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The covid-19 lockdown forced psychotherapists to use videoconferencing psychotherapy (VCP). There is little literature on the relationship between VCP and the theoretical orientation of the psychotherapist. The aim of our research work is to explore to what extent the Italian therapists used VCP and how they experienced the change in setting during lockdown. A sample of psychotherapists completed an on-line questionnaire including data about any previous experience of remote work, information on changes in setting during lockdown and their opinions on this experience. In the second phase, a statistical analysis of the data collected was performed with SPSS. The most represented theoretical orientations are psychoanalytic, Gestalt, systemic-relational and psychodynamic. Almost all the respondents had chosen to change the setting, opting for remote work via video calls, with no differences in terms of theoretical orientation and age group. Psychotherapeutic orientation seems to affect the type of difficulties encountered. The scientific literature on remote psychotherapy (VCP) so far does not correlate it with any specific theoretical-clinical model. Our research work offers some preliminary hypotheses about potential correlations between setting variations with the theoretical-clinical models.

Orexin system regulates sleep/wake states and its deficiency result in narcolepsy thus indicating the crucial role of orexins in maintaining wakefulness. There are two types of orexin peptides: the orexin-A (OXA or hypocretin 1) and orexin-B (OXB or hypocre- tin 2). The Majority of the central nervous system orexin peptides are synthesized in neurons located in the lateral and back hypotha- lamus and send projections throughout the brain regions Orexin neurons are “multi-tasking” hence regulating also energy homeosta- sis, reward systems and feeding behaviour through connection with hypothalamic nuclei and through responsiveness to leptine and glucose. It has recently been found a connection with lymbic system suggesting a further possible role of orexins in regulating emo- tions. All the studies conducted confirm that orexin system regulates vigilance states, energy homeostasis, reward system, and emo- tions. These crucial role might be the target to develope treatments of narcolepsy, obesity, emotional stress, and drug addiction.

The consciousness is the expression of an enormous and complex variety of neurobiological events, phenomenological and psychological that, from the early stages of development, prepare the emergence soil of the Self. It is a complex of tangible and intan- gible characters distinct from one another - neural infrastructure, awareness, temporality, qualitative subjectivity, intentionality - to such an extent as to seem welded faces of the same prism. Consciousness is not a simple function of the mind, but its organization. In this paper we intend to show how its order is not strictly hierarchical, but sustained by multiple horizontal levels, each of which in a structural and functional continuum with several emerging phenomena. The same distinction between quantitative aspects (surveil- lance) and qualitative (content of consciousness) of consciousness is founded on the premise that the supervision is regulated by widespread in projection systems of the brain stem, hypothalamus and thalamus; while the content of consciousness depends on the cortical activity, and particularly from the associative areas of the cortex connected between them. The so-called disturbances of consciousness (vegetative state, the minimally conscious state, a coma, the Locked in syndrome) suggests the existence of an altera- tion of a common underlying system. Although the current heterogeneity of the data makes it impossible to attribute with certainty whether positive or negative about the alleged absence of consciousness in the individual patient, the search is deriving significant benefits from the accumulation of neuroimaging evidence in paintings like coma, general anesthesia , sleep, epilepsy and somnambu- lism. In this sense, it seems increasingly urgent a deeper understanding of the neural correlates during sleep or general anesthesia, as well as the relationships between neural processes and altered states of consciousness generated by pharmacological manipulations.

In a sample of 60 male Italian subjects imprisoned at a juvenile detention institute (JDI), psychopathological aspects of the AXIS II were described and the validity of a psychopathological dimensional approach for describing criminological issues was examined. The data show that the sample has psychopathological characteristics which revolve around ego weakness and poor management of relations and aggression. Statistically these psychopathological characteristics explain 85% of criminal behavior.

Lo studio si è svolto all’interno di una popolazione di adolescenti detenuti e ha avuto come obiettivi la descrizione degli aspetti psicopatologici di Asse II del campione in esame; la definizione di pattern di elementi caratteriali e temperamentali peculiari di questi soggetti attraverso l’utilizzo di un approccio dimensionale allo studio della personalità; la costruzione di un modello gerarchico per la descrizione delle peculiarità cliniche di questo campione.

