Development and Validation of the Single Item Trait Empathy Scale (SITES)

Empathy involves feeling compassion for others and imagining how they feel. In this article, we develop and validate the Single Item Trait Empathy Scale (SITES), which contains only one item that takes seconds to complete. In seven studies (N = 5724), the SITES was found to be both reliable and valid. It correlated in expected ways with a wide variety of intrapersonal outcomes. For example, it is negatively correlated with narcissism, depression, anxiety, and alexithymia. In contrast, it is positively correlated with other measures of empathy, self-esteem, subjective well-being, and agreeableness. The SITES also correlates with a wide variety of interpersonal outcomes, especially compassion for others and helping others. The SITES is recommended in situations when time or question quantity is constrained

The relevance of schizotypal traits for understanding interpersonal functioning in adolescents with psychiatric problems.

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Examining psychopathy from an attachment perspective: the role of fear of rejection and abandonment

A key feature of psychopathy, a self-centered orientation towards others and a failure to truly connect, is poorly understood. The attachment framework can be used to examine underlying interpersonal mechanisms. Because of the overall failure to connect, we anticipated, and found, in a large undergraduate sample (n=1074) that both affective-interpersonal traits and impulsive-irresponsible psychopathy facets were positively related to attachment avoidance. Different dynamics may underlie this distancing from others, as evidenced by the fact that callous-unemotionality was negatively related to attachment anxiety, whereas grandiose-manipulative and impulsive-irresponsible traits were positively related to attachment anxiety. Although effect sizes were small and are of correlational nature, our results are in line with a dual deficit model that differential developmental trajectories, largely heritable callousness vs. neglecting and abusive parenting, may lead to adult psychopathy. The differentiating role of fear of rejection and abandonment for the psychopathy construct is discussed

Is the Book Really Better?: Comparing the Facets of Fantasy Apparent in C.S. Lewis\u27s \u3ci\u3eThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe\u3c/i\u3e and its 2005 Cinematic Adaptation

“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids” (Lewis 2). Sixty-eight years ago, these two simple lines introduced the world to the Pevensie children, who were destined to travel through a wardrobe into one of literature’s most creative, compelling, and enveloping fantasy worlds. Seven books later, the Pevensie children were kings and queens, yes, but considering the hugely expanded scope, they were merely inhabitants of the sprawling lore of The Chronicles of Narnia. Narnia, then, became much more than a world beyond a wardrobe. Narnia, the place and the lore, became a staple of any sturdy fantasy diet

Daily Stress Recognition from Mobile Phone Data, Weather Conditions and Individual Traits

Research has proven that stress reduces quality of life and causes many diseases. For this reason, several researchers devised stress detection systems based on physiological parameters. However, these systems require that obtrusive sensors are continuously carried by the user. In our paper, we propose an alternative approach providing evidence that daily stress can be reliably recognized based on behavioral metrics, derived from the user's mobile phone activity and from additional indicators, such as the weather conditions (data pertaining to transitory properties of the environment) and the personality traits (data concerning permanent dispositions of individuals). Our multifactorial statistical model, which is person-independent, obtains the accuracy score of 72.28% for a 2-class daily stress recognition problem. The model is efficient to implement for most of multimedia applications due to highly reduced low-dimensional feature space (32d). Moreover, we identify and discuss the indicators which have strong predictive power.Comment: ACM Multimedia 2014, November 3-7, 2014, Orlando, Florida, US

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. Moreover, several authors have noted that one key problem that characterizes all PDs is an impairment in understanding mental states - here termed metacognition - which could also be responsible for therapy failures. Unfortunately, a limited number of studies have investigated the role of mentalization in the process of change during psychotherapy. In this paper, we assume that poor metacognition corresponds to a core element of the general pathology of personality, impacts a series of clinical variables, generates symptoms and interpersonal problems, and causes treatment to be slower and less effective. We explored whether changes in metacognition predicted an improvement among different psychopathological variables characterizing PDs; 193 outpatients were treated at the Third Center of Cognitive Psychotherapy in Rome, Italy, and followed a structured path tailored for the different psychopathological variables that emerged from a comprehensive psychodiagnostic assessment that considered patients' symptoms, metacognitive abilities, interpersonal relationships, personality psychopathology, and global functioning. The measurements were repeated after a year of treatment. The results showed that changes in metacognitive abilities predicted improvements in the analyzed variable