Measuring psychological mindedness: validity,reliability, and relationship with psychopathology of an Italian version of the Balanced Index of Psychological Mindedness

Psychological mindedness (PM) is an underinvestigated, but important construct in psychoanalytic psychotherapy research and practice. It refers to the interest in and ability for reflecting on one's thoughts and feelings, and it represents an important precondition for insight-oriented therapy to be successful. Notwithstanding, very few instruments are available to measure PM. The current investigation aimed at evaluating the validity and reliability of the Balanced Index of Psychological Mindedness (BIPM; Nyklí?ek & Denollet, 2009, Psychological Assessment, 21, 32–44), a brief measure of PM. In a first study, factor structure, internal consistency, and concurrent validity of the BIPM were tested, along with the relationship between the BIPM and a continuous measure of general distress, using a sample of 298 Italian students. In a second study, test-retest stability analyses were completed using a new, different, Italian student sample (N = 58). In a third study, the BIPM scores of a clinical sample with diagnosis of mood spectrum disorders (N = 30) were compared to those of an age-, gender-, and education-matched nonclinical sample. Overall, results indicate that the BIPM is a psychometrically sound instrument that can be used in clinical practice to obtain rapid information about the client's mentalization skills and assess PM.     

The Philosophy of Information as a Conceptual Framework

The article contains the replies to the collection of contributions discussing my research on the philosophy of information.     

Individual differences in self-reported thought control: the role of the repressive coping sytle

The purpose of the present research is to assess differences between repressors and non repressors in some aspects associated with conscious thought control. Thus, Sixty-three Spanish university students with different combinations of trait anxiety and defensiveness completed the Thought Control Ability Questionnaire (TCAQ) and the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI). Data analysis showed that subjects with low anxiety (repressors and low anxious) reported higher perceived ability to control unpleasant thoughts and less tendency to suppress than did subjects with high anxiety (high anxious and defensive high anxious). Implications of these results are discussed in relation to recent researches that have explored the association between repression and thought suppression.     

What Can Political Psychology Learn from Implicit Measures? Empirical Evidence and New Directions

Implicit measures have become very popular in virtually all areas of basic and applied psychology. However, there are empirical and theoretical arguments that might raise doubts about their usefulness in research on political attitudes. Based on a review of relevant evidence, we argue that implicit measures can be useful to identify distal sources of political preferences in domains where self‐presentation may bias self‐reports (e.g., influence of racial attitudes on voting decisions). In addition, implicit measures of proximal political attitudes can contribute to the prediction of future political decisions by virtue of their capability to predict biases in the processing of decision‐relevant information (e.g., prediction of voting behavior of undecided voters). These conclusions are supported by research showing that implicit measures predict real‐world political behavior over and above explicit measures. The reviewed findings suggest that implicit measures may serve as a useful supplement to improve the prediction of election outcomes. Open questions and potential directions for future research are discussed.     

Toleration and the Design of Norms

One of the pressing challenges we face today—in a post-Westphalian order (emergence of the state as the modern, political information agent) and post-Bretton Woods world (emergence of non-state multiagent systems or MASs as “hyperhistorical” players in the global economy and politics)—is how to design the right kind of MAS that can take full advantage of the socio-economic and political progress made so far, while dealing successfully with the new global challenges that are undermining the best legacy of that very progress. This is the topic of the article. In it, I argue that (i) in order to design the right kind of MAS, we need to design the right kind of norms that constitute them; (ii) in order to design the right kind of constitutive norms, we need to identify and adopt the right kind of principles of normative design; (iii) toleration is one of those principles; (iv) unfortunately, its role as a foundation for the design of norms has been undermined by the “paradox of toleration”; (v) however, the paradox can be solved; (vi) so toleration can be re-instated as the right kind of foundational principle for the design of the right kind of norms that can constitute the right kind of MAS that can operate across cultures, societies and states, to help us to tackle the new global challenges facing us.     

Important announcement on publication policy

Important announcement on publication policy     

Distributed Morality in an Information Society

The phenomenon of distributed knowledge is well-known in epistemic logic. In this paper, a similar phenomenon in ethics, somewhat neglected so far, is investigated, namely distributed morality. The article explains the nature of distributed morality, as a feature of moral agency, and explores the implications of its occurrence in advanced information societies. In the course of the analysis, the concept of infraethics is introduced, in order to refer to the ensemble of moral enablers, which, although morally neutral per se, can significantly facilitate or hinder both positive and negative moral behaviours.