multiple Causes model investigated its association with the number of sessions and emotional symptoms. The PSSS showed good psychometric properties and the Confirmatory Factor Analysis provided acceptable fit indexes for a unidimensional structure. The Multiple Indicators and Multiple Causes revealed that more sessions and emotional symptoms were associated with lower PSSS scores. The PSSS is a reliable brief tool to measure PS and could be useful to individualize treatments (i.e., number of sessions) to efficiently allocate efforts and resources in clinical contexts and emergencies (e.g., earthquake, COVID-19 pandemic). Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03344-z.

Extracting partially ordered clusters from ordinal polytomous data.

In practical applications of knowledge space theory, knowledge states can be conceived as partially ordered clusters of individuals. Existing extensions of the theory to polytomous data lack methods for building "polytomous" structures. To this aim, an adaptation of the k-median clustering algorithm is proposed. It is an extension of k-modes to ordinal data in which the Hamming distance is replaced by the Manhattan distance, and the central tendency measure is the median, rather than the mode. The algorithm is tested in a series of simulation studies and in an application to empirical data. Results show that there are theoretical and practical reasons for preferring the k-median to the k-modes algorithm, whenever the responses to the items are measured on an ordinal scale. This is because the Manhattan distance is sensitive to the order on the levels, while the Hamming distance is not. Overall, k-median seems to be a promising data-driven procedure for building polytomous structures.

Testing rTMS-Induced Neuroplasticity: A Single Case Study of Focal Hand Dystonia.

Focal hand dystonia in musicians is a neurological motor disorder in which aberrant plasticity is caused by excessive repetitive use. This work's purposes were to induce plasticity changes in a dystonic musician through five daily thirty-minute sessions of 1 Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) applied to the left M1 by using neuronavigated stimulation and to reliably measure the effect of these changes. To this aim, the relationship between neuroplasticity changes and motor recovery was investigated using fine-grained kinematic analysis. Our results suggest a statistically significant improvement in motor coordination both in a task resembling the dystonic-inducing symptoms and in a reach-to-grasp task. This single case study supports the safe and effective use of noninvasive brain stimulation in neurologic patients and highlights the importance of evaluating outcomes in measurable ways. This issue is a key aspect to focus on to classify the clinical expression of dystonia. These preliminary results promote the adoption of kinematic analysis as a valuable diagnostic tool.

What is a number? The interplay between number and continuous magnitudes.

Leibovich et al. argue that it is impossible to control for all continuous magnitudes in a numerical task. We contend that continuous magnitudes (i.e., perimeter, area, density) can be simultaneously controlled. Furthermore, we argue that shedding light on the interplay between number and continuous magnitudes - rather than considering them independently - will provide a much more fruitful approach to understanding mathematical abilities.

A class of k-modes algorithms for extracting knowledge structures from data.

One of the most crucial issues in knowledge space theory is the construction of the so-called knowledge structures. In the present paper, a new data-driven procedure for large data sets is described, which overcomes some of the drawbacks of the already existing methods. The procedure, called k-states, is an incremental extension of the k-modes algorithm, which generates a sequence of locally optimal knowledge structures of increasing size, among which a "best" model is selected. The performance of k-states is compared to other two procedures in both a simulation study and an empirical application. In the former, k-states displays a better accuracy in reconstructing knowledge structures; in the latter, the structure extracted by k-states obtained a better fit.

Assessing the Impact of Atopic Dermatitis on the Patients' Parents with the Visual Instrument 'Caregiver-PRISM'.

BACKGROUND: There is a need to improve the quality of communication between clinicians and parents of young patients with atopic eczema (AE). OBJECTIVE: To create a tool to measure the suffering that caregivers experience in association with their child's AE (Caregiver Pictorial Representation of Illness and Self-Measure, Caregiver-PRISM), assess the validity and reliability, and identify factors associated with caregiver suffering. METHODS: Caregiver-PRISM was administered to 45 parents of patients from an AE outpatient service (Padua, Italy). RESULTS: Caregiver-PRISM had a good test-retest reliability (r = 0.85; t7 = 4.13; p < 0.05), content validity and construct validity when used in parents of AE children. Parents with a less positive family affective climate, higher education, or with children following a diet experienced higher suffering associated with their child's AE, demonstrated by lower Caregiver-PRISM scores (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Our results support the use of Caregiver-PRISM in parents of AE patients to assess suffering associated with patients' illness.

Sociodemographic characteristics, risk factors and psychobehavioral disorders associated to alcohol consumption in adolescents of Veneto.

