The massive spread of fake news (FN) requires a better understanding of both risks and protective psychological factors underlying vulnerability to misinformation. Prior studies have mostly dealt with news that do not bear any direct personal relevance to participants. Here, we ask whether high-stakes news topics may decrease vulnerability to FN. Data were collected during the national lockdown in Italy (COVID-19 news) and one year later (political news). We compared truth discrimination and overall belief for true news (TN) and FN concerning COVID-19 and political topics. Our findings indicate that psychological risk and protective factors have similar effects on truth discrimination, regardless of whether the news topic is highly or minimally personally relevant. However, we found different effects of psychological factors on overall belief, for high and low personal relevance. These results suggest that, given a high level of cognitive dissonance, individuals tend to rely on proximal or emotional sources of information. In summary, our study underscores the importance of understanding the psychological factors that contribute to vulnerability to misinformation, particularly in high-stakes news contexts.

Article: Space For Children: improving mastery and reducing negative emotions about COVID-19 in youth via mobile interactive storytelling - Minerva Pediatrics 2024 Apr 05 - Minerva Medica - Journals

Somatic symptom disorder (SSD) is increasingly prevalent in youth and is associated with impaired later health and social functioning. SSD in youth is linked to emotional awareness and mentalising deficits; however, these factors, together with parental mentalising, have rarely been examined together. This cross‐sectional case–control study aims to investigate these key factors in early adolescents with SSD and their mothers, compared with a community sample. The sample included 360 participants: a clinical group ( n = 112) of 56 adolescents with SSD (M _age = 12.98, SD = 1.72) and their mothers, recruited from two paediatric hospitals; and a comparison group ( n = 248) of 124 adolescents (M _age = 13.04, SD = 1.21) and their mothers from the general population. The adolescents completed the Emotional Awareness Questionnaire (EAQ) and the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire for Youth (RFQ‐Y), and their mothers completed the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire for Adolescents (PRFQ‐A). A logistic regression predicting clinical (vs. comparison) group membership ( R ² = 0.24; p < 0.001) revealed that greater adolescent verbal emotion sharing (OR = 0.41, p = 0.015), higher RFQ‐Y curiosity (OR = 0.45, p = 0.014) and higher RFQ‐Y certainty (OR = 0.53, p = 0.011) were associated with reduced odds of belonging to the clinical group. Additionally, higher maternal PRFQ certainty was linked to lower odds of clinical group membership (OR = 0.56, p = 0.003). These findings inform interventions to enhance mentalising and emotional awareness in adolescents with SSD and their mothers, particularly deficits concerning others' mental and affective states.