Connected guys: Endorsement of masculine honour predicts more frequent contact with members of criminal organisations

Italian criminal organisations (COs) engage in contact with community members to assert their control over local populations in Southern Italy. According to intracultural appropriation theory, COs’ presence in these regions is legitimised by values of masculinity and honour. Here, we test the role of these values in drawing people closer to COs, facilitating more frequent contact with COs’ members. Study 1 (N_T1 = 176, N_T2 = 170) used a two-wave longitudinal design demonstrating that endorsement of masculine honour predicts more frequent contact with COs after five months. In contrast, results revealed no longitudinal effect of contact frequency on masculine honour endorsement. Using a cross-sectional design, Study 2 (N = 314) extended these results by revealing an indirect effect of masculine honour on the tendency to see COs as embodying honour and respect (romanticisation), through more frequent contact with COs’ members. Limitations, directions for future research and implications of these results are discussed.     

Human gaze behaviour during action execution and observation

Gaze shifts and fixations appear to be proactive in both action execution and observation. We investigated a dependency of anticipatory gaze behaviour by using a block stacking task. Blocks were rectangles depicted on a computer screen and the stacking movements were controlled via computer mouse. Subjects either had to execute the task or had to observe it made by the experimenter, or by the computer. The dependency of gaze behaviour on the visibility of a virtual effector, the visibility of the actor, and the nature of the actor was tested by measuring eye movements. Anticipatory eye movements were predominant when the subjects themselves executed the task. During action observation, gaze behaviour did neither depend on the visibility nor depend on the nature of the actor. However, big variability was found between the subjects suggesting the use of two different strategies in action observation: some subjects were mainly tracking the blocks during stacking movements; others were strongly anticipating. We suggest that gaze behaviour during action observation is not predetermined by rigid neural circuitry, but strongly depends on the context. The possibility to explain the causal mechanism, as well as the ownership of the action may be crucial preconditions for anticipatory gaze behaviour.     

Scaffolding the design of accessible eLearning content: a user-centered approach and cognitive perspective

There exist various guidelines for facilitating the design, preparation, and deployment of accessible eLearning applications and contents. However, such guidelines prevalently address accessibility in a rather technical sense, without giving sufficient consideration to the cognitive aspects and issues related to the use of eLearning materials by learners with disabilities. In this paper we describe how a user-centered design process was applied to develop a method and set of guidelines for didactical experts to scaffold their creation of accessible eLearning content, based on a more sound approach to accessibility. The paper also discusses possible design solutions for tools supporting eLearning content authors in the adoption and application of the proposed approach.     

Stimulus-driven attentional capture: An empirical comparison of display-size and distance methods

Four experiments examined attentional capture by colour as assessed by two different investigative methods. Subjects performed a visual search task for a vertical-target line embedded among tilted-distractor lines, presented inside 4, 8, or 12 coloured discs. Interestingly, when the colour singleton was task irrelevant, and data were analysed by means of the display-size method combined with the zero-slope criterion, no evidence for attentional capture by colour was found. However, when data were analysed by means of the distance method, which consists of monitoring the spatial relationship between the target and the singleton, results showed that the target was found faster and/or more accurately when it was inside the singleton than when it was in a nonsingleton location. This provided evidence for a stimulus-driven attentional capture. In addition, the application of signal detection methodology showed that attentional capture, as revealed by the distance method, resulted from a perceptual modulation at the singleton location, rather than from a criterion shift. We conclude that, at least with the kind of stimuli used here, the display-size method combined with the zero-slope criterion is less than ideal for investigating how static discontinuities can affect the automatic deployment of visual attention.     

A conditioned weight illusion: Reafference learning without a correlation store

Each of 20 female college students repeatedly judged the weight of a heavy metal cylinder dropped repeatedly (180 times) into her waiting hand. The cylinder came to appear lighter to her when the release of the cylinder was accompanied by the onset of an indicator lamp than when it was not, but only providing the onset of the lamp preceded the release of the cylinder by a half second rather than being simultaneous with it. This conditional illusion has implications for von Holst and Mittelstaedt’s well-known thesis that every neural efference leaves an efference copy or corollary discharge of itself in the nervous system to be compared with concurrent neural reafference. Apparently some types of conditioned-efference leave no copies, and objects lifted in part by such unregistered efforts appear lightened accordingly. The illusion illustrates a form of reafference learning that need involve no correlation store (Held, 1961).     

