Alessandro Miani

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Verified

Alessandro verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellow at University of Bristol

Conspiracy theories may arise out of an overarching conspiracy worldview that identifies common elements of subterfuge across unrelated or even contradictory explanations, leading to networks of self-reinforcing beliefs. We test this conjecture by analyzing a large natural language database of conspiracy and nonconspiracy texts for the same events,...

The spread of online conspiracy theories represents a serious threat to society. To understand the content of conspiracies, here we present the language of conspiracy (LOCO) corpus. LOCO is an 88-million-token corpus composed of topic-matched conspiracy ( N = 23,937) and mainstream ( N = 72,806) documents harvested from 150 websites. Mimicking inte...

The proliferation of online misinformation undermines societal cohesion and democratic principles. Effectively combating this issue relies on developing automatic classifiers, which require training data to achieve high classification accuracy. However, while English-language resources are abundant, other languages are often neglected, creating a c...

We present DONALD (Dataset Of News Articles for studying the Language of Dubious information), a topic- matched corpus comprising 2,173,172 news articles, gathered from 1,709 domains, focused on 172 politically polarizing topics. DONALD serves as a comprehensive resource for shedding light on the language of misinformation circulating online, facil...

Incoherence has been considered a hallmark of belief in conspiracy theories (CTs). Previous research has assessed conspiratorial incoherence via the correlation between responses to contradictory items, with a higher correlation being seen as indicating greater incoherence. This approach has been successfully applied in many studies but nevertheles...

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are spectacular narratives, widely spread, that pose societal threats. We test whether CTs might be linguistically creative products, which would facilitate their transmission and thereby account for their widespread popularity. We analyzed nominal compounds (e.g., mind control, carbon dioxide; N = 1,713,568) from a large...

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are spectacular narratives, widely spread, that pose societal threats. We test whether CTs might be linguistically creative products, which would facilitate their transmission and thereby account for their widespread popularity. We analyzed nominal compounds (e.g., mind control, carbon dioxide; N = 1,713,568) from a large...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has caused numerous casualties, overloaded hospitals, reduced the wellbeing of many and had a substantial negative economic impact globally. As the population of the United Kingdom was preparing for recovery, the uncertainty relating to the discovery of the new Omicron variant on November 24 2021 threatened those pl...

The dissemination of false information on the internet has received considerable attention over the last decade. Misinformation often spreads faster than mainstream news, thus making manual fact checking inefficient or, at best, labor-intensive. Therefore, there is an increasing need to develop methods for automatic detection of misinformation. Alt...

Background Trypophobia is characterised by an aversion to or even revulsion for patterns of holes or visual stimuli featuring such patterns. Past research has shown that trypophobic stimuli trigger emotional and physiological reactions, but relatively little is known about the antecedents, prodromes, or simply covariates of trypophobia. Aim The go...

Background Neonatal male circumcision is a painful skin-breaking procedure that may affect infant physiological and behavioral stress responses as well as mother-infant interaction. Due to the plasticity of the developing nociceptive system, neonatal pain might carry long-term consequences on adult behavior. In this study, we examined whether infan...

Captivity may have adverse effects on captive great apes, as they spend much more of their time engaged in foraging and other activities in the wild. Enrichment interventions have the potential to alleviate the adverse effects of captivity by introducing novel stimuli. In orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), interactive digital enrichment has proven effect...

Objective Patients with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) may present with convulsive events that are not accompanied by epileptiform brain activity. Video-electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring is the gold standard for diagnosis, yet not all patients experience convulsive episodes during video-EEG sessions. Hence, we aimed to construct a...

Objective The present study explores the relationship between neuroactive hormones and religious commitment. We hypothesised that religious commitment is mediated by neuropeptide Y and oxytocin. These neurohormones have a well-established role in general well-being, anxiety regulation, stress-resilience, social affiliation and spirituality. Method...

Explore and Visualize Data in R

The long-term behavioral consequences of circumcision are underexplored. Along with a marked increase of cortisol, changes in mother-infant interactions have been observed after circumcision, including disrupted feeding and weaker attachment. This might lead to a reduction in oxytocin, which in turn increases testosterone availability. The present...

Psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) is a conversion disorder that reflects underlying psychological distress. Female patients with PNES often present with a history of prolonged stressors, especially sexual abuse. In the current study, we studied the relationship between neuropeptide Y (NPY) and PNES symptoms in women with a history of sexual...

This chapter describes the structural similarities between music and language, in pursuit of a strong argument for the hypothesis that music and language are not categorically different from one another, but placed on the same continuum. Hence, we propose an integrative model. Analyzing their denotative and connotative levels, a crucial systemic di...

Music is a remarkable universal human-unique trait based on a special genetic and neuroanatomical infrastructure, shared among vocal learners, that links auditory inputs to motor outputs via a sensorimotor feedback. This neural configuration is necessary for rhythmic synchronization, a crucial feature of music that fosters affiliation and positive...

During sexual intimacy, humans have a strong preference for ventro-ventral copulatory posture (VVCP). This allows for an increase in oxytocin (OT) maximized by eye contact and skin-to-skin contact, kiss, and nipple stimulation. Previous studies have shown that coitus is more satiating than masturbation, and that OT enhanced the intensity of orgasm...

This paper provides an analytical tool for the study of intertextuality in music. A brief part explains the motives both for and against focusing on music and language parallelisms. It follows the proposal for a systematic linguistics for musicology centered on linguistic layers, which is then applied to the Hjelmslevian semiotics. This results in...

This is not an investigation on the sexual habits of Mötley Crüe, neither on drugs of abuse. Rather, reviewing the neuroendocrine literature on music, courtship, orgasm, and attachment, a parallel between music and love is proposed. Exapted from mother-infant interactions to mate attraction, fostering neotenization, music reduced inter-male aggress...

Postmodernism is often characterized by the collapse of dichotomies (kitsch/cult; self/others; in/out; real/unreal), meta-narrativity (focus on enunciation vs. narration), and hyper-textuality (intra- & extra-textual relationships). It can be also seen as a forma mentis that pervades modern epistemology sensu lato, fostering multidisciplinarity, su...

Music is a universal species-specific activity among humans (Sloboda, 1985). However, many communicative convergent behaviors have been also traced in nonhuman animals: e.g., social learning (Tomasello, 2014b), critical period (Marler, 1999), babbling stage (Doupe & Kuhl, 1999), and dialects (Payne, 2000). Advances in genetics show that such a deep...

Is music just a cheesecake (Pinker, 1997)? For Darwin, music offers a means to impress females (Darwin, 1859; Miller, 2000a; Mithen, 2005; Levitin, 2006; for an opponent view see Fitch, 2006), while others highlighted its role in group cohesion (Cross, 1999), which arose from the capacity to entrain rhythm (Patel, 2014), reading the mind (Livingsto...

An evolutionary view on the neuroanatomy of music and its role will be presented. Driven by ecological factors, a change in intentionality (individual, joint, and collective; Tomasello, 2014) allowed for progression from ape to modern-human cognition, i.e. the shift from indexes of emotions to symbolized iconic indexes of emotions (i.e. music; Mian...

Do we have musicality, or are we musical? To what extent is music an artefact and how much does it shape us? It is suggested that our first musical experience is in the mother's womb, that we result from an accurate selection by ancestral women towards 'musicians', and that music affects our brain, cognition and mood. It will be concluded that the...

Do we have musicality, or are we musical? To what extent is music an artefact and how much does it shape us? It is suggested that our first musical experience is in the mother's womb, that we result from an accurate selection by ancestral women towards 'musicians', and that music affects our brain, cognition and mood. It will be concluded that the...

Background Recent theories of human evolution deal with the so-called intentionality, i.e., thinking about the self (individual), the partner (joint), and the group to which one belongs (collective). It has been also advanced an evolutionary parallelism between intentionality and sign qualities which led to a similar account for music evolution: (i...

In empirical research, syntax is one of the most recognized and studied linguistic trait of music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983; Patel et al., 1998; Maess et al., 2001; Patel, 2003). Little work has been done for semantics (Koealsch et al., 2004), and much confusion surrounds phonology (Sloboda, 1985; Patel 2008). In reference to music as a cultural...

The most recognized feature of music is the capacity to arouse emotions in listeners: are such emotions inherent to music (indexes) or are they evoked by resemblance to an analogous emotional expression (icons)? The claim is that music is a conventionalized imitation of an expression of an emotional state (i.e., a symbolized iconic index), but to r...

Event-related brain potential (ERP) components are taken to reflect different neural mechanisms related to syntax and semantics in both language and music. While semantic processing is associated with the negative component N400 in both domains, the syntactic one elicits an Early Right Anterior Negativity for music (ERAN), and an Early LeJ Anterior...