Spirituality and Religiosity in the Aftermath of a Natural Catastrophe in Italy

The aim of this study is to assess the influence of spirituality and religiousness on the psychological traumatic effects of a catastrophic event in a population that had been exposed to an earthquake compared with a control population that had not been exposed. A total of 901 people have been evaluated using: (1) Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality; (2) Impact of Event Scale and (3) Trauma and Loss Spectrum-Self Report (TALS-SR). Self-perceptions of spirituality and religiousness were used to rank the samples, distinguishing between spiritual and religious, spiritual-only, religious-only and neither spiritual nor religious groups. The sample that had experienced the earthquake showed lower scores in spiritual dimension. The religious-only group of those who were exposed to the earthquake demonstrated TALS-SR re-experiencing and arousal domain scores similar to the population that was not exposed. A weakening of spiritual religiosity in people having difficulty coping with trauma is a consistent finding. We further observed that the religious dimension helped to buffer the community against psychological distress caused by the earthquake. The religiosity dimension can positively affect the ability to cope with traumatic experiences.     

Studying the neural bases of prism adaptation using fMRI: A technical and design challenge

Prism adaptation induces rapid recalibration of visuomotor coordination. The neural mechanisms of prism adaptation have come under scrutiny since the observations that the technique can alleviate hemispatial neglect following stroke, and can alter spatial cognition in healthy controls. Relative to non-imaging behavioral studies, fMRI investigations of prism adaptation face several challenges arising from the confined physical environment of the scanner and the supine position of the participants. Any researcher who wishes to administer prism adaptation in an fMRI environment must adjust their procedures enough to enable the experiment to be performed, but not so much that the behavioral task departs too much from true prism adaptation. Furthermore, the specific temporal dynamics of behavioral components of prism adaptation present additional challenges for measuring their neural correlates. We developed a system for measuring the key features of prism adaptation behavior within an fMRI environment. To validate our configuration, we present behavioral (pointing) and head movement data from 11 right-hemisphere lesioned patients and 17 older controls who underwent sham and real prism adaptation in an MRI scanner. Most participants could adapt to prismatic displacement with minimal head movements, and the procedure was well tolerated. We propose recommendations for fMRI studies of prism adaptation based on the design-specific constraints and our results.     

Attachment patterns and emotion regulation strategies in the second year

With the aim of studying the relationship between methods of emotion regulation and quality of attachment we examined 39 infants with different patterns of attachment, of whom 20 were classified as secure (B), 12 as avoidant (A) and 7 as resistant (C), assessing the regulatory strategies adopted by them during the Strange Situation at 13 months. Secure infants used strategies of positive social engagement more than insecure avoidant infants, while resistant infants displayed greater negative social engagement and less object orientation than the other two groups. Avoidant infants adopted positive and negative hetero-regulatory strategies less than the other groups, also differing from resistant infants in their greater use of object regulatory strategies. There were no significant differences as regards self-comforting regulation. Thus, the findings showed how the most significant differences to emerge between the groups concerned hetero-regulatory strategies, developed by the infant in interaction with attachment figures, and regulatory strategies oriented towards objects. Further analysis showed how the use by part of each attachment group of the emotion regulation strategies varies, differentiating the episodes of the SSP according to their level of stress.     

Temperament and Character Inventory - Revised (TCI-R) 1 year after the earthquake of L’Aquila (Italy)

The aim of this pilot study was to evaluate the impact of L’Aquila earthquake (Italy) on the Temperament and Character Inventory - Revised (TCI-R) administered 1 year after the earthquake to a community sample of 375 subjects exposed to the earthquake and 480 non-exposed. Exposed people showed variations in the adaptive response to stress with higher Persistence (P) and lower Harm Avoidance (HA) dimensions among adult and lower self directedness (SD) and higher Harm Avoidance (HA) in older people. No differences in young adults were seen. Temperament and character dimensions are sensitive to trauma exposure in different ways in different age groups.     

System Justification, Right-Wing Conservatism, and Internalized Homophobia: Gay and Lesbian Attitudes toward Same-Sex Parenting in Italy

Adopting a system justification perspective (Jost and Banaji 1994), we investigated the manner and extent to which gay men and lesbians might internalize a sense of inferiority when it comes to parenthood. In an Italian sample of gay and lesbian individuals, we found that gay men who scored high (versus low) on system justification and right-wing conservatism regarded same sex parents as less competent; these effects were mediated by internalized homophobia. Lesbian women, however, perceived lesbian parents as more competent than opposite sex parents, regardless of ideological orientations. For gay men the internalization of societal discrimination harms perceptions of parental competence, whereas for lesbians gender stereotypes about parenting trump the negative effects of bias related to sexual orientation. These findings suggest that men??s and women??s perceptions of their own bodies and capacities are strongly affected by sociocultural processes, including ideological processes.     

Anxiety,Sophistication, and Resistance to Persuasion: Evidence from a Quasi‐Experimental Survey on Global Climate Change

Our contribution deals with the emotional and cognitive foundations of resistance to persuasive information. We rely on an original quasi‐experimental protocol that simulates the flow of information and the respondents' reactions to persuasive arguments on global climate change. Respondents in a representative sample (N = 604) were asked if they supported reduction of economic activity to reduce climate warming and were then provided, based on their support or disapproval for this first argument, with counterattitudinal arguments to test their resistance to persuasion. This article highlights that sophistication strengthens resistance to persuasion, whereas anxiety has a double effect: directly, it decreases resistance; indirectly, it interacts with political sophistication and makes sophisticates less likely to resist persuasion when facing arguments inconsistent with their previous beliefs. Nonanxious citizens, in turn, are more likely to resist persuasion when their political sophistication increases. We also provide evidence that the joint effect of anxiety and sophistication is moderated by the ideological identification of respondents.     

When affordances climb into your mind: Advantages of motor simulation in a memory task performed by novice and expert rock climbers

Does the sight of multiple climbing holds laid along a path activate a motor simulation of climbing that path? One way of testing whether multiple affordances and their displacement influence the formation of a motor simulation is to study acquired motor skills. We used a behavioral task in which expert and novice rock climbers were shown three routes: an easy route, a route impossible to climb but perceptually salient, and a difficult route. After a distraction task, they were then given a recall test in which they had to write down the sequence of holds composing each route. We found no difference between experts and novices on the easy and impossible routes, whereas on the difficult route, the performance of experts was better than that of novices. This suggests that seeing a climbing wall activates a motor, embodied simulation, which relies not on perceptual salience, but on motor competence. More importantly, our results show that the capability to form this simulation is modulated by individuals’ motor repertoire and expertise, and that this strongly impacts recall.