[Pharmaceutical expenditures in the different municipalities of Rome (Italy): impact of socioeconomic conditions of the resident population].

Pharmaceutical expenditure is a cost item that is monitored continuously, to verify the appropriateness of prescriptions, the good use of available resources and to contain costs. However, socioeconomic differences in the population affect health conditions and consequently health expenditure. A comparison of socio-economic determinants and per-capita pharmaceutical expenditure in the different municipalities of Roma Capitale (Capital city of Rome, Italy) indicates that higher expenditures occur in areas characterized by lower socio-economic conditions.

Metacognition as a Predictor of Improvements in Personality Disorders.

Personality Disorders (PDs) are particularly hard to treat and treatment drop-out rates are high. Several authors have agreed that psychotherapy is more successful when it focuses on the core of personality pathology. For this reason, therapists dealing with PDs need to understand the psychopathological variables that characterize this pathology and exactly what contributes to maintaining psychopathological processes.

Symptom severity and mindreading in narcissistic personality disorder.

Background: Grandiose narcissism has been associated with poor ability to understand one's own mental states and the mental states of others. In particular, two manifestations of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) can be explained by poor mindreading abilities: absence of symptomatic subjective distress and lack of empathy.

Methods: We conducted two studies to investigate the relationships between mindreading capacity, symptomatic subjective distress and narcissistic personality.

Levels of Social Sharing and Clinical Implications for Severe Social Withdrawal in Patients with Personality Disorders.

Social sharing capacities have attracted attention from a number of fields of social cognition and have been variously defined and analyzed in numerous studies. Social sharing consists in the subjective awareness that aspects of the self's experience are held in common with other individuals. The definition of social sharing must take a variety of elements into consideration: the motivational element, the contents of the social sharing experience, the emotional responses it evokes, the behavioral outcomes, and finally, the circumstances and the skills which enable social sharing.

Avoidant personality disorder and social phobia: Does mindreading make the difference?

Objective: Avoidant personality disorder (AvPD) is closely related to and partially overlaps with social phobia (SP). There is an ongoing debate as to whether AvPD and SP can be classified as separate and distinct disorders or whether these diagnoses rather reflect different degrees of severity of social anxiety. The hypothesis of this study is that in patients with AvPD and in those with AvPD and comorbid SP both interpersonal functioning and metacognitive abilities (the ability to understand mental states) are more severely impaired than they are in patients with SP only.

Mindreading Dysfunction in Avoidant Personality Disorder Compared With Other Personality Disorders.

The ability to reflect on one's own states of mind and those of others (metacognition or mindreading) is strongly implicated in personality disorders (PDs). Metacognition involves different abilities, and there is evidence that specific abilities can be selectively impaired in different PDs. The purposes of this study were to compare metacognitive competence in avoidant PD (AvPD) with that in other PDs and to investigate whether there is a specific profile for AvPD.

Personality Disorders and Mindreading: Specific Impairments in Patients With Borderline Personality Disorder Compared to Other PDs.

The capacity of understanding mental states is a complex function which involves several components. Single components can be selectively impaired in specific clinical populations. It has been suggested that impairments in mindreading are central for borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Metacognitive dysfunctions in personality disorders: correlations with disorder severity and personality styles.

Metacognitive impairment is crucial to explaining difficulties in life tasks of patients with personality disorders (PDs). However, several issues remain open. There is a lack of evidence that metacognitive impairments are more severe in patients with PDs.