Alessandra Geraci

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Catania

This study investigates the interplay between social evaluation and relationship context in the second year of life. We examined how 21-month-olds (N = 50) evaluate a 'protective puppet' over to an 'ignore puppet' in three different types of relationship: in the first one a puppet observes from a distance a child playing alone and eventually falls...

The problem of how to distribute available resources among members of a group is a central aspect of social life. Adults react negatively to inequitable distributions and several studies have reported negative reactions to inequity also in non-human primates and dogs. We report two experiments on infants' reactions to equal and unequal distribution...

Prior research on implicit mind-reading skills has focussed on how infants anticipate other persons' actions. This study investigated whether 11- and 17-month-olds spontaneously attribute false beliefs (FB) even to a simple animated geometric shape. Infants were shown a triangle chasing a disk through a tunnel. Using an eye-tracker, we found that 1...

We review recent experimental studies relevant to assess the proposal that human infants possess a sense of fairness that relies on sociomoral knowledge. We propose that this knowledge may include a core concept of justice with four foundational aspects: impartiality, agency, obligatoriness and conflicting claims. Infants’ and toddlers’ looking tim...

This study examined whether preterm infants possess a predisposition to follow face-like patterns and investigated the potential consequences of limited visual exposure to faces during the first weeks of life in preterm infants who experienced temporary visual deprivation due to phototherapy. The orienting responses (i.e., eyes and head movements t...

Newborn chicks can solve complex numerical discriminations through a purely perceptual mechanism based on the possibility of creating all equal-sized subsets. The present work investigates whether this is a prerogative of precocial birds or whether an analogous mechanism can be found in humans. We familiarized 8-month-olds with sets of even numeros...

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third‐party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...

Background/Objectives: Affective touch is crucial in infant development, particularly in regulating emotional, cognitive, and physiological processes. Preterm infants are often deprived of essential tactile stimulation owing to their early exposure to the external environment, which may affect long-term developmental outcomes. This review aimed to...

Recent theories of socio-moral development assume that humans evolved a capacity to evaluate others' social actions in different kinds of interactions. Prior infant studies found both reaching and visual preferences for the prosocial over the antisocial agents. However, whether the attribution of either positive or negative valence to agents' actio...

Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests they do. But a growing body of failed replication studies raised questions about the paradigm’s suitability, urging the need to test the robustness of AL as a spontaneous measure of ToM. In a multi-lab collaboration we examine...

This research explored early ecological-moral sense, by investigating 2.5- and 5-year-old children’s evaluations of overt and covert pro-environmental actions using both rewarding and reaching paradigms (N = 96; 100% White). In Experiment 1, the overt pro-environmental action was compared with the action of harming the environment. In Experiment 2,...

Racial concepts emerge in preschool age, and affect children's evaluations of others’ actions. This research investigated whether 2.5‐year‐old and 7‐year‐old children's (N = 160; 100% White) evaluations may be influenced by an initial racial bias when both out‐group and in‐group protagonists were evaluated directly by attributing the responsibility...

Prior research provided evidence for retrospective and prospective judgements of immanent justice in adults, but the developmental origins of judgements of immanent justice remain unknown. Both retrospective and prospective judgements were investigated in preschool age, using explicit and implicit measures. In Experiment 1, 2.5‐ and 4‐year‐olds wer...

Background Despite the established contribution to psychological well-being in young subjects, the investigation of reflective functioning and dissociative experiences in help-seekers adolescents still appears an unmet need. Objective The study aimed to assess reflective functioning and dissociative symptoms in help-seekers adolescents, and compar...

Few month old human infants are able to detect the social roles of artificial agents and consistently choose the object behaving as ‘approacher’ rather than ‘repulser’. This preference has been considered evidence of a pre-linguistic and pre-cultural origin of the social mind. Similar preferences have not been described in other species, though com...

Environmental morality is the foundation of a sustainable future, yet its ontogenetic origin remains unknown. In the present study, we asked whether 7-month-olds have a sense of ‘environmental morality’. Infants’ evaluations of two pro-environmental actions were assessed in both visual and reaching preferential tasks. In Experiment 1, the overt beh...

Why do certain moral violations elicit amusement while others do not? According to McGraw and Warren’s (2010) benign-violation theory of humor, for a situation to elicit amusement it should involve a benign violation. Furthermore, the greater the psychological distance from the situation, the greater the amusement it will elicit. We tested this the...

Rewarding individuals who distribute resources fairly and punishing those who distribute resources unfairly may be very important actions for fostering cooperation. This study investigated whether 9-month-olds have some expectations concerning punishments and rewards that follow distributive actions. Infants were shown simple animations and were te...

Four-month-olds' ability to consider the intentions of agents performing distributive actions was investigated in four experiments, using the Violation of Expectation paradigm (VoE) (Experiments 1-3) and the Preferential Looking paradigm (Experiment 4). In Experiment 1, infants were presented with two events showing two types of failed attempts to...

Recent research revealed that infants attend to agents’ intentions when they evaluate helping actions. The current study investigated whether infants also consider agents’ intentions when they evaluate distributive actions. In Experiment 1, 9-month-old infants were first shown two failed attempts to perform a distribution. In the “failed equal dist...

The principle of fairness is very important in social life and plays an important role in socio‐moral evaluation; in the last decade, the amount of research on this topic is increasing and suggests different considerations about its origin whether this principle is present at birth or constructed later in development. This article presents some of...

Although impairments in mentalizing and dissociation have been linked to the onset of eating disorders, there is still a paucity of studies investigating their relationships among adolescents. This study aimed at investigating the role of failures in reflective functioning and dissociation in predicting the risk of eating disorders during adolescen...

Despite its adaptive value for social life, the emergence and the development of the ability to detect agents that cause aversive interactions and distinguish them from potentially affiliative agents (approachers) has not been investigated. We presented infants with a simple interaction involving two agents: one of them (the "repulser") moved towar...

Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to di...

Recent research has demonstrated that toddlers expect individuals to approach and reward those who defend a victim from an aggressor rather than those who refuse to do so. This work focused on toddlers’ expectations of corporal third-party punishments trought various actions, such as hitting with a stick or repelling someone who refused to defend a...

This research investigates whether preschoolers evaluate positively a puppet that comforts another puppet and how different relationship contexts affect these evaluations. Children were presented with three familiarization events showing different relationship conditions that differed for the social interaction type between puppets: uninvolved, soc...

This research investigated whether the perception of social-causal relation alone triggers both infants’ evaluation processes and expectations about the social preferences of informed third parties. Three experiments were carried out, using the violation of expectation (VoE) paradigm. During the familiarization phase, infants saw events in which ne...

Recent research revealed rich socio‐cognitive abilities in toddlerhood. The current study investigates whether 21‐month‐olds expect that wealthy agents help agents needing food or shelter. By using the violation of expectation (VoE) implicit paradigm, toddlers' expectations on helping behaviors were explored upon the arrival of agents that need foo...

Rewarding someone who defends the victim of an unjust aggression and punishing someone who chose not to defend her may be very important acts of reciprocation in social life. This study investigates whether 21-month-olds have some expectations concerning such punishing and rewarding actions. Infants were shown simple puppet shows and were tested us...

Yarkoni’s analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to di...

Yarkoni’s analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to di...

Do children and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Accumulating evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests that they do. But a growing body of studies failed to replicate these original findings. This paper presents the first step of a large-scale multi-lab collaboration dedicated to testing the robustness of spontaneo...

Defensive behavior is a central aspect of social life and provides benefits to the self and others. Recent evidence reveals that infants evaluate third parties’ prosocial and antisocial actions. Three experiments were carried out to assess toddlers’ reactions to defensive and non‐defensive events (N = 54). In two experiments, infants’ looking times...

Objective: this study examined the prevalence of depression and anxiety as well as the relationship to cognitive functioning in the sub-acute phase and at 2 months post-stroke in a sample of 40 inpatients. This study also explored the relationship between anxiety, depression and the side of lesions caused by stoke. In addition, efficacy of neuropsy...

This study investigates a spontaneous preference for an equal distribution of resources. Toddlers are presented with real life events followed by a verbal test question. In the first experiment one of the distributors (the ‘equal’) gives one cherry to each receiver, while the other one (the ‘unequal’) gives both cherries to just one of the two rece...

Introduction: Previous studies demonstrated that both emotional and cognitive processes are involved in moral judgments. In this study we analyse moral judgment in two psychiatric pathologies to explain the greater use of the utilitarian judgment in moral dilemma, to recognize a selective sense moral disorder or a consequence of Theory of Mind impa...

Based on anticipatory looking and reactions to violations of expected events, infants have been credited with 'theory of mind' (ToM) knowledge that a person's search behaviour for an object will be guided by true or false beliefs about the object's location. However, little is known about the preconditions for looking patterns consistent with belie...

This study investigates the state-independence and the state-dependence of theory of mind (ToM) impairments in schiz-ophrenia. In particular, we compared the performance of healthy controls, discharged and hospitalized patients with schizophrenia on three well-known ToM tasks, requiring men-tal state recognition from eyes, inferences about the ment...

Introduction Several studies revealed that cognitive functioning in BPD are impaired not only in the acute phase but over time (Mur et al., 2008). On Theory of Mind (ToM) recent studies found a impairment of this ability in remitted patients, supporting the theory that ToM deficits are trait-dependent (Bora et al., 2009) in contrast with another st...

We investigated the cognitive processes underlying inferential reasoning, comparing performance of patients suffering from schizophrenia with that of patients with brain injury in an attempt to understand the nature of the social impairments in schizophrenia. Inferential reasoning on mental and physical states and second-order false belief attribut...

Previous studies on patients with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and diffuse brain damages have reported selective deficits in mental states reasoning or 'Theory of Mind' (ToM). The goal of the current study is to investigate the fundamental role of the prefrontal cortex in two ToM components: inferential reasoning and social perception. Selective...

Although bilingualism is prevalent throughout the world, little is known about the extent to which it influences children's conversational understanding. Our investigation involved children aged 3-6 years exposed to one or more of four major languages: English, German, Italian, and Japanese. In two experiments, we examined the children's ability to...

INTRODUCTION Here we report the preliminary results of three experiments where we compare deaf and hearing children from Italy, Sweden and UK on non-verbal tasks of belief attribution and measures of communication. The aim is to determine the effects of access to language on children's early mentalizing abilities.