Numerose ricerche compiute negli Stati Uniti dimostrano che una percentuale del 2-3% della popolazione americana presenta un Disturbo Antisociale Di Personalità (ASPD). Queste percentuali arrivano fino al 50-60% se si considera la popolazione dei detenuti maggiorenni. Tra i detenuti minorenni la diagnosi di personalità antisociale presenta problematiche peculiari che richiedono un approfondimento degli aspetti clinici ed epidemiologici. Inoltre, è evidente l’importanza di approfondire gli aspetti psicopatologici al fine di impostare interventi riabilitativi correttamente mirati. Il nostro studio ha lo scopo di valutare la prevalenza dei disturbi di personalità in una popolazione di detenuti minorenni con particolare attenzione al ASPD, di definire il profilo clinico caratteristico dei soggetti in esame, di valutare l’importanza di variabili anamnestiche e sociodemografiche e, infine, di rilevare la presenza di sintomi psichici quali l’ansia, la depressione, la disfunzione sociale e i sintomi somatici.

Although it is a familiar experience for everyone, in the vast majority of cases we discover the importance of consciousness only when in front of someone who no longer appears to possess it: someone ‘absent’, with their eyes fixed in the void, while the heart beats vigorously and their muscle tone is intact; or a patient with a psycho-organic syndrome or brain trauma, who is awake, even alert, but no longer in contact with the surrounding environment. Despite the fact that millions of people around the world enter and leave the state of consciousness every day, neurophysiological and clinical knowledge about consciousness is still far from forming a coherent scientific corpus. In fact, nowadays, there is no general shared definition of an altered state of consciousness. In this paper we propose a structured model of the phenomenon of consciousness, viewed as a multivariate combination of independent factors, which includes the variations and transitions of consciousness from a normal state of wakefulness to a psychopathological condition (with discrete deviations in subjective experience), and to severe clinical-neurological pictures.

Multisensory integration indicates the brain's ability to synthesize information from different sensory and perceptual sources. This ability is also known as cross-modal integration or intersensory integration. The interest in the neural bases of multisensory integration is largely due to the extraordinary influence it has on perceptual and behavioral effects: effects that are impossible to access through individual sensory channels. This paper aims to analyse the relationship between multisensory integration and the qualitative dimension of consciousness. It will also focus on the way in which the individual modalities - visual, auditory, somatic and other inputs - are synthesized within a central-encephalic space of integration, giving new insights to Cognitive Infocommunications scientific field.

Each new era brings with it new technologies and new challenges to civilization. The impetuous technological development is changing the economy and work more and more every day; to the point of making the passage from agrarian society to industrial society seem like a trifle. Nevertheless, if there is widespread awareness of the general issues of society, there is definitely less on the way in which anthropomorphic robots (increasingly in an emotional and cognitive relationship with human beings) are radically modifying intimate and exclusive spheres such as sexuality and love. An epochal passage is being announced from an organic sexuality (driven by desire and pleasure) to an inorganic, artificial sexuality, suspended in an abstract excitement, always at hand and disengaged from categories such as beauty, forms and age. In this paper, we will discuss the plausibility of an emotional relationship between robots and human beings and its ethical implications. It is probable, in fact, that soon there will be self-aware robots, capable of experiencing feelings such as love, joy, suffering, pain and pleasure. If this scenario is realized, will we continue to think that they are only machines, or will we recognize the moral relevance that they do not have today?

For over a century, it has been accepted that there exists a remote psychic space that influences our way of thinking, perception, decision-making and so on. This space, defined by Freud as the ‘unconscious’, embodies the psychic element that we are unaware of. It is a space that is an extension and a wider representation of the complex and sophisticated metapsychological apparatus he conceived. With respect to the conscious sphere (whose related anatomical function concerns the encephalic trunk, diencephalon and associative cortical areas), this unconscious dimension relates to the limbic lobe and specific areas of the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes. This complex neurophysiological system connects and coordinates the sensory, emotional, cognitive and behavioural systems. Its sophisticated adaptive functions, implied and unaware, allow the prefrontal cortex to transform a huge amount of information into explicit behaviour, thus affecting our behaviour in terms of executive functions, decision-making, moral judgments and so on. In this paper, we advance the hypothesis that these subcortical components constitute interconnected modal matrices that intervene under certain circumstances to respond to environmental requirements. In this space of functional integration, they act as an intermediary between the frontal cortex, the limbic system and the basal ganglia and are a key player in the planning, selection and decision to carry out appropriate actions. Due to their generativity and intramodal and extramodal connections, it is plausible to assume that they also play a role in mediation between unconscious and conscious thought. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020.

The study of personality has been developed according to different lines of research in which it is also possible to identify transversal elements that are useful for an unprecedented trans-theoretical research programme. The existence of a close relation between the contents of thought (narrative system) and the vegetative and motor functions (experiential system) of the human being is currently considered of great relevance. However, until now, the studies using classic psychological test in order to describe the contents of the narrative system customize the experiential system and produce partial descriptions and non-integrated description of the personality. Nevertheless, when the people reflect about the questions in a personality test, they present (under the action of this cognitive stimulus) a synchronous activity of the narrative and experiential system. The intention of the study proposed in this paper, with the use of biofeedback and neurofeedback methods, is to record the physiological responses of the subject while answering to the items of a personality test, in order to describe it as a functional unit of thoughts, behaviours and affective states. The personality assessment tool, Cloninger’s temperament and character inventory, will be provided with a computerized system: the electrophysiological recording will be produced using the neurofeedback system “Neurobit Optima 4”; for the analysis of electrophysiological measurements, software (“BioExplorer” system) will be used to manage the brain–computer interface (BCI). It is expected that the aforementioned methodology will allow for an original description of the personality as a functional unit of thoughts, behaviours and affective states.

Episodic memory has been conceptualized as the memory for personal events with specific spatiotemporal components. The assessment of episodic memory is usually conducted by means of verbal recall tasks, in which the individual is required to repeat what (s)he remembers from a previously presented verbal material (either single words or a brief story). However, the need of a more ecological approach to memory assessment led researchers to investigate the potential use of 360° videos as a suitable tool to present real life scenes to be remembered. The present study presents the protocol of the assessment of episodic memory employing five 360° video that represent interpersonal, emotional experiences known to be altered in psychopathological conditions. Furthermore, a case study in which the assessment protocol is applied to a patient with Borderline Personality Disorder is described. The results of the case study seem to indicate that our 360° videos are able to detect anomalies in remembering the behaviors displayed, the connected emotion together with details regarding the “where” and “when” components of the episodic recall. © 2019, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

The scientific evidence found in the literature shows that aggression is innate in humans, in a reactive and proactive form. This work proposes a distinction between an aggressive act and a predisposition to aggression, highlighting how this type of behavior is normative and natural in child's development. Aggressiveness reaches its peak between two and four years old and tends to decrease sensibly and permanently throughout the life. This work traces genetic and temperamental correlates of aggressiveness, highlights the relationship between aggression and decision making and explores the elements that lead to the choice of implementing aggressive behavior. Finally, we discuss the preliminary research proposal for the development of a gaming software, structured with a set of decision tasks, including measurement of reaction times, in order to detect the predisposition to chose aggressive behavior. This will enable the correlation between the collected data and the results obtained from the temperamental tests. © 2018 IEEE.

The way individuals make choices and decisions influences their behavior and life style. The choice is not simply based on rational and formal logic, but it’s influenced by many emotional and social factors. Starting from this assumption, some studies investigated the way in which emotions influence decision-making processes, while others explored the possibility that decision-making processes are compromised by the onset of psychiatric pathologies and by the presence of prefrontal cortexlesions, which can induce a radical change in basic preferences of the subject. In our opinion, the decision-making style is strictly connected to the normal personality structure while the relationship with psychopathology can be framed within the non-causal and non-linear effects typical of risk or protection factors. The present pilot study, first, intends to explore the relation between decision-making styles, non-pathological personality traits and psychic disorders; second, it intends to propose a psychometric tool administrable via mobile app, aimed at studying the influence of decision-making styles, related to personality, on the quality and effectiveness of decisions. The present pilot study, was developed in a sample of outpatients in a private psychotherapy service made up of subjects diagnosed with personality disorder. The TCI test was been administered to identify the decision-making styles related to the character traits and temperament. Through statistical analyses, five factors were extracted (5 decision-making styles) and only two personality disorders appear to be related to decision-making styles. This results describe a significant but marginal impact of decisional styles on the pathology of personality, with respect to which they play a role of risk or protection factor.

Creativity is crucial for innovation, technological progress and social change. It reinforces individual coping and self-assertion skills, thanks to its strong adaptive function. Even though there is substantial agreement that individual creativity (an expression of structure and well-defined brain processes) determines the creative potential of society, both brain and creativity are studied from very different perspectives. In fact, if the human brain is the object of investigation of the hard sciences on the part of neuroscientists, creativity is usually studied by social and behavioral scientists. Over time, this fact has made it difficult to create research programs that combine both approaches, although efforts have been made to link the two topics in recent years, exploring the advantages of a transdisciplinary approach. In this paper, we shall try to show that it is necessary to clarify the biological basis of creativity in order to establish some of the fundamental connections between invention, IC technology innovation, improvisation and the unconscious archaic structures that guide us in many aspects of our daily behavior.

