Does how I look at what you're doing depend on what I'm doing?

Previous studies showed that people proactively gaze at the target of another's action by taking advantage of their own motor representation of that action. But just how selectively is one's own motor representation implicated in another's action processing? If people observe another's action while performing a compatible or an incompatible action themselves, will this impact on their gaze behaviour? We recorded proactive eye movements while participants observed an actor grasping small or large objects. The participants' right hand either freely rested on the table or held with a suitable grip a large or a small object, respectively. Proactivity of gaze behaviour significantly decreased when participants observed the actor reaching her target with a grip that was incompatible with respect to that used by them to hold the object in their own hand. This indicates that effective observation of action may depend on what one is actually doing, being actions observed best when the suitable motor representations may be readily recruited.     

Out of your hand's reach, out of my eyes' reach

When witnessing another's action, people recruit the same motor resources that enable them to efficiently perform that action, thus gazing at its target well before the agent's hand. But just to what extent does this recruitment help people in grabbing another's action target? If the latter seems to be out of the agent's reach, will this impact on people's gaze behaviour? We recorded proactive eye movements while participants witnessed someone else trying to reach for and grasp objects located either within or outside his reach. Proactivity of gaze was impaired when the targets were just out of the agent's reach. This effect is likely to be due to an interpersonal bodily space representation that allows one to map another's reaching space, thus prompting proactive eye movements towards the target just in case the agent is in the position to act upon it.     

The subjective duration of audiovisual looming and receding stimuli

Looming visual stimuli (log-increasing in proximal size over time) and auditory stimuli (of increasing sound intensity over time) have been shown to be perceived as longer than receding visual and auditory stimuli (i.e., looming stimuli reversed in time). Here, we investigated whether such asymmetry in subjective duration also occurs for audiovisual looming and receding stimuli, as well as for stationary stimuli (i.e., stimuli that do not change in size and/or intensity over time). Our results showed a great temporal asymmetry in audition but a null asymmetry in vision. In contrast, the asymmetry in audiovision was moderate, suggesting that multisensory percepts arise from the integration of unimodal percepts in a maximum-likelihood fashion.     

The Interaction Between Culture, Health and Psychological Well-Being: Data Mining from the Italian Culture and Well-Being Project

The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of health status and cultural participation upon psychological well-being, with special attention to the interaction between patterns of cultural access and other factors known to affect psychological well-being. Data for this report were collected from a sample of 1,500 Italian citizens. A multi-step random sampling method was adopted to draw a large representative sample from the Italian population. Subjects underwent a standard questionnaire for psychological well-being [the Italian short form of the Psychological General Well Being Index (PGWBI)], and a questionnaire related to the frequency of participation to 15 different kinds of cultural activities during the previous year. The results show that, among the various potential factors considered, cultural access unexpectedly rankes as the second most important determinant of psychological well-being, immediately after the absence or presence of diseases, and outperforming factors such as job, age, income, civil status, education, place of living and other important factors. According to a semantic map generated by a powerful data mining algorithm, it turns out that different factors (among which cultural access and health status in particular) may be viewed as concurrent elements of a complex multi-causal scheme that seems to play a primary role in determining psychological distress or well-being. In particular, distress seems to be tightly connected with: living in the Southern part of Italy, average income level, living in semi-urban and urban areas, age group 46–60, presence of more than two concomitant diseases and a low level of cultural access. Well being, on the other hand, is tightly connected with: male gender, high cultural access, and absence of diseases. Some of these associations are confirmed by Principal Component Analysis.     

The Realist Wager: Challenging Rorty on His Home Ground

Philosophia - The paper is devoted to Richard Rorty’s thought, with the aim of exploiting a certain contention of his and directing it, as it were, against Rorty himself. Here is the...     

Communicating Science Effectively: When an Optimised Video Communication Enhances Comprehension,Pleasantness, and People’s Interest in Knowing More About Scientific Findings

In two experiments (N = 160) we predicted and found that an optimised video science communication was more effective than either a press release science communication (Experiment 1) and a non-optimised video science communication (Experiment 2) in promoting (a) a better comprehension of the communication, (b) a higher perceived pleasantness, and (c) a stronger manifest interest in learning more about its findings, as reflected in participants’ explicit requests to receive supplemental material on the communicated and analogous findings. The results were consistent across experiments. They were also not influenced by the content type of the communication. Implications for communication professionals and future research in the field of media, social influence, education, and applied social psychology are discussed.     

Evidence on the Hierarchical,Multidimensional Nature of Behavioural Job Crafting

While to date job crafting has been conceptualised as consisting of behaviours aiming at seeking more resources, decreasing hindering demands, and seeking more challenges, recent research suggests that individuals may restore the fit between their demands and preferences also by optimising their demands. Accordingly, optimising demands has been introduced in the resource-based perspective to job crafting as an additional strategy that aims at making the work processes more efficient, simplifying procedures and eliminating obstacles. In this paper, we explore and provide evidence for the validity of a four-factor, hierarchical structure of behavioural job crafting constituted by increasing resources, seeking challenges, decreasing demands, and optimising demands. Moreover, our results provide initial evidence suggesting that overall job crafting may be more strongly characterised by effortful actions to expand the work characteristics rather than to reduce them.