Ricerc@Sapienza

Stressful life events are an important cause of psychopathology. Humans exposed to aversive or stressful experiences show considerable inter-individual heterogeneity in their responses. However, the majority does not develop stress-related psychiatric disorders. The dynamic processes encompassing positive and functional adaptation in the face of significant adversity have been broadly defined as resilience. Traditionally, the assessment of resilience has been confined to self-report measures, both within the general community and putative high-risk populations.

Background:
The effects of having a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on parents are multifaceted and pervasive. While ample
evidence has been provided that these families are under severe stress, there are still several knowledge gaps and unresolved
questions.
Objective:
This study aimed at quantifying the subjective and objective burden of ASD in mothers and fathers, and at improving the
understanding of the interplay between parental burden, child’s characteristics, and parents’ coping resources and strategies.
Methods:

The paper provides, as a first step, a critical, although not-exhaustive, review of the steps required for assessing the resilience of electric distribution systems to natural hazards, and identifies the required metrics and models still to be defined. Aiming to contribute towards that, the paper proposes an empirical-based analytical formula for estimating the expected damage frequencies to underground cable joints, when subjected to overheating. Empirical-based formulas for estimating the damage frequency to underground cables, subjected to earthquakes are also reported in the paper.

During the summer periods of the last few years there have been unexpected increased numbers of failures of underground cable joints of the medium voltage (MV) network both of e-distribuzione and of other Italian electrical distributors. As a result of this, the University of Roma 'La Sapienza' and e-distribuzione started a cooperation with the aim to investigate on causes of such failures and for finding the most appropriate countermeasures in terms of improvement of technologies, operative procedures and operation.

Resilience represents a new important feature that the anthropic systems, and cities among them, are called to cope with. In fact, the increasing negative stresses to which urban contexts are exposed, and mainly the climatic pressures, call for the capability of adapting to these modifications and, possibly, to restore the ex-ante situations. The role of the buildings and their envelope components is of crucial importance to this aim. This paper analyses the features of resilience of the roofs of buildings by means of proper quantitative indexes.

One of the parameters that has to be considered in designing underground cables is the thermal resistivity of the soil along their routes. In fact, the ampacity of the MV underground cables having different types of insulation is normally evaluated through the application of the IEC Standard 60287-x 'Electric cables - Calculation of the current rating'. This series of IEC Standard is formed of three parts as in the following: part 1: Formulae of ratings and power losses; part 2: Formulae for thermal resistance; part 3: Sections on operating conditions.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder whose pathogenesis relies on a maladaptive expression of the memory for a life-threatening experience, characterized by over-consolidation, generalization and impaired extinction, which in turn are responsible of dramatic changes in arousal, mood, anxiety and social behavior. Even if human subjects experiencing a traumatic event during lifetime all show an acute response to the trauma, only a subset (susceptible) of them ultimately develops PTSD, meanwhile the others (resilient) fully recover after the first acute response.

Chronic stress induces maladaptive neural responses in several brain areas including hippocampus. It has been demonstrated that chronic stress exposure induced a downregulation of the putative presynaptic type 2 metabotropic glutamate (mGlu2) receptors, which would reduce the negative feedback role exerted by these receptors. The reduced availability of these receptors would enhance glutamate overflow in the hippocampus, supporting the hypothesis that hippocampal glutamatergic neurotransmission plays a key etiopathological determinant in stress-induced neuropsychiatric disorders.

Graph theory analysis on resting state electroencephalographic rhythms disclosed topological properties of cerebral network. In Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients, this approach showed mixed results. Granger causality matrices were used as input to the graph theory allowing to estimate the strength and the direction of information transfer between electrode pairs.

The recent financial crisis had serious worldwide impacts. Initial resilience and good past performances led to the illusion that the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region was able to decouple from developments in advanced economies. This initial illusion was however immediately denied since the crisis spread to that region just with a lag. The CEE region was, in fact, suddenly placed at the epicenter of the emerging market crisis. Further, the consequences of the crisis were not uniform among countries of the CEE region.