The so-called Posthuman question - the birth of organisms generated by the encounter of biological and artificial entities (humanoid robots, cyborgs and so on) - is now on the agenda of science and, more generally, of contemporary society. This is an issue of enormous importance, which not only poses ethical questions but also, and above all, methodological questions about how it will be achieved on a scientific plane. How such entities will be born and what their functions will be? For example, what kind of consciousness will they be equipped with, in view of the function of consciousness for distinguishing the Self from others, which is the foundation of the interactive life of relationships? Many scholars believe that rapid technological progress will lead to the emergence of organisms that will simulate the functions of the mind, learn from their experiences, decode real-world information, and plan their actions and choices based on their own values elaborated from vast amounts of data and metadata. In the not-too-distant future, it is believed that these entities will acquire awareness and, consequently, decisional freedom, and perhaps even their own unique morals. In this paper, we try to show that the path towards this goal cannot avoid clarification of the problems that neuroscience has ahead of it. These problems concern: a) the way in which consciousness comes about on the basis of well-defined brain processes; b) how it represents its own organization and not a simple brain function; c) how simultaneously contains multiple distinct contents, each with its own intentionality; d) how it expresses dynamic evolutionary relations and not a set of phenomena that may be isolated; e) finally, how its order is not rigidly hierarchical, but is supported by a multiplicity of horizontal levels, each of which is in structural and functional continuum with different phenomenal events. The empirical and theoretical research effort on this topic provides an intensive contribution to the development of IC Technologies.

During the last period of lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic influence, a lot of mental health professionals were able to continue working online, assisting their patients from home too. Even if there are still some doubts about videoconferencing psychotherapy (VCP), a lot of studies indicate that VCP can be feasible and clinically effective, in fact the online therapy is becoming increasingly popular, reducing distances even during the current pandemic. The aim of this study is to analyze the degree of satisfaction after using VCP in a sample of psychotherapists freely recruited through the publication on social media of a specially created questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by performing descriptive statistics to show the qualitative and quantitative composition of the sample examined. A tree classification model was created to predict the liking of the remote therapeutic intervention based on the socio- demographic characteristics, previous experiences and aspects of psychotherapeutic orientation of the therapists recruited in the study. Through a decision tree that explains which variables are related to positive responses, the following characteristics were found to predict the degree of satisfaction of the psychotherapists in using the VCP: belonging to a specific age group; having previously used VCP; and belonging to a specific psychotherapeutic orientation. According to the results, the first two important characteristics of the psychotherapists to influence the satisfaction in their use of VCP (belonging to the specific age group 45-65 and having previously used VCP) are probably a matter that can be linked to the degree of professional maturity and experience. The innovation of this research is to highlights the real impact of the distance therapy on the main therapeutic models, concluding that to have a certain level of proficiency, according the own orientation, in the use of the VCP may influence the level of satisfaction of the psychotherapists.

This paper presents a procedure that aims to combine explanatory and predictive modeling for the construction of new psychometric questionnaires based on psychological and neuroscientific theoretical grounding. It presents the methodology and the results of a procedure for items selection that considers both the explanatory power of the theory and the predictive power of modern computational techniques, namely exploratory data analysis for investigating the dimensional structure and artificial neural networks (ANNs) for predicting the psychopathological diagnosis of clinical subjects. Such blending allows deriving theoretical insights on the characteristics of the items selected and their conformity with the theoretical framework of reference. At the same time, it permits the selection of those items that have the most relevance in terms of prediction by therefore considering the relationship of the items with the actual psychopathological diagnosis. Such approach helps to construct a diagnostic tool that both conforms with the theory and with the individual characteristics of the population at hand, by providing insights on the power of the scale in precisely identifying out-of-sample pathological subjects. The proposed procedure is based on a sequence of steps that allows the construction of an ANN capable of predicting the diagnosis of a group of subjects based on their item responses to a questionnaire and subsequently automatically selects the most predictive items by preserving the factorial structure of the scale. Results show that the machine learning procedure selected a set of items that drastically improved the prediction accuracy of the model (167 items reached a prediction accuracy of 88.5%, that is 25.6% of incorrectly classified), compared to the predictions obtained using all the original items (260 items with a prediction accuracy of 74.4%). At the same time, it reduced the redundancy of the items and eliminated those with less consistency.

