It Is Time to Take Complaints Seriously? An Exploratory Analysis of Communications Sent by Users to a Public Healthcare Agency before, during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Taking due account of users' perspectives is crucial for improving the quality of healthcare services. This study aimed to analyse the representations and evaluation criteria that users of a public health agency express towards care and treatment services and to explore whether and how the content and meaning of their communications varied according to pre-pandemic, pandemic or post-pandemic periods. A total of 501 communications sent to the public relations office of an Italian health agency were collected.

What Adolescents Have to Say about Problematic Internet Use: A Qualitative Study Based on Focus Groups.

In this paper, the study presented is designed to gain a deeper insight into how adolescents describe, understand, and suggest dealing with Problematic Internet Use (PIU). Eight focus groups were activated with a total of 70 students from the 9th and 11th grades (Mean = 15.53 ± 1.

Supporting bereaved people: a qualitative study on the experience of informal support providers, before and during the pandemic scenario.

The COVID-19 outbreak has further highlighted the need to strengthen support networks to sustain grieving people. However, we know very little about the experience of those who, because of their emotional connection with the bereaved person or of their social function, find themselves supporting people in grief. The current study aimed to analyze the experience of grievers' informal support providers (relatives and friends, teachers, religious leaders, funeral providers, pharmacists, volunteers, and social service workers).

Social Environment and Attitudes toward COVID-19 Anti-Contagious Measures: An Explorative Study from Italy.

Social and cultural aspects (i.e., political decision making, discourses in the public sphere, and people's mindsets) played a crucial role in the ways people responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Relationship between view of context, psychosocial malaise and problematic internet use: mediation analysis using partial least squares structural equation modelling.

Background: According to more recent approaches on problematic internet use (PIU), using the internet can be seen as a way of compensating for psychosocial malaise. Taking semiotic cultural psychology theory as its theoretical framework, this study examines the role of affect-laden assumptions concerning the world, known as latent dimensions of sense (LDSs), in promoting (or not) adaptive responses, including internet use as a maladaptive strategy against problems and difficulties.

Aims: To test a theoretical model in which PIU is predicted by LDSs through the mediation of high levels of psychosocial malaise.

Making sense of the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative longitudinal study investigating the first and second wave in Italy.

The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the crucial role of people's compliance for the success of measures designed to protect public health. Within the frame of Semiotic Cultural Psycho-social Theory, we discuss how the analysis of people's ways of making sense of the crisis scenario can help to identify the resources or constraints underlying the ways the citizens evaluate and comply with the anti-covid measures. This study aimed to examine how Italian adults interpreted what was happening in the first wave of the pandemic and how the interpretation varied in the period up to the beginning of the second wave.

What game we are playing: the psychosocial context of problem gambling, problem gaming and poor well-being among Italian high school students.

Gambling and gaming are not infrequent among adolescents and preventing low-risk youth from becoming at-risk appears to be a priority of public health strategies. Greater scrutiny of the risk and protective factors in the relationships and community of young people appears crucial in steering prevention initiatives adequately. This study aimed to explore the role of the qualities of relational networks (i.

Emotional distress, psychosomatic symptoms and their relationship with institutional responses: A survey of Italian frontline medical staff during the Covid-19 pandemic.

With the advent of Covid-19, health workers have been under constant physical and psychological pressure. Italy was among the first countries to face the health emergency in a period of great uncertainty about the virus and the ways to treat patients. The present study aims to analyse the levels of emotional distress (ED) and psychosomatic symptoms (PS) of Italian frontline health workers during the Covid-19 emergency, and their relationship with the evaluation of the institutional responses received.

The Meaning of Living in the Time of COVID-19. A Large Sample Narrative Inquiry.

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a sudden, disruptive event that has strained international and local response capacity and distressed local populations. Different studies have focused on potential psychological distress resulting from the rupture of consolidated habits and routines related to the lockdown measures. Nevertheless, the subjective experience of individuals and the variations in the way of interpreting the lockdown measures remain substantially unexplored.

Steps Towards a Unified Theory of Psychopathology: The Phase Space of Meaning Model.

The hypothesis of a general psychopathology factor ( factor) has been advanced in recent years. It is an innovation with breakthrough potential, in the perspective of a unified view of psychopathology; however, what remains a controversial topic is how its nature might be conceptualized. The current paper outlines a semiotic, embodied and psychoanalytic conceptualization of psychopathology - the Phase Space of Meaning (PSM) model - aimed at providing ontological grounds to the factor hypothesis.

Fear, Affective Semiosis, and Management of the Pandemic Crisis: Covid-19 as Semiotic Vaccine?

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an extraordinary challenge to clinicians, health care institutions and policymakers. The paper outlines a psychoanalytically grounded semiotic-cultural psychological interpretation of such a scenario. First, we underline how the actual emotional reaction (mainly of fear) of our society is a marker of how the mind functions in conditions of affective activation related to heightened uncertainty: it produces global, homogenizing and generalizing embodied interpretations of reality, at the cost of more fine-grained and differentiated analytical thought.

The Cardiac Rehabilitation Psychodynamic Group Intervention (CR-PGI): An Explorative Study.

An explorative study focusing on the process of a Cardiac Rehabilitation Psychodynamic Group Intervention (CR-PGI) addressed to myocardial infarction (MI) patients is discussed. The study aimed at analyzing whether the treatment based on CR-PGI serves as a communicational context within which MI patients are enabled to explore new interpretations of their post-infarction condition. The intervention, divided into 12 weekly one-hour group sessions, was addressed to MI patients recruited within a Public Hospital of southern Italy.

An automated method of content analysis for psychotherapy research: A further validation.

Objective: The aim of the study is to validate the ability of ACASM (Automated Co-occurrence Analysis for Semantic Mapping) to provide a representation of the content of the therapeutic exchange that is useful for clinical analysis.

Method: We compared the clinical case analyses of a good outcome psychodynamic therapy performed by a group of clinicians (n = 5) based on the verbatim transcripts (transcript-based analysis) with the clinical case analyses performed by another group of clinicians (n = 5) based on the ACASM representation of the same sessions (ACASM-based analysis). Comparison concerned two levels: the descriptive level and the interpretative level of the clinical case analysis.

Unplanned reaction or something else? The role of subjective cultures in hazardous and harmful drinking.

This study compares the impact of levels of impulsivity and subjective cultures through which subjects interpret their experience of the social environment on the probability of hazardous and harmful alcohol use. A sample of 501 participants from Southern Italy completed a series of questionnaires in order to detect their subjective cultures and levels of impulsiveness (attentional, motor and non-planning). Moreover, alcohol consumption, drinking behavior, alcohol-related problems and adverse reactions during the past year were assessed.

The Role of Cultural Factors in Differentiating Pathological Gamblers.

It is recognised that cultural factors play a role in the onset and continuation of several mental health problems. However, there is a significant lack of empirical studies investigating the relationships between cultural factors and gambling behavior. This study assessed whether the subjective cultures through which subjects interpret and enact their experience of the social environment play a major role in increasing (or decreasing) the probability of pathological gambling.

Understanding the role of emotion in sense-making: a semiotic psychoanalytic oriented perspective.

We propose a model of emotion grounded on Ignacio Matte Blanco's theory of the unconscious. According to this conceptualization, emotion is a generalized representation of the social context actors are involved in. We discuss how this model can help to better understand the sensemaking processes.