Time-of-night variations in the story-like organization of dream experience developed during rapid eye movement sleep.

This study aimed to investigate the cycles (2nd/4th) and duration-related (5/10 min) variations in the story-like organization of dream experience elaborated during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Dream reports were analysed using story grammar rules. Reports were provided by those subjects (14 of 22) capable of reporting a dream after each of the four awakenings provoked in 2 consecutive nights during REM sleep of the 2nd and 4th cycles, after periods of either 5 or 10 min, counterbalanced across the nights.

Moderating effects of empathic concern and personal distress on the emotional reactions of disaster volunteers.

This study examines stress and mood outcomes in community volunteers who undertook one week's worth of post-disaster relief work in L'Aquila, Italy, which had been hit by an earthquake four months earlier. The study team obtained pre- and post-relief work data from 130 volunteers involved in activities such as preparing food for the displaced, cleaning the camps and distributing clean linen. The Perceived Stress Scale, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Profile of Mood States were administered at the start and at the end of the aid activities.

How the brain heals emotional wounds: the functional neuroanatomy of forgiveness.

IN LIFE, EVERYONE GOES THROUGH HURTFUL EVENTS CAUSED BY SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: a deceiving friend, a betraying partner, or an unjustly blaming parent. In response to painful emotions, individuals may react with anger, hostility, and the desire for revenge. As an alternative, they may decide to forgive the wrongdoer and relinquish resentment.

Italian guidelines for primary headaches: 2012 revised version.

The first edition of the Italian diagnostic and therapeutic guidelines for primary headaches in adults was published in J Headache Pain 2(Suppl. 1):105-190 (2001). Ten years later, the guideline committee of the Italian Society for the Study of Headaches (SISC) decided it was time to update therapeutic guidelines.

Is Social Phobia a "Mis-Communication" Disorder? Brain Functional Connectivity during Face Perception Differs between Patients with Social Phobia and Healthy Control Subjects.

Recently, a differential recruitment of brain areas throughout the distributed neural system for face perception has been found in social phobic patients as compared to healthy control subjects. These functional abnormalities in social phobic patients extend beyond emotion-related brain areas, such as the amygdala, to include cortical networks that modulate attention and process other facial features, and they are also associated with an alteration of the task-related activation/deactivation trade-off. Functional connectivity is becoming a powerful tool to examine how components of large-scale distributed neural systems are coupled together while performing a specific function.

Distinct neural systems involved in agency and animacy detection.

We designed an fMRI experiment comparing perception of human faces and robotic faces producing emotional expressions. The purpose of our experiment was to investigate engagement of different parts of the social brain by viewing these animate and inanimate agents. Both human and robotic face expressions evoked activity in face-responsive regions in the fusiform gyrus and STS and in the putative human mirror neuron system.

Do we really need vision? How blind people "see" the actions of others.

Observing and learning actions and behaviors from others, a mechanism crucial for survival and social interaction, engages the mirror neuron system. To determine whether vision is a necessary prerequisite for the human mirror system to develop and function, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activity in congenitally blind individuals during the auditory presentation of hand-executed actions or environmental sounds, and the motor pantomime of manipulation tasks, with that in sighted volunteers, who additionally performed a visual action recognition task. Congenitally blind individuals activated a premotor-temporoparietal cortical network in response to aurally presented actions that overlapped both with mirror system areas found in sighted subjects in response to visually and aurally presented stimuli, and with the brain response elicited by motor pantomime of the same actions.

Beyond amygdala: Default Mode Network activity differs between patients with social phobia and healthy controls.

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a constellation of brain areas that decrease their activity during a wide number of different goal-oriented tasks as compared to passive "rest" tasks. DMN can be modulated by different factors such as emotional states, cognitive load of the task and psychopathology, including anxiety. Moreover, DMN seems to play a pivotal role in social cognition.

Differential modulation of neural activity throughout the distributed neural system for face perception in patients with Social Phobia and healthy subjects.

Social Phobia (SP) is a marked and persistent fear of social or performance situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or to possible scrutiny by others. Faces of others are perceived as threatening by social phobic patients (SPP). To investigate how face processing is altered in the distributed neural system for face perception in Social Phobia, we designed an event-related fMRI study in which Healthy Controls (HC) and SPP were presented with angry, fearful, disgusted, happy and neutral faces and scrambled pictures (visual baseline).

Combination of event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging during single-letter reading.

This work proposes a mathematical approach for combining event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI). Data were separately recorded during the same event-related experimental design, consisting of visually presented single letters and non-alphabetic symbols, that had to be either simply observed (passive condition) or read aloud (active condition). This protocol was useful for exploring the neural correlates of reading processes.

The effect of visual experience on the development of functional architecture in hMT+.

We investigated whether the visual hMT+ cortex plays a role in supramodal representation of sensory flow, not mediated by visual mental imagery. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural activity in sighted and congenitally blind individuals during passive perception of optic and tactile flows. Visual motion-responsive cortex, including hMT+, was identified in the lateral occipital and inferior temporal cortices of the sighted subjects by response to optic flow.

A follow up study on the efficacy of metadoxine in the treatment of alcohol dependence.

Background: We carried out a three months follow-up study on the efficacy of metadoxine in a cohort of alcoholics admitted to the Alcohol misuse Long-term Treatment (ALT) Unit-University of Pisa (Italy). We analyzed the clinical data, psychometric tests and blood tests of 160 alcoholics on admission and after 3 months of treatment. We compared 58 pts treated with metadoxine (MET) with 102 pts who did not receive (NULL) any drug as an adjunct to the psycho-educational interventions provided by the ALT Unit.

Psychiatric comorbidity and chronicisation in primary headache.

The frequent association between primary headaches and psychiatric disorders is consistently reported in the literature. There is increasing evidence that a bi-directional relationship links these somatic conditions to psychopathological events. Prospective studies show that several psychiatric disorders are severe risk factors for both the onset and chronicisation of primary headache, and for a long time it has been suspected that headache triggers psychiatric disorders, mostly of affective nature, and affects both their course and outcome.

Tertiary treatment for psychiatric comorbidity in headache patients.

The presence of significant and confounding psychiatric comorbidity is greater in patients attending headache clinics than in headache patients from the general population. The frequent comorbidity of headache with generalized anxiety disorder can take advantage of the administration of benzodiazepines. With regard to depression-related headache, it's wellknown that the antidepressive drugs can improve migraine as well as tension-type headache.

Mental activity after early afternoon nap awakenings in healthy subjects.

Despite the common misconception that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a unique correlate of dreaming, reports of mental activity can be elicited after awakenings from any stage of nocturnal sleep. We extended the investigation to naps and tried to explore the relationship between recall length and level of sleep stage and depth preceding the awakening. We hypothesized that dream report length would be related to arousal level.

Beyond sensory images: Object-based representation in the human ventral pathway.

We investigated whether the topographically organized, category-related patterns of neural response in the ventral visual pathway are a representation of sensory images or a more abstract representation of object form that is not dependent on sensory modality. We used functional MRI to measure patterns of response evoked during visual and tactile recognition of faces and manmade objects in sighted subjects and during tactile recognition in blind subjects. Results showed that visual and tactile recognition evoked category-related patterns of response in a ventral extrastriate visual area in the inferior temporal gyrus that were correlated across modality for manmade objects.