On March 9, 2020, Italy has gone into “lockdown” because of COVID-19 pandemic, with a national quarantine. All non-essential working activities and schools of all levels have been temporarily closed: consequently, the entire population have been forced to dramatically change their daily habits. The pandemic raised important psychological, moral, social, and economic issues. Our research focused on the moral decision-making of people during an emergency. This paper reports two studies. The aim of Study 1 was to evaluate moral decision-making, level of perceived stress, ability of mentalizing and empathy in university students and Italian workers. 224 front-line workers (FLW), 413 second-line workers (SLW), and 663 university students (US), during Italian Phase 1 of lockdown, completed an online questionnaire. The results of Study 1 showed that participants in the FLW group are more likely to choose utilitarian solutions and judge as morally acceptable actions finalized to saving lives of more people if this requires sacrificing a low number of individuals. At the same time, decision-making was experienced as less unpleasant and less arousing with respect to the other two groups, demonstrating a greater ability to keep emotional control under pressure. In Study 2, we compared the same variables used in Study 1, selecting two professional categories from the FLW group engaged in emergency during COVID-19, namely healthcare providers (n = 82) and public safety personnel (n = 117). Our results showed that healthcare providers were more stressed and emotionally involved than public safety personnel, with higher empathic concern and arousal in moral decision-making. We suggest it is essential providing immediate psychological support and monitoring physical and emotional well-being for workers in the front-line during emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to prevent experiences of moral distress or mental health problems.

The differential diagnosis between schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) remains an important clinical question, because they have overlap in clinical diagnosis. This study explored the differences between ASD (n = 44) and SSD patients (n = 59), compared to typically developing peers (n = 63), in completing an advanced Theory of Mind (ToM) task. The outcome found several differences between groups. The SSD patients showed greater difficulty in understanding social scenarios, while ASD individuals understood the stories, but did not correctly identify the protagonist’s intention. The interesting aspect of the results is that some ToM stories are more informative about the mentalistic reasoning of the two clinical groups, namely, the stories that investigate pretend, persuasion, double bluff and ironic joke constructs.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a set of heterogeneous neurodevelopmental conditions, characterised by difficulties in social communication and restricted, repetitive behaviours and interests. Th...

New generation wearable devices allow for the development of interactive environments tailored for Virtual Reality (VR)– and Augmented Reality (AR)–based treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Experts agree on their potential; however, there is lack of consensus on how to perform trials and the need arises for evaluation frameworks, methods, and techniques appropriate for the ASD population. In this paper, we report on a study conducted with high-functioning ASD people in the 21–23 age range, with the objectives of (1) evaluating the engagement of two headsets offering distinct immersive experiences, (2) reasoning on the interpretation of engagement factors in the case of ASD people, and (3) translating results into general guidelines for the development of VR/AR-based ASD treatment. To this aim, we (1) designed two engagement evaluation frameworks based on behavioral observation measures, (2) set up two packages of reference immersive scenarios, (3) defined the association between metrics and scenarios, and (4) administered the scenarios in distinct sessions for the investigated headsets. Results show that the immersive experiences are engaging and that the apparent lack of success of some evaluation factors can become potential advantages within the framework of VR/AR-based ASD treatment design.

In recent years, the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, to imitate human behavioral patterns have been attracting growing interest from experimental psychology. Although ChatGPT can successfully generate accurate theoretical and inferential information in several fields, its ability to exhibit a Theory of Mind (ToM) is a topic of debate and interest in literature. Impairments in ToM are considered responsible for social difficulties in many clinical conditions, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Some studies showed that ChatGPT can successfully pass classical ToM tasks, however, the response style used by LLMs to solve advanced ToM tasks, comparing their abilities with those of typical development (TD) individuals and clinical populations, has not been explored. In this preliminary study, we administered the Advanced ToM Test and the Emotion Attribution Task to ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT-4 and compared their responses with those of an ASD and TD group. Our results showed that the two LLMs had higher accuracy in understanding mental states, although ChatGPT-3.5 failed with more complex mental states. In understanding emotional states, ChatGPT-3.5 performed significantly worse than TDs but did not differ from ASDs, showing difficulty with negative emotions. ChatGPT-4 achieved higher accuracy, but difficulties with recognizing sadness and anger persisted. The style adopted by both LLMs appeared verbose, and repetitive, tending to violate Grice’s maxims. This conversational style seems similar to that adopted by high-functioning ASDs. Clinical implications and potential applications are discussed.