Advancing Creativity Theory and Research: A Socio-cultural Manifesto

This manifesto, discussed by 20 scholars, representing diverse lines of creativity research, marks a conceptual shift within the field. Socio-cultural approaches have made substantial contributions to the concept of creativity over recent decades and today can provide a set of propositions to guide our understanding of past research and to generate new directions of inquiry and practice. These propositions are urgently needed in response to the transition from the Information Society to the Post-Information Society. Through the propositions outlined here, we aim to build common ground and invite the community of creativity researchers and practitioners to reflect up, study, and cultivate creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon.     

“Change my selfie”: Relationships between self-objectification and selfie-behavior in young Italian women

Self-objectification is a pervasive phenomenon, related to specific socio-cultural context, that can lead to many psychological and interpersonal consequences. With the present study, we investigated the correlates of self-objectification in young Italian women analyzing both its traditional antecedents and its consequences for self-presentation on social network sites (SNS). A total of 676 Italian university female students completed a self-reported questionnaire on self-objectification, internalization of a thin-ideal and related influences, internalized sexism, self-esteem, SNS use, selfie-posting on SNS and selfies’ manipulation. Results indicated that media and peers, but not family pressures, were positively associated with thin-ideal internalization, which, in turn, was positively associated with self-objectification. Moreover, both sexism and self-esteem were significantly associated with self-objectification. Regarding self-objectification consequences for SNS usage, results revealed that self-objectification was positively associated with time spent on SNS, frequency of selfie-posting and selfie-editing. It was concluded that objectification theory can be extended into the context of image-related behaviors on SNS. Results suggest that young women with low self-esteem, traditional attitudes toward gender roles and high levels of internalization of thin-ideal may report high levels of self-objectification which, in turn, may be related to specific self-promotion behaviors on social media. The limitations of the present study, particularly in terms of sampling and implications for future research on selfie-behavior are discussed.     

An effective fixed-point theorem in intuitionistic diagonalizable algebras

Summary Within the technical frame supplied by the algebraic variety of diagonalizable algebras, defined by R. Magari in [2], we prove the following:LetT be any first-order theory with a predicate Pr satisfying the canonical derivability conditions, including Löb's property. Then any formula inT built up from the propositional variables q, p₁, ..., p_n, using logical connectives and the predicate Pr, has the same fixed-points relative to q (that is, formulas (p₁ ..., p_n) for which for all p₁, ..., p_n T((p₁, ..., p_n), p₁, ..., p_n) (p₁, ..., p_n)) of a formula ^* of the same kind, obtained from in an effective way.Moreover, such ^* is provably equivalent to the formula obtained from substituting with ^* itself all the occurrences of q which are under Pr. In the particular case where q is always under Pr in , ^* is the unique (up to provable equivalence) fixedpoint of .Since this result is proved only assumingPr to be canonical, it can be deduced that Löb's property is, in a sense, equivalent to Gödel's diagonalization lemma.All the results are proved more generally in the intuitionistic case.The algebraization of the theories which express Theor, IXAllatum est die 19 Decembris 1975     

Subdirectly Irreducible Modal Algebras and Initial Frames

The duality between general frames and modal algebras allows to transfer a problem about the relational (Kripke) semantics into algebraic terms, and conversely. We here deal with the conjecture: the modal algebra A is subdirectly irreducible (s.i.) if and only if the dual frame A* is generated. We show that it is false in general, and that it becomes true under some mild assumptions, which include the finite case and the case of K4. We also prove that a Kripke frame F is generated if and only if the dual algebra F* is s.i. The technical result is that A is s.i. when the set of points which generate the dual frame A* is not of zero measure.