Papers by Mariapaola Barbato
Computers in human behavior reports, Jun 1, 2024
Psychiatry Research-neuroimaging, Nov 1, 2022
Psychiatry Research-neuroimaging, Aug 1, 2020
International Journal of Psychology, Jun 14, 2021
T he COVID-19 pandemic and the associated infection prevention and control measures (e.g. quarant... more T he COVID-19 pandemic and the associated infection prevention and control measures (e.g. quarantine, lockdown and isolation), have had an adverse impact on mental health. To date, the mental health status and challenges of foreign workers during the pandemic have been neglected in the literature. This cross-sectional web-based survey assessed levels of post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety and insomnia among an international sample of foreign workers (n = 319) resident in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The majority of participants were female (76%), European (69%) and highly educated (83% had a bachelor's or higher degree). Results indicate high rates of post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and insomnia, especially among women, younger individuals, and those with a previous diagnosis of a psychological disorder. Additionally, foreign workers' perceptions of pandemic severity in their home nations (mild, moderate, severe) were positively correlated with their symptom levels of depression, anxiety and insomnia. Overall, these findings may help inform future public mental health strategy and pandemic preparedness plans with reference to safeguarding the psychological wellbeing of foreign workers.
Mindfulness, 2022
Objectives Few studies have explored mindfulness and nonattachment in Arab populations. This stud... more Objectives Few studies have explored mindfulness and nonattachment in Arab populations. This study extends our understanding of mindfulness and nonattachment to Arab students in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) based on the 20-item Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and the 7-item Nonattachment Scale (NAS-7). This study investigated the model fit of each measure, in conjunction with examining the measurement invariance of both measures across Emirati and Australian samples. Next, this study investigated the mediating role of nonattachment. Methods University students from the UAE ( N = 452) and Australia ( N = 731) completed self-report measures of mindfulness, nonattachment, positive and negative affect, and depression, stress, and anxiety. Results For the FFMQ, a four-factor model—excluding the facet Observe but with the addition of covariance between two items from the facet Describe—provided adequate fit in both samples. The NAS-7 provided adequate fit in the Australian sample but not the UAE. While the FFMQ model was invariant across samples, the NAS-7 was non-invariant, thus preventing sample comparison. Overall, nonattachment partially mediated the relationship between mindfulness and well-being with differences across samples. Conclusions Findings support the use of a four-factor model of the FFMQ in Emirati samples and attest to its robustness and suitability as a measure for cross-cultural comparisons. Findings also support a partial mediating role for nonattachment and attest to the intricacies of the Emirati culture.
BMC Public Health
Background Determining the potential barriers responsible for delaying access to care, and elucid... more Background Determining the potential barriers responsible for delaying access to care, and elucidating pathways to early intervention should be a priority, especially in Arab countries where mental health resources are limited. To the best of our knowledge, no previous studies have examined the relationship between religiosity, stigma and help-seeking in an Arab Muslim cultural background. Hence, we propose in the present study to test the moderating role of stigma toward mental illness in the relationship between religiosity and help-seeking attitudes among Muslim community people living in different Arab countries. Method The current survey is part of a large-scale multinational collaborative project (StIgma of Mental Problems in Arab CounTries [The IMPACT Project]). We carried-out a web-based cross-sectional, and multi-country study between June and November 2021. The final sample comprised 9782 Arab Muslim participants (mean age 29.67 ± 10.80 years, 77.1% females). Results Bivar...
Frontiers in Psychology, Jul 15, 2020
The last two decades have witnessed growing interest in the study of social cognition and its mul... more The last two decades have witnessed growing interest in the study of social cognition and its multiple facets, including trust. Interpersonal trust is generally understood as the belief that others are not likely to harm you. When meeting strangers, judgments of trustworthiness are mostly based on fast evaluation of facial appearance, unless information about past behavior is available. In the past decade, studies have tried to understand the complex relationship between trust and gaze-cueing of attention (GCA) (i.e., attentional orienting following another person's gaze). This review will focus on the studies that used a gaze-cueing paradigm to explore this relationship. While the predictivity of the gaze-cue seems to consistently influence trustworthiness judgments, the impact of trust on gaze-cueing is less clear. Four studies found enhanced gazecueing effects with trustworthy faces; one found stronger effects of gaze-cueing with faces associated with undesirable behavior, but only when the observer's personal evaluations were taken into account. Four studies did not observe an effect of trust on gaze-cueing. Overall, studies have highlighted the complexity of this relationship, suggesting that multiple factors (including age, gender, the characteristics of the observer, and whether or not a threat is perceived) are likely to intervene in the interplay between trust and gaze-triggered attentional orienting. After discussing results in the context of existing theories of gaze-cueing and trust, we conclude that further investigation is needed to better understand this relationship and the contribution of social factors to attentional shifts guided by gaze.
Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Mar 1, 2012
Impaired depth perception, a fundamental aspect of early visual processing, has been shown in pat... more Impaired depth perception, a fundamental aspect of early visual processing, has been shown in patients with schizophrenia suggesting a disturbance to magnocellular and possibly parvocellular pathways. Despite some evidence showing visual-perceptive deficits in people with schizotypal personality traits (SPT), depth perception has not been evaluated in these subjects. 12 clinically healthy schizotypy and 17 control participants were examined using a novel stereoscopic depth perception task. A mixed ANOVA design considered the Group (SPT/control) as independent factor, and trial Block (BD/BD+/BD-) and target Condition (SDSS/SDDS/DDSS/DDDS) were considered as repeated measures. Schizotypal participants were not significantly different to controls on simple judgements of depth but demonstrated a subtle impairment in perceiving binocular depth when performing high difficulty judgements. The presence of subtle depth perception problems in schizotypal subjects, similar but less marked than those of schizophrenia patients, may suggest a less pervasive disturbance of early information processing. If so, such deficits could be considered as innate neurological changes that may occur in people vulnerable for schizophrenia, thus with the potential to be a novel intermediate phenotype.
Schizophrenia Research, Dec 1, 2017
Schizophrenia Research: Cognition, Sep 1, 2015
Social cognition, the mental operations that underlie social interactions, is a major construct t... more Social cognition, the mental operations that underlie social interactions, is a major construct to investigate in schizophrenia. Impairments in social cognition are present before the onset of psychosis, and even in unaffected first-degree relatives, suggesting that social cognition may be a trait marker of the illness. In a large cohort of individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR) and healthy controls, three domains of social cognition (theory of mind, facial emotion recognition and social perception) were assessed to clarify which domains are impaired in this population. Six-hundred and seventy-five CHR individuals and 264 controls, who were part of the multi-site North American Prodromal Longitudinal Study, completed The Awareness of Social Inference Test, the Penn Emotion Recognition task, the Penn Emotion Differentiation task, and the Relationship Across Domains, measures of theory of mind, facial emotion recognition, and social perception, respectively. Social cognition was not related to positive and negative symptom severity, but was associated with age and IQ. CHR individuals demonstrated poorer performance on all measures of social cognition. However, after controlling for age and IQ, the group differences remained significant for measures of theory of mind and social perception, but not for facial emotion recognition. Theory of mind and social perception are impaired in individuals at CHR for psychosis. Age and IQ seem to play an important role in the arising of deficits in facial affect recognition. Future studies should examine the stability of social cognition deficits over time and their role, if any, in the development of psychosis.
Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, Jul 30, 2012
Although it is well established that cognitive impairment is a common feature of schizophrenia, o... more Although it is well established that cognitive impairment is a common feature of schizophrenia, only recently has cognitive functioning been prospectively studied in individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for developing psychosis. To date, both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have been conducted in the CHR population and in the context of later conversion to psychosis. A comprehensive review of the literature suggests that CHR individuals have general and specific baseline cognitive deficits compared to healthy controls. As a group, their cognitive course, tends to remain stable over time and in this way does not differ from healthy controls. For those who go on to develop a full-blown psychotic illness compared to those who do not convert, there appeared to be minimal differences at baseline with respect to cognition, although over time the converters may show deterioration in certain cognitive abilities compared to the non-converters. However, for many cognitive domains results are mixed, and may result from methodological limitations.
Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, Mar 21, 2013
Background: Metacognition has been described as the knowledge of our own cognitive processes. Met... more Background: Metacognition has been described as the knowledge of our own cognitive processes. Metacognitive deficits are common in schizophrenia, but little is known about metacognition before the onset of full-blown psychosis. Aims: This study aimed to longitudinally characterize metacognition in a sample of individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis, and to determine if metacognition was related to later conversion to psychosis. Method: Participants (153 CHR individuals; 68 help seeking controls, HSC) were part of the large multi-site PREDICT study, which sought to determine predictors of conversion to psychosis. They were tested at baseline and 6 months using the Meta-Cognitions Questionnaire (MCQ) that has five sub-scales assessing different domains of metacognition. Results: Results of the mixed-effect models demonstrated significantly poorer scores at baseline for the CHR group compared to the HSC group in Negative beliefs about uncontrollability, Negative beliefs and the overall MCQ score. At the 6-month assessment, no difference was observed in metacognition between the two groups, but both groups showed improvement in metacognition over time. Those who later converted to psychosis had poorer performance on metacognitive beliefs at baseline. Conclusions: A poorer performance in metacognition can be seen as a marker of developing a full blown psychotic illness and confirms the potential value of assessing metacognitive beliefs in individuals vulnerable for psychosis.
Schizophrenia Research, Apr 1, 2012
studies devoted to agency with patients, agency was explored through attribution judgments. Metho... more studies devoted to agency with patients, agency was explored through attribution judgments. Methods: We investigated metacognition of agency. The feeling to be or not in control of a task was expressed quantitatively. Participants filled a computer task in which X's and O's streamed from the top of the screen, and participants moved the mouse to get the cursor to touch the X's and avoid the O's. After each trial, participants made judgments of agency and judgments of performance. Objective control was either undistorted, or distorted by either turbulence (i.e., random noise), a lag between the mouse and cursor movements (of 250 or 500 ms), or made easier (an increased radius around the X's for which credit was given). Results: Patients exhibited good metacognitions about their performance on this task, and the sensitivity of their Judgment of agency was quite good. They knew that they were not in control when the mouse control was distorted by turbulence and by a lag. However, the one variable to which patients differed from healthy comparison subjects and in which they felt less in control was the control variable, which is in a way the "everyday life", natural situation. Discussion: Patients felt when there was an external source that increased the difficulty of the task, but they did not feel as well than healthy subjects that they were themselves, intentionally acting in the normal situation. Such denial of feeling in control in the usual condition allowed us to get further light into the pathological disturbances of sense of agency in patients.
Neuropsychology (journal), 2014
Objective-In the last decade the interest in the role of the visual system in schizophrenia has g... more Objective-In the last decade the interest in the role of the visual system in schizophrenia has grown, with evidence pointing to dysfunction in bottom-up visual processing that leads to early visual processing deficits. A fundamental component of visual perception is binocular depth perception (BDP), i.e. depth perception derived by the difference between the images impressed upon the left and right retina. Two studies reported impaired BDP in schizophrenia and suggested a possible developmental deficit of brain structures involved in early visual processing. The aim of this study was to examine BDP in a young population at clinical high risk (CHR) of developing psychosis to determine if this dysfunction is present in this potentially pre-psychotic period. Methods-Forty-two CHR participants and 44 healthy controls were assessed using a computerized test of depth perception; a subsample completed a test of stereopsis. The computerized test was comprised of two trial blocks, with four conditions at increasing level of difficulty, where participants were asked to discriminate the relative depth of two stimuli simultaneously presented on the screen. Results-BDP was not impaired in the CHR group, whose performance was similar to that of the control group on both measures. For the CHR group performance in both tests was not correlated to positive symptoms. Conclusions-These results indicate that BDP is preserved in individuals at CHR for psychosis and impaired BDP should not be considered a vulnerability marker for schizophrenia. Nevertheless future studies should verify BDP's potential power in predicting schizophrenia.
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Nov 8, 2022
Schizophrenia Research, Nov 1, 2013
In schizophrenia, neurocognition, social cognition and functional outcome are all interrelated , ... more In schizophrenia, neurocognition, social cognition and functional outcome are all interrelated , with social cognition mediating the impact that impaired neurocognition has on functional outcome. Less clear is the nature of the relationship between neurocognition, social cognition and functional outcome in individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis. 137 CHR participants completed a neurocognitive test battery, a battery of social cognition tasks and the Social Functioning Scale. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that all social cognition tasks were reliable and valid measures of the latent variable. The path from neurocognition to functioning was statistically significant (standardized coefficient = 0.22, p <0.01). The path from social cognition to functioning was also statistically significant (= 0.27, p<0.05). In the mediation model the bootstrapping estimate revealed a nonsignificant indirect effect that was the association of social cognition with neurocognition and with functional outcome (=0.20, 95% CI =−0.07 to 0.52, p=0.11). However, social cognition was significantly associated with neurocognition (= 0.80, p < 0.001) and the path from neurocognition to functioning was no longer significant as soon as the mediator (social cognition) was entered into the mediation model (= 0.02, p = 0.92). All of the model fit indices were very good. Unlike what has been observed with psychotic patients,
International Journal of Social Psychiatry
Background: The majority of research attention has been devoted to the link between religiosity a... more Background: The majority of research attention has been devoted to the link between religiosity and suicide risk, and a considerable amount of studies has been carried out on how stigma impacts individuals with mental health problems of different kinds. However, the interplay between religiosity, suicide literacy and suicide stigma has seldom been empirically researched, especially quantitatively. We sought through this study to redress the imbalance of research attention by examining the relationship between religiosity and suicide stigma; and the indirect and moderating effects of suicide literacy on this relationship. Method: A cross-sectional web-based survey was conducted among Arab-Muslim adults originating from four Arab countries (Egypt: N = 1029, Kuwait: N = 2182, Lebanon N = 781, Tunisia N = 2343; Total sample: N = 6335). The outcome measures included the Arabic Religiosity Scale which taps into variation in the degree of religiosity, the Stigma of Suicide Scale-short form...
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology
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Papers by Mariapaola Barbato