BACKGROUND: This study aims to estimate the alcohol consumption in a large student population in Veneto (North Italy) and to identify possible psychosocial factors associated, with particular attention to the relationship between alcohol consumption and psychopathological vulnerability. METHODS: Two semi-structured questionnaires were administered: the Questionnaire for Adolescents' Saturday evening, ad hoc designed for the study, which investigates the habits and alcohol consumption patterns, and the Youth Self Report which assesses the possible presence of psychic and behavioral problems. We recruited 10,465 students attending secondary and high schools in two Venetian provinces (age range 11-19 years). Frequency and amount of alcohol consumption were analyzed in relation to socio-demographic characteristics, habits, and vulnerability to psycho-behavioral problems. RESULTS: Data confirmed the high occurrence of alcohol consumption among young people (36.5%), with a higher prevalence among males (58,0%); the frequency of consumption and the amount of alcohol in taking increase with age, in greater measure after the transition to higher education level (10.4% in secondary school, 36,% in first year till 50% in third year of high school). Alcohol misuse was associated with: pubs and clubs attendance, coming back home late, a greater availability of money and externalizing behavioral problems. CONCLUSIONS: Results from this study confirmed the worrying data about the prevalence of alcohol misuse among young people, pointing out some protective and risk factors to be taken into account in planning of preventive interventions.

An iterative procedure for extracting skill maps from data.

The methodologies for the construction of a knowledge structure mainly refer to the query to experts, the skill maps, and the data-driven approaches. This last method is of growing interest in recent literature. In this paper, an iterative procedure for building a skill map from a set of data is introduced. This procedure is based on the minimization of the distance between the knowledge structure delineated by a given skill map and the data. The accuracy of the proposed method is tested through a number of simulation studies where the amount of noise in the data is manipulated as well as the kind of structure to be reconstructed. Results show that the procedure is accurate and that its performance tends to be sufficiently stable even with high error rates. The procedure is compared to two already-existing methodologies to derive knowledge structures from a set of data. The use of the corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc) as a stopping criterion of the iterative reconstruction procedure is tested against the app criterion introduced by Schrepp. Moreover, two empirical applications on clinical data are reported, and their results show the applicability of the procedure.

Beyond the score: clinical evaluation through formal psychological assessment.

Questionnaires generate numerical scores, but endorsing different sets of items could produce the same score despite reflecting qualitatively different configurations of clinical features. Formal psychological assessment (FPA) attempts to overcome this by identifying the clinical features entailed by observed response patterns. This study illustrates an application of FPA to the cleaning subscale of a questionnaire assessing obsessive-compulsive symptoms and DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder. A deterministic model of the items-criteria relationships was constructed by mapping each item to each diagnostic criterion. The resulting model was tested on a large community sample (N = 4,412). Results indicate that the theoretical model has adequate fit; item error rates and probabilities for each of the criteria are examined. Clinically relevant examples of the items-criteria relationships are discussed. Possible applications of FPA to personality assessment are also discussed, including long multidimensional questionnaires and questionnaires that use subtle item content.

Assessing Discriminant Validity through Structural Equation Modeling: The Case of Eating Compulsivity.

Food addiction (FA) and disordered eating behaviors related to obesity are gaining attention in clinical and research fields. The modified Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0 (mYFAS2.0) is the gold standard questionnaire to measure FA, while another tool is the Measure of Eating Compulsivity 10 (MEC10). Discriminant validity is present when two measures of similar but distinct constructs show a correlation that is low enough for the factors to be regarded as distinct. However, the discriminant validity of these measures has never been tested. Through a cross-sectional study design, 717 inpatients (females: 56.20%, age: 53.681 ± 12.74) with severe obesity completed the MEC10, Binge Eating Scale (BES), and mYFAS2.0. A structural equation model (SEM) was fitted, freely estimating latent correlations with 95% confidence intervals (95% CI). The results confirmed the scales' excellent psychometric properties. Importantly, latent factor correlations between MEC10 and mYFAS2.0 (est = 0.783, 95% CI [0.76, 0.80]) supported their discriminant validity. In contrast, the latent correlation of MEC10 and BES (est = 0.86, 95% CI [0.84, 0.87]) exceeded the recommended thresholds, indicating the absence of discriminant validity and suggesting a potential overlap, consistent with previous evidence. In conclusion, MEC10 demonstrates excellent psychometric properties but is more a measure of BED and not FA.

Investigating acoustic numerosity illusions in professional musicians.