The term dyspraxia defines an inability to perform a pragmatically oriented action. It doesn't yet have a precise nosographic location. According to the embodied cognition model, this disorder compromises the development of superior mental functions, the construction and the representation of the Self. In our perspective it isn't possible to reduce dyspraxia to a mere disorder of the execution of an intentional gesture and it must be included in a wider spectrum of pathological processes that compromise the functions and the development of individual mind. With the aim to identify early and to support pupils with possible motor difficulties, our contribution intends to propose a computational analysis model of the dyspraxic movements and to define the construction of a technologically assisted diagnostic system for dyspraxia, thanks to the use of an ecological observation grid (GEO-DE). The observation tool was applied in a sample of 525 subjects, aged between 48 and 72 months in order to identify the groups of motor tasks predictive of dyspraxic phenomena. The analysis of the normalized importance of the independent variables showed that the Linguistic Skill (AL) group is the most important group for the forecast of praxic deficits, it was followed in descending order by the AP (Personal Autonomy), GTI (Transitive and Intransitive Gestures), EC (Balance and Coordination) groups. The innovation in this research is to identify which movement patterns are capable of predicting praxic motor dysfunction, for an automated mixed assessment system that includes teacher evaluation.

Naturalistic decision-making (NDM) investigates the cognitive strategies used by experts in making decisions in real-world contexts. Unlike studies conducted in the laboratory, the NDM paradigm is applied to real human interactions, often characterized by uncertainty, risk, complexity, time pressures and so on. In this approach, the role of experience is crucial in making possible a quick classification of decision-making situations and therefore in making an effective, rapid and prudent choice. Models of behaviour resulting from these studies represent an extraordinary resource for research and for the application of decision-making strategies in high-risk environments. They particularly underline not only that most of the critical decisions that we take are based on our intuition, but that the ability to recognize patterns and other signals that allow us to act effectively is a natural extension of experience. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020.

Personality disorders (PDs) are one of the major problems for the organization of public health systems. Deepening the link between personality traits and psychopathological drifts, it seems increasingly essential for the often dramatic repercussions that PDs have on social contexts. Some of these disorders, such as borderline PD, antisocial PD, in their most tragic expression, are the basis of problems related to crime, sexual violence, abuse, and mistreatment of minors. Many authors propose a dimensional classification of personality pathology, which has received empirical support from numerous studies over the last 20 years based on more robust theoretical principles than those applied to current nosography. The present study investigates the nature of the research carried out in the last years on the personality in the clinical field exploring the contents of current research on personality relapses, evaluating, on the one hand, the emerging areas of greatest interest and others, those that they stopped generating sufficient motivations in scholars. This study evaluates text patterns regarding how the terms “personality” and “mental health” are used in titles and abstracts published in PubMed in the last 5 years. We use a topic analysis: Latent Dirichlet Allocation that expresses every report as a probabilistic distribution of latent topics that are represented as a probabilistic distribution of words. A total of 7,572 abstracts (from 2012 to 2017) were retrieved from PubMed for the query on “mental health” and “personality.” The study found 30 topics organized in eight hierarchical clusters that describe the type of current research carried out on personality and its clinical relapse. The hierarchical clusters latent themes were the following: social dimensions, clinical aspects, biological issues, clinical history of PD, internalization and externalization symptoms, impulsive behaviors, comorbidities, criminal behaviors. The results indicate that the concept of personality is associated with a wide range of conditions. The study of personality and mental health still proceeds, mainly, according to a practical-clinical approach; too little moves, however, according to an innovative research approach, but the work shows the common commitment of scholars to a new way of dealing with the study of personality.

In the psychological field, the study of the interaction between the caregiver and the child is considered the context of primary development. Observing how infants interact with their mothers, in the first year of their life, has allowed researchers to identify behavioural indicators useful to highlight the crucial role of their synchronisation, within the behavioural and cognitive domain. The aim of this study is to employ a new observational method, mediated by an artificial neural network model, to systematically study the complex bodily gestural interaction between child and caregiver, which concurs in the development of the child’s bodily awareness, and how the quality of early interactions affects the child’s relationship with his body. The first part will deal with qualitative observational methods, their limits and the object of the study; the second part will describe the reference theory; the third part will describe the neural network model, the details of the proposed study and the expected results. We hypothesise that this model could be used for the construction of a tool that could compensate for some of the critical shortcomings that lie within observational methods in the field of psychology.

Although there is a no established theory, there is no longer any doubt about the multiplicity of the structures involved in the attentional processes. Attention is involved, in fact, in several fundamental functions: Consciousness, perception, motor action, memory and so on. For several decades, the hypothesis that attention is highly variable (for extension and clarity) in terms of consciousness has been quite influential, which would range within itself in relation to its changes of state: From sleep to wakefulness, from drowsiness to twilight state of consciousness, from confusion to hyperlucidity, from dreamlike to oneiric states. More recently, other fields of considerable theoretical importance have linked attention to emotion, to affectivity or primary autonomous psychic energy or to social determinants. In this paper, we shall demonstrate how paying attention to something does not mean becoming aware of it. A series of experiments has shown that these are two distinct mental states. This decoupling could represent a useful mechanism for the ability to survive that has developed during the course of evolution. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020.