Principal component analysis on twenty years (2000-2020) of geochemical and geophysical observations at Campi Flegrei active caldera.

Campi Flegrei (CF) is an active and densely populated caldera in Southern Italy, which has manifested signs of significant unrest in the last 50 years. Due to the high volcanic risk, monitoring networks of the most sensitive unrest indicators have been implemented and improved over time. Precious database constituted by geophysical and geochemical data allowed the study of the caldera unrest phases. In this paper we retrace the caldera history in the time span 2000-2020 by analyzing displacement, seismicity and geochemical time series in a unified framework. To this end, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was firstly applied only on geochemical data because of their compositional nature. The retrieved first three components were successively analyzed via PCA together with the geophysical and thermodynamical variables. Our results suggest that three independent processes relay on geochemical observations: a heating/pressurizing of the hydrothermal system, a process related to magmatic fluids injection at the hydrothermal system roots, and third process probably connected with a deeper magmatic dynamic. The actual volcano alert state seems mainly linked to the variation of the hydrothermal system activity. Our approach made it possible to explore the interrelation among observations of different nature highlighting the importance of the relative driving processes over time.

Spectral and Informational Analysis of Temperature and Chemical Composition of Solfatara Fumaroles (Campi Flegrei, Italy).

Temperature and composition at fumaroles are controlled by several volcanic and exogenous processes that operate on various time-space scales. Here, we analyze fluctuations of temperature and chemical composition recorded at fumarolic vents in Solfatara (Campi Flegrei caldera, Italy) from December 1997 to December 2015, in order to better understand source(s) and driving processes. Applying the singular spectral analysis, we found that the trends explain the great part of the variance of the geochemical series but not of the temperature series. On the other hand, a common source, also shared by other geo-indicators (ground deformation, seismicity, hydrogeological and meteorological data), seems to be linked with the oscillatory structure of the investigated signals. The informational characteristics of temperature and geochemical compositions, analyzed by using the Fisher-Shannon method, appear to be a sort of fingerprint of the different periodic structure. In fact, the oscillatory components were characterized by a wide range of significant periodicities nearly equally powerful that show a higher degree of entropy, indicating that changes are influenced by overlapped processes occurring at different scales with a rather similar intensity. The present study represents an advancement in the understanding of the dominant driving mechanisms of volcanic signals at fumaroles that might be also valid for other volcanic areas.

Assessment of attention network efficiency in schizophrenic patients with positive and negative symptoms.

AIM: The aim of the present study was to examine the anterior (Experiment 1) and posterior (Experiment 2) attention systems in schizophrenic patients with predominantly negative or positive symptoms, in order to evidence possible differences in symptomatology. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The schizophrenic sample was divided into two subgroups: negative(n=13) versus positive symptoms (n=10). The anterior and posterior attention systems in schizophrenic patients were assessed through two experiments: a dual-task paradigm evaluating executive functions, in particular planning and coordination,and a Simon task evaluating automatic shifting of visual attention. RESULTS: Our study showed specific attention deficits in the presence of negative symptoms. These findings suggest that negative schizophrenics have a deficit that affects functioning of both anterior and posterior attention systems, whereas positive schizophrenics showed a selective deficit only for the posterior attention system, with a pattern that is in the opposite direction compared to that of negative schizophrenics. DISCUSSION: Our results demonstrate that specific symptom dimensions or patterns are associated with specific cognitive impairments. Notably, negative schizophrenics exhibited clear abnormalities, whereas positive schizophrenics performed very similarly to healthy controls.

New evidence in theory of mind deficits in subjects with chronic schizophrenia and first episode: correlation with symptoms, neurocognition and social function.

AIM: Currently substantial evidence exists about Theory of Mind (ToM) impairment in subjects affected by chronic and first episode schizophrenia. In particular, in order to enhance the validity of our construct, we used in this study classical false beliefs tasks and advanced theory of mind tasks, together with the application of structural equation model, in order to ex-amine whether we are using ToM tasks with good psychometric properties. The main goal of the present study was to examine ToM deficits in a large sample including subjects suffering from chronic schizophrenia, first episode of schizophrenia and nor-mal controls, by observing in the same task the relationship with symptomatological gravity, neurocognition and social function.Materials and methods. A sample of 178 patients with chronic schizophrenia, a sample of 49 subjects with a first episode of psychosis and 484 healthy controls participated to this study. Measures of social cognition included task of false belief and advanced theory of mind task. RESULTS: No significant differences were found on ToM tasks between subjects affected by chronic and first episode schizophrenia. Social cognition showed in both groups a strong correlation with negative symptoms and social function, but did not evidence any relationship with neurocognition. CONCLUSION; ToM deficits exist in subjects suffering from chronic and first episode schizophrenia. These impairments do not seem to be a consequence of illness condition, they are likely to be state-independent and appear to be the most important cognitive mediator of social functioning in both groups.

Neural correlates of automatic perceptual sensitivity to facial affect in posttraumatic stress disorder subjects who survived L'Aquila eartquake of April 6, 2009.

The "Emotional Numbing" (EN) constitutes one of the core symptoms in PTSD although its exact nature remains elusive. This disorder shows an abnormal response of cortical and limbic regions which are normally involved in understanding emotions since the very earliest stages of the development of processing ability. The aim of our study, which included ten physically healthy subjects with PTSD, diagnosed according to DSM-IV-TR, who survived L'Aquila earthquake of April 6, 2009, and 10 healthy controls matching for age, sex and education, was to examine automatic perceptual sensitivity to facial affect in PTSD, through an affective priming task that was administered during functional magnetic resonance (fMRI). Behavioural data revealed in the PTSD group a higher sensitivity to negative facial affect on an automatic processing level. FMRI data analysis revealed that PTSD subjects showed a significantly higher activation in right insula and left amygdala that we did not observe in healthy subjects; on the contrary, healthy controls showed a greater activation of left lingual gyrus. Our data support the hypothesis that PTSD appears to be sensitive to negative affect on an automatic processing level and correlates with the activation of specific areas involved in processing emotions. An elevated activation of these areas may underlie the emotion dysregulation in PTSD and could explain the Emotional Numbing symptom associated with this disorder. The present study suffers of a number of limitations, for instance, the relatively small sample size did not allow the application of alternative statistical models.