Ricerc@Sapienza

Left and right are viewed as social constructs that serve to orient and to bind people to political choices over the last two centuries mostly within established Western liberal democracies. Their contents and functions, however, have not been invariant across polities but were largely shaped in accordance with the distinctive characteristics of societies and of political systems in which they operated. Thus, one can't avoid addressing left and right under an historical perspective to make sense of their different expressions and to better appreciate their functions.

Introduction: Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a major public health problem among adolescents and a risk factor for suicide. The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between NSSI, personality functioning, sleep disturbance and problematic technology use in 136 Italian adolescents (36.8% males) aged from 14 to 17 years (mean age = 14.78 ± 0.86).

In the last two decades, scientific research has explored the problematic use of internet, videogames and mobile phones. However, there is still little consistent knowledge regarding the co‐occurrence of problematic technology use and the role of maladaptive personality characteristics in adolescence. The present study aimed to investigate adolescents' styles of technology use with a cluster analysis approach focusing on personality functioning. The sample comprised 408 Italian adolescents (46.3% males) aged 11 to 18 years (M age = 13.80; SD = 2.08).

Believing in conspiracy theories is a common phenomenon that is attracting attention from the scientific community because of its important individual- and social-level implications. Here we examine the association between attachment styles and conspiracy ideation. We anticipated that avoidant attachment style, because of its emphasis on self-reliance, its motivation to suppress psychological distress, and a Manichean view of the world based on a neat distinction between good and bad, would be associated with conspiracy ideation.

In the present research, we examined whether individual differences in basic moral concerns might be related to a greater
endorsement of conspiracy theories. Building on the notion that conspiracy theories often deal with super-individual
relevant events in which a group perspective is central, we proposed that individual differences in moral concerns
pertaining to group- and community-concerns (i.e., binding moral foundations) rather than to individual well-being (i.e.,

Background: A large body of research has traced tobacco dependence among adolescents to a series of intrapersonal and interpersonal factors. However, there are remaining questions regarding the differences on these factors related to tobacco use. Objectives: We sought to investigate intrapersonal and interpersonal differences among adolescent nonsmokers, ex-smokers, and smokers. Methods: We used data from a 3-year project designed to investigate and address tobacco dependence among 1071 students (Mage = 15.76, SD = 1.52; girls = 51.54%) who were recruited from 11 high schools.

The aim of the present study was to identify sub-types of moped riders based on a cluster analysis of specific personality characteristics (i.e., driving anger, anxiety, angry hostility, excitement-seeking, altruism, normlessness, and driving locus of control) within a large sample of Italian adolescents. The study had also the aim to compare the emerged sub-types of moped riders on measures of attitudes toward safe driving, risky driving behaviors (e.g., rule's violations and speeding, not using helmet, drinking and driving, etc.), and self-reported tickets and accident involvement.

The HEXACO Personality Inventory–Revised (HEXACO–PI–R) has become one of the most heavily applied measurement tools for the assessment of basic personality traits. Correspondingly, the inventory has been translated to many languages for use in cross-cultural research. However, formal tests examining whether the different language versions of the HEXACO–PI–R provide equivalent measures of the 6 personality dimensions are missing.

Absorption, the ability to highly focus attention, as well as openness to self-altering experiences, is an important psychological construct, closely related to deep-meditation states and other altered states of consciousness. Yet, little is known about the electrophysiological profile of states of absorption, possibly due to the difficulty to induce this state in the lab.

In this exploratory study, we investigated whether and to what extent individual differences in cognitive and personality variables are associated with spoken idiom comprehension in context. Language unimpaired participants were enrolled in a cross-modal lexical decision study in which semantically ambiguous Italian idioms (i.e., strings with both a literal and an idiomatic interpretation as, for instance, break the ice), predictable or unpredictable before the string offset, were embedded in idiom-biasing contexts.