Measuring psychological traits with standardised questionnaires is an essential component of clinical practice and research; however, patients and participants risk fatigue from overly long and repetitive measures. When developing the short form of a questionnaire, the most widely used method for selecting an item subset uses factor analysis loadings to identify the items most closely related to the psychological construct being measured. However, this approach will tend to select highly correlated, homogeneous items and might therefore restrict the breadth of the construct examined.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Work Ability Index (WAI) is the most commonly used tool for evaluating work capacity. Self-assessments made by workers can be influenced by various occupational and emotional factors. We wanted to study the association of work-related factors, such as work annoyance, stress, overcommitment, job satisfaction, social support, and emotional factors, such as anxiety, depression, and happiness, with work ability, in a sample of 490 healthcare workers from an Italian public health company.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOur study examined the complex relationships among reading performance (decoding, comprehension) and language, visuo-spatial, and attentional control abilities in 115 Italian-speaking children. Latent profile analysis was used to identify distinct clusters of participants showcasing quantitative differences in decoding skills, including word, pseudo-word, text reading speed and accuracy. Then, we used this classification to investigate group differences in a variety of linguistic, working memory, and visuo-spatial tasks, as well as in reading comprehension skills, by means of multivariate and univariate tests.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe investigation of the phenomenology of autobiographical memories (i.e., how a memory is subjectively experienced and its meaning) has provided an important contribution to our understanding of autobiographical remembering.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Memory deficits in mild cognitive impairment related to Parkinson's disease (PD-MCI) are quite heterogeneous, and there is no general agreement on their genesis.
Objectives: To define memory phenotypes in de novo PD-MCI and their associations with motor and non-motor features and patients' quality of life.
Methods: From a sample of 183 early de novo patients with PD, cluster analysis was applied to neuropsychological measures of memory function of 82 patients with PD-MCI (44.
Int J Environ Res Public Health
October 2022
The quality of work organization may be responsible not only for reduced productivity but also for an increased risk of mental and physical disorders. This study was aimed at testing this hypothesis. Workers of a local health unit in Italy were asked to fill out the Work Organization Assessment Questionnaire (WOAQ) during their periodic medical examinations in the second half of 2018.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: This study investigates the relations of resilience with coping, personality traits, emotional intelligence, sense of coherence and maladaptive personality traits.
Method: The study employs network analysis techniques to the study of resilience, showcasing how these methods can estimate a model that is simple to interpret while still retaining the most important relations and that can even suggest the direction of causality despite using a cross-sectional design (N = 305).
Results: The results highlight several important variables that should be considered for fostering resilience, foremost among them the use of positive reappraisal coping, sense of coherence, and the social management aspect of emotional intelligence.
Int J Environ Res Public Health
August 2022
In complex systems such as hospitals, work organization can influence the level of occupational stress and, consequently, the physical and mental health of workers. Hospital healthcare workers were asked to complete a questionnaire during their regular occupational health examination, in order to assess the perceived level of organizational justice, and to verify whether it was associated with occupational stress, mental health, and absenteeism. The questionnaire included the Colquitt Organizational Justice (OJ) Scale, the Karasek/Theorell demand-control-support (DCS) questionnaire for occupational stress, and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ12) for mental health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
July 2022
Existing measures of the impact of job characteristics on workers' well-being do not directly assess the extent to which such characteristics (e.g., opportunity to learn new skills) are perceived as positive or negative.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale-Self Report (LSAS-SR) is a self-report measure of social anxiety (SA), which has shown adequate psychometric properties across cultures. However, no study has systematically evaluated its measurement invariance (MI) between (a) individuals with and without a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and (b) males and females. The current study addresses this issue.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the present study we investigated whether and how age group, dimensions of well-being and their interactions predicted the phenomenological properties of semantic self-images, taking also into account the different levels of accessibility of self-images (i.e., order of generation).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Purpose: Although disabling fatigue is common in Parkinson disease (PD), available consensus-based diagnostic criteria have not yet been empirically validated. The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinimetric properties of the criteria.
Methods: A sample of outpatients with PD was evaluated for demographic, clinical, behavioral, and cognitive features.
This research investigated the effect of dispositional mindfulness on the reduction of sexual prejudice and internalized sexual stigma in heterosexual and lesbian/bisexual women, who still represent a population that is under-represented in the scientific literature. Participants were 203 Italian women, both heterosexual ( = 104, 51.2%) and lesbian/bisexual (= 99, 48.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecognition of identity and of emotional facial expressions of individuals are both based on processing of the human face. While most studies show these abilities to be dissociated, some others find evidence of a connection. One possible explanation for these contradictory results comes from neurological evidence, which points to identity recognition being mostly based on holistic processing, while emotion recognition seems to be based on both an explicit, fine-grained process, and an implicit, mostly-holistic one.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To develop a short, flexible, and comprehensive tool to measure psychological distress in caregivers of malignant mesothelioma (MM) patients: the Mesothelioma Psychological Distress Tool-Caregivers version (MPDT-C).
Methods: Based on a systematic review of the relevant literature, aspects associated with caregiver distress were derived. Expert researchers/clinicians developed a pool of items for each identified aspect.
The Impulsivity/Reflexivity issue in inhibitory control ability has seldom been investigated in terms of individual differences in typically developing populations. Although there is evidence of changes in executive functioning (EF), including inhibition, in adolescence, very little is known about the role of individual differences. Using the data from 240 14-to-19-year-old high school students who completed a battery of EF tasks (Flanker, Go No-Go, Antisaccade, and Stop signal task), measures of emotion regulation strategies and behavioral difficulties, we performed a latent profile analysis to identify qualitatively distinct score profiles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals that attend cancer genetic counseling may experience test-related psychosocial problems that deserve clinical attention. In order to provide a reliable and valid first-line screening tool for these issues, Eijzenga and coworkers developed the Psychosocial Aspects of Hereditary Cancer (PAHC) questionnaire. The aim of this work was to develop an Italian adaptation of the PAHC (I-PACH).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAutobiographical memories (ABMs) produce rich phenomenological experiences. Although few standardized and comprehensive measures of the phenomenology of ABMs have been developed, a web-based assessment of the full range of phenomenological properties is still missing. In the present study, we aimed to fill this gap and tested the psychometric properties of a web-based version of the Assessment of the Phenomenology of Autobiographical Memory (APAM) in a group of young and older adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBody awareness disorders and reactivity are mentioned across a range of clinical problems. Constitutional differences in the control of the bodily state are thought to generate a vulnerability to psychological symptoms. Autonomic nervous system dysfunctions have been associated with anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
March 2021
Telecommuting is a flexible form of work that has progressively spread over the last 40 years and which has been strongly encouraged by the measures to limit the COVID-19 pandemic. There is still limited evidence on the effects it has on workers' health. In this survey we invited 905 workers of companies that made a limited use of telecommuting to fill out a questionnaire to evaluate intrusive leadership of managers (IL), the request for work outside traditional hours (OFF-TAJD), workaholism (Bergen Work Addiction Scale (BWAS)), effort/reward imbalance (ERI), happiness, and common mental issues (CMIs), anxiety and depression, assessed by the Goldberg scale (GADS).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Subjective complaints of cognitive deficits are not necessarily consistent with objective evidence of cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD). Here we examined the factors associated with the objective-subjective cognitive discrepancy.
Methods: We consecutively enrolled 90 non-demented patients with PD who completed the Parkinson's Disease Cognitive Functional Rating Scale (subjective cognitive measure) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA; objective cognitive measure).