Various studies have reported an association between musical expertise and enhanced visuospatial and mathematical abilities. A recent work tested the susceptibility of musicians and nonmusicians to the Solitaire numerosity illusion finding that also perceptual biases underlying numerical estimation are influenced by long-term music training. However, the potential link between musical expertise and different perceptual mechanisms of quantitative estimation may be either limited to the visual modality or universal (i.e., modality independent). We addressed this question by developing an acoustic version of the Solitaire illusion. Professional musicians and nonmusicians listened to audio file recordings of piano and trombone notes and were required to estimate the number of piano notes. The stimuli were arranged to form test trials, with piano and trombone notes arranged in a way to form the Solitaire pattern, and control trials, with randomly located notes to assess their quantitative abilities in the acoustic modality. In the control trials, musicians were more accurate in numerical estimation than nonmusicians. In the presence of illusory patterns, nonmusicians differed from musicians in the esteem of regularly arranged vs. randomly arranged notes. This suggests that the association between long-term musical training and different perceptual mechanisms underlying numerical estimation may not be confined to the visual modality. However, neither musicians nor nonmusicians seemed to be susceptible to the acoustic version of the Solitaire illusion, suggesting that the emergence of this illusion may be stimulus and task-dependent.

On the Identifiability of 3- and 4-Parameter Item Response Theory Models From the Perspective of Knowledge Space Theory.

The present work aims at showing that the identification problems (here meant as both issues of empirical indistinguishability and unidentifiability) of some item response theory models are related to the notion of identifiability in knowledge space theory. Specifically, that the identification problems of the 3- and 4-parameter models are related to the more general issues of forward- and backward-gradedness in all items of the power set, which is the knowledge structure associated with IRT models under the assumption of local independence. As a consequence, the identifiability problem of a 4-parameter model is split into two parts: a first one, which is the result of a trade-off between the left-side added parameters and the remainder of the Item Response Function, e.g., a 2-parameter model, and a second one, which is the already well-known identifiability issue of the 2-parameter model itself. Application of the results to the logistic case appears to provide both a confirmation and a generalization of the current findings in the literature for both fixed- and random-effects IRT logistic models.

Moral reasoning behind the veil of ignorance: An investigation into perspective-taking accessibility in the context of autonomous vehicles.

Perspective-taking (PT) accessibility has been recognized as an important factor in affecting moral reasoning, also playing a non-trivial role in moral investigation towards autonomous vehicles (AVs). A new proposal to deepen this effect leverages the principles of the veil of ignorance (VOI), as a moral reasoning device aimed to control self-interested decisions by limiting the access to specific perspectives and to potentially biased information. Throughout two studies, we deepen the role of VOI reasoning in the moral perception of AVs, disclosing personal and contingent information progressively throughout the experiment. With the use of the moral trilemma paradigm, two different VOI conditions were operationalized, inspired by the Original Position theory by John Rawls and the Equiprobability Model by John Harsanyi. Evidence suggests a significant role of VOI reasoning in affecting moral reasoning, which seems not independent from the order in which information is revealed. Coherently, a detrimental effect of self-involvement on utilitarian behaviours was detected. These results highlight the importance of considering PT accessibility and self-involvement when investigating moral attitudes towards AVs, since it can help the intelligibility of general concerns and hesitations towards this new technology.

Atypical Time to Contact Estimation in Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) present atypical sensory processing in the perception of moving stimuli and biological motion. The present study aims to explore the performance of young adults with ASD in a time to contact (TTC) estimation task involving social and non-social stimuli. TTC estimation involves extrapolating the trajectory of a moving target concealed by an occluder, based on the visible portion of its path, to predict the target's arrival time at a specific position. Sixteen participants with a diagnosis of level-1 ASD (M = 19.2 years, SE = 0.54 years; 3 F, 13 M) and sixteen participants with TD (M = 22.3 years, SE = 0.44 years; 3 F, 13 M) took part in the study and underwent a TTC estimation task. The task presented two object types (a car and a point-light walker), different object speeds, occluder lengths, motion directions and motion congruency. For the car object, a larger overestimation of TTC emerged for ASDs than for TDs, whereas no difference between ASDs and TDs emerged for the point-light walker. ASDs exhibited a larger TTC overestimation for the car object than for the point-light walker, whereas no difference between object types emerged for TDs. Our results indicated an atypical TTC estimation process in young adults with ASD. Given its importance in daily life, future studies should further explore this skill. Significant effects that emerged from the analysis are discussed.

Ascent and Attachment in Pea Plants: A Matter of Iteration.

Pea plants (Pisum sativum L.) can perceive the presence of potential supports in the environment and flexibly adapt their behavior to clasp them. How pea plants control and perfect this behavior during growth remains unexplored. Here, we attempt to fill this gap by studying the movement of the apex and the tendrils at different leaves using three-dimensional (3D) kinematical analysis. We hypothesized that plants accumulate information and resources through the circumnutation movements of each leaf. Information generates the kinematical coordinates for the final launch towards the potential support. Results suggest that developing a functional approach to grasp movement may involve an interactive trial and error process based on continuous cross-talk across leaves. This internal communication provides evidence that plants adopt plastic responses in a way that optimally corresponds to support search scenarios.