The COVID-19 pandemic represents a major stressor for the psychological health of people worldwide. In the UK, the COVID19-Psychological Research Consortium Study (C19PRC) launched to evaluate the psychological impact of COVID-19 in the general population and its implications. The project was then extended to Italy and several other countries. This article provides an overview of the Italian C19PRC study and its replication of two specific findings from the UK C19PRC. In the first part, the relationship between anxiety and somatic symptomatology is examined. In the second part, we analyze the association between several factors and psychological health outcomes: depression/anxiety, traumatic stress, COVID-19 anxiety. In line with the study conducted in the UK, an online survey was administered to the adult Italian general population. The sample included 1038 respondents (age, mean = 49.94, SD = 16.14, 51.15% females) taken from four regions: Lombardia, Veneto, Lazio, and Campania. The relationship between predictors and outcomes was evaluated by means of logistic regression models. Somatic indices showed a positive association with anxiety, worse somatic symptoms were associated with mourning a loss of a beloved one due to COVID-19 and with precarious health conditions. Females showed a higher incidence of psychological issues. No differences in anxiety, depression, and traumatic stress were found across regions but the Campania region showed the most severe somatic symptomatology. In the second analysis, the factors associated with more severe psychological outcomes (i.e., anxiety and/or depression, traumatic stress, and COVID-19 related anxiety) were younger age, the presence of minors in the household, traumatic stressors, and precarious health conditions. No differences across regions emerged. The Italian results correspond to the UK findings for anxiety, depression, and traumatic stress. Both in the UK and Italy, the factors associated with worse psychological health were gender (female), younger age, having children, pre-existing health issues (both for oneself or someone close), and the moderate/high perceived risk of contracting COVID-19 within one month. In Italy, unlike the UK, lower household income and having (had) COVID-19 were not associated with poorer mental health. The psychological impact of COVID-19 can last for months; future research should explore all aspects of the psychological burden of COVID-19 in order to implement psychological interventions and promote psychological health.

In research and clinical contexts, it is important to briefly evaluate perceived Psychological and Social Support (PSS) to plan psychological interventions and allocate efforts and resources. However, an appropriate brief assessment tool for PSS was lacking. This study aimed at developing a brief and accurate scale to specifically measure PSS in clinical and emergency contexts, with specific, relevant, targeted, and irredundant items. Experienced clinicians developed the perceived Psycho-Social Support Scale (PSSS) and administered it to a clinical sample (N = 112) seeking psychological help during the COVID-19 emergency. A Confirmatory Factor Analysis examined the PSSS internal structure, and a Multiple Indicator and Multiple Causes model investigated its association with the number of sessions and emotional symptoms. The PSSS showed good psychometric properties and the Confirmatory Factor Analysis provided acceptable fit indexes for a unidimensional structure. The Multiple Indicators and Multiple Causes revealed that more sessions and emotional symptoms were associated with lower PSSS scores. The PSSS is a reliable brief tool to measure PS and could be useful to individualize treatments (i.e., number of sessions) to efficiently allocate efforts and resources in clinical contexts and emergencies (e.g., earthquake, COVID-19 pandemic).

In the investigation of moral judgments of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the paradigm of the sacrificial dilemma is a widespread and flexible experimental tool. In this context, the sacrifice of the AV’s passenger typically occurs upon enactment of the utilitarian option, which differs from traditional sacrificial dilemmas, in which the moral agent’s life is often jeopardized in the non-utilitarian counterpart. The present within-subject study (n = 183) is aimed at deepening the role of self-sacrifice framing, comparing autonomous- and human-driving text-based moral dilemmas in terms of moral judgment and intensity of four moral emotions (shame, guilt, anger, and disgust). A higher endorsement of utilitarian behavior was observed in human-driving dilemmas and for self-protective utilitarian behaviors. Interestingly, the utilitarian option was considered less moral, shameful, and blameworthy in the case of concurrent self-sacrifice. The present study collects novel information on how different levels of driving automation shape moral judgment and emotions, also providing new evidence on the role of self-sacrifice framing in moral dilemmas.

The degree of attention individuals pay to olfactory cues (called odor awareness) influences the role of odors in everyday life. Particularly, odors produced by the human body (i.e., social odors) are able to carry a wide variety of information and to elicit a broad spectrum of emotional reactions, making them essential in interpersonal relationships. Hence, despite the assessment of awareness toward social odors is crucial, a proper tool is still lacking. Here, we designed and initially validated the Social Odor Scale (SOS), a 12-item scale designed to measure the individual differences in awareness towards different social odors. In Study 1, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA; KMO test: MSA = 0.78; Bartlett’s test: χ²(78) = 631.34, p < 0.001; Chi-squared test: χ²(42) = 71.84, p = 0.003) suggests that the three factors structure was the model that best fit with the Italian version of the scale. The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supports a second-order model with one higher-order factor representing social odor awareness in general and three lower-order factors representing familiar, romantic partner, and stranger social odors. The final version of the scale presented a good fit (RMSEA = 0.012, SRMR = 0.069, CFI = 0.998, TLI = 0.997). In Study 2, CFA was performed in the German version of the scale confirming the validity of scale structure. Study 3 and 4 revealed that SOS total score and its subscales were positively correlated with other validated olfactory scales, but not with olfactory abilities. Moreover, SOS was found to be related to the gender of the participants: women reported to be more aware to social odors and, specifically, to familiar social odors than men. Overall, the results indicated that SOS is a valid and reliable instrument to assess awareness toward social odors in everyday life.

Commonly identified patterns of psychological distress in response to adverse events are characterized by resilience (i.e., little to no distress), delayed (i.e., distress that increases over time), recovery (i.e., distress followed by a gradual decrease over time), and sustained (i.e., distress remaining stable over time). This study aimed to examine these response patterns during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Anxiety and depressive symptom data collected across four European countries over the first year of the pandemic were analyzed ( N = 3,594). Participants were first categorized into groups based on the four described patterns. Network connectivity and symptom clustering were then estimated for each group and compared. Two thirds (63.6%) of the sample displayed a resilience pattern. The sustained distress network (16.3%) showed higher connectivity than the recovery network (10.0%) group, p = .031; however, the resilient network showed higher connectivity than the delayed network (10.1%) group, p = .016. Regarding symptom clustering, more clusters emerged in the recovery network (i.e., three) than the sustained network (i.e., two). These results replicate findings that resilience was the most common mental health pattern over the first pandemic year. Moreover, they suggest that high network connectivity may be indicative of a stable mental health response over time, whereas fewer clusters may be indicative of a sustained distress pattern. Although exploratory, the network perspective provides a useful tool for examining the complexity of psychological responses to adverse events and, if replicated, could be useful in identifying indicators of protection against or vulnerability to future psychological distress.

Despite sleepiness being considered one of the main factors contributing to road crashes, and even though extensive efforts have been made in the identification of techniques able to detect it, the assessment of fitness-to-drive regarding driving fatigue and sleepiness is still an open issue. In the literature on driver sleepiness, both vehicle-based measures and behavioral measures are used. Concerning the former, the one considered more reliable is the Standard Deviation of Lateral Position (SDLP) while the PERcent of eye CLOSure over a defined period of time (PERCLOS) seems to be the most informative behavioral measure. In the present study, using a within-subject design, we assessed the effect of a single night of partial sleep deprivation (PSD, less than 5 h sleeping time) compared to a control condition (full night of sleep, 8 h sleeping time) on SDLP and PERCLOS, in young adults driving in a dynamic car simulator. Results show that time-on-task and PSD affect both subjective and objective sleepiness measures. Moreover, our data confirm that both objective and subjective sleepiness increase through a monotonous driving scenario. Considering that SDLP and PERCLOS were often used separately in studies on driver sleepiness and fatigue detection, the present results have potential implications for fitness-to-drive assessment in that they provide useful information allowing to combine the advantages of the two measures for drowsiness detection while driving.