Alice Chirico

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore | UNICATT · Department of Psychology

This study examines seniors’ creative engagement in group activities using synchronous communication tools and explores automatic assessment methods through behavioral and psychophysiological measurements. Working with a small senior group on collaborative creative tasks, we implemented a comprehensive data collection approach using audio-visual an...

Background Transformative experiences (TEs) have been conceptualized in many ways, contexts, magnitudes, and durations, but at their heart, they entail some manner of adjustment, which contributes to changing individuals’ worldviews, actions, views of others and/or their own feelings, personality, and identity. Among the many elicitors identified a...

A breathtaking sunset, an immersive art exhibition, a captivating piece of music—all of these experiences can be deeply moving. These experiences can be called aesthetic experiences since they involve the perception and appreciation of the sensory qualities of objects or events. Aesthetic experiences are not simply about perceiving beauty, they are...

The aesthetic of our surrounding environment has a significant impact on our behavior. According to the SO -R model, specific features characterizing the environment act as stimuli (S) that affect the internal states of people-organisms (O)-, which, in turn, drive their behavioral responses (R). Specifically, engaging with aesthetically appealing e...

Virtual Reality is an effective technique for eliciting emotions. It provides immersive and ecologically valid emotional experiences while maintaining experimental control. Recently, novel VR forms like 360° videos have been used successfully for emotion elicitation. Some preliminary databases of 360° videos for emotion elicitation have been propos...

Luxury retailers are increasingly considering the introduction of service robots in their stores to enhance the value proposition and reshape the dynamics of both the service encounter and the customer experience. Although the literature recognizes the social presence of robots in service encounters, little empirical research compares humans and se...

Over the last two decades, awe has attracted the attention of an increasing number of researchers. The use of virtual reality has been identified as one of the most effective techniques for eliciting awe, in addition to more personalized methods for inducing emotion, such as autobiographical recall. However, previous measures of awe were unable to...

Affective computing has been widely used to detect and recognize emotional states. The main goal of this study was to detect emotional states using machine learning algorithms automatically. The experimental procedure involved eliciting emotional states using film clips in an immersive and non-immersive virtual reality setup. The participants’ phys...

Affective computing has been widely used to detect and recognize emotional states. The main goal of this study was to detect emotional states using machine learning algorithms automatically. The experimental procedure involved eliciting emotional states using film clips in an immersive and non-immersive virtual reality setup. The participants' phys...

Introduction Awe is a complex emotion unveiling a positive and mixed nature, which resembles the Romantic feeling of the Sublime. It has increasingly become the object of scientific investigation in the last twenty years. However, its underlying brain mechanisms are still unclear. To fully capture its nature in the lab, researchers have increasingl...

A meditative ‘technique’ is conceived as a continuum of different affective states involving mind and body jointly. Meditative practices can involve cognitive effort (e.g., focused attention and open-minded techniques), as well as automatic and implicit practices (e.g., transcendental techniques). The NGALSO tantric self-healing meditation techniqu...

The ubiquity of human art prompted evolutionary psychologists to explore its origins as a potential adaptation to the environment. Here we focus on emotionally charged art and posit that affective affordances embedded into some artworks play a pivotal role in explaining why these artworks are enjoyed from an evolutionary perspective. Such features,...

The integration of transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroencephalography (TMS-EEG) has been sought to explore connectivity and cortical excitability in healthy and pathological subjects. Although the number of studies in this field is continuously increasing, there is still no consensus on the pre-processing pipeline. The goal of this work i...

Background Virtual Reality (VR) has already emerged as an effective instrument for simulating realistic interactions, across various domains. In the field of User Experience (UX), VR has been used to create prototypes of real-world products. Here, the question is to what extent the users’ experience of a virtual prototype can be equivalent to that...

Affective states are constantly evolving, ranging from serenity to excitement. Understanding the dynamic transitions between emotional states, known as affect dynamics, is crucial for understanding intraindividual emotional heterogeneity. Various statistical methods have been used to capture and quantify these dynamics, based on longitudinal time s...

Virtual reality can potentially induce a range of affective states and be a powerful tool for exploring affective responses in a controlled and immersive environment. It allows visualizing continuous affective experiences without duptions, enabling the measurement of behavioral and physiological changes during transitions between affective states....

The response of older people to the COVID-19 pandemic has attracted much attention as they are at increased risk of adverse outcomes. A longitudinal study has shown that improvement in global cognitive, executive and language functioning in healthy older adults enrolled at the University of the Third Age appears to play a protective role against em...

Mental Flexibility oscillates between adaptive variability in behavior and the capacity to restore homeostasis, linked to mental health. It has recently been one of the most investigated abilities in mental and neurological diseases such as Anorexia nervosa and Parkinson’s disease, studied for rigidity or cognitive inflexibility. Patients with anor...

Theoretically, affective states have always been conceived as complex phenomena enabling individuals to respond flexibly and dynamically to environmental demands. Methodologically, the novel field of Affect Dynamics has started to analyze affective states as inherently dynamic and interdependent phenomena by focusing on how and why they fluctuate o...

Non tutti i compiti e le attività hanno lo stesso potere di farci sentire "creativamente competenti". Alcune di esse posseggono delle proprietà rare nate dall'incastro tra le nostre caratteristiche personali e quelle del compito stesso, tali per cui, siamo in grado di realizzare un'attività senza sforzo, con immenso piacere e, soprattutto, con una...

Il Design Thinking (DT) è divenuto nel tempo un termine accettato all'interno del dominio dell'Innovation management (IM) in qualità di approccio improntato alla creatività e all'innovazione, basato sulle pratiche e i metodi di design. In particolare, come indica la Interaction Design Foundation, è impossibile identificare tutti quei fattori respon...

Mental flexibility (MF) has long been defined as cognitive flexibility. Specifically, it has been mainly studied within the executive functions domain. However, there has recently been increased attention towards its affective and physiological aspects. As a result, MF has been described as an ecological and cross-subject skill consisting of respon...

Measures of the same phenomenon should produce the same results; this principle is fundamental because it allows for replication—the basis of science. Unfortunately, measures of a psychological construct in one language can often measure something a bit different in another language (i.e., low “scale equivalence”). Historically, the problem was tho...

Older adults have been reported to have increased susceptibility to the adverse effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection, such as fatal outcomes, cognitive decline, and changes in physical and/or mental health. However, few studies have examined neuropsychological changes by comparing measurements before and during the pandemic in healthy older people. In a...

Virtual nature exposure has emerged as an effective method for promoting pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, also due to the increased emotional connection with nature itself. However, the role played by complex emotions elicited by virtual nature, such as awe, needs to be fully elucidated. Awe is an emotion stemming from vast stimuli, inclu...

In psychology, the term affect has been increasingly used to indicate an overarching state including a wide range of phenomena, including the experience of feelings, moods, and/or emotions (Schiller et al., 2022). Affective states, in particular, refer to individuals' current emotional state or mood toward allostatic goals. The first attempt to out...

https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/47006/advances-in-machine-learning-for-mental-health-monitoring-using-speech-emotion-analysis; Abstract submission deadline (not mandatory) 24 March 2023; Manuscript submission deadline: 19 June 2023

Empirical research has explored the potential of the emotion of awe to shape creativity, while theoretical work has sought to understand the link between this emotion and transformation in terms of imagining new possible worlds. This branch of study relies on the transformative potential of virtual reality (VR) to examine and invite cognitive and e...

Virtual Reality (VR) changed the ways through which art is produced and also experienced by the audience. VR can convey effective emotional and aesthetic experiences thanks to the sense of presence. So far, previous studies have mostly focused on the cognitive implications of using virtual environments in aesthetic contexts. However, empirical stud...

How do specific nature experiences in VR differ from the equivalent real ones? Although virtual reality (VR) is increasingly being used as an ecological tool to resemble even complex phenomena, a debated issue still concerns the extent to which experiences in VR are similar to the equivalent real ones. This is especially relevant at the emotional l...

Purpose: This post hoc study aimed to assess the hypothesis that subjects with obesity could underestimate their body size. Methods: Data from a previous study with different aims were used to compare 22 female inpatients with obesity with 21 healthy-weight women in the size estimation accuracy of their shoulders, waist, and hips circumferences...

With the development of data-driven tools, including machine learning, audio signal processing has attained a high level of accuracy, either for speech recognition or emotion analysis. Both issues necessitate creating a model for the signal's source. Whereas this requirement has been solved for speech signals, through the repartition of the recogni...

Research shows that reduced exposure to natural contexts is associated with an increase in psychophysical disorders. Recent evidence suggests that even a brief experience in natural scenarios can positively affect people's health and well-being. However, natural contexts are not always easily accessible. This study investigates the effects of natur...

Crisis and hostage negotiators are conflict resolution professionals who work toward peacefully resolving tense and possible volatile incidents. These law enforcement negotiators must possess comprehensive knowledge of the required skills and strategically deploy them to accomplish their goals. This exploratory Article examines the skills that make...

Art is a complex subject of analysis. Nonetheless, Empirical Aesthetics has proved that the interaction between some bottom-up and top-down mechanisms shapes individuals’ perception of a work of art. Recently, the Vienna Integrated Model for Art Perception [1] added that, during the observation of an artwork, the emotional state of the observer, as...

The primary goal of this study was to elaborate an integrated model on the development of Internet use behavior (including functional and not functional use) across life span, by outlining the interaction among Physical, Cognitive, Emotional, Social, Material, Environmental, Digital resources, and challenges. Moreover, since the focus was on the tr...

The concept of transformative experience (TE) has been widely explored by several disciplines from philosophy to neurobiology, and in different domains, from the spiritual to the educational one. This attitude has engendered heterogeneous models to explain this phenomenon. However, a consistent and clear understanding of this construct remains elus...

The considerable connection between religiosity/spirituality and positivity in life in general has been widely demonstrated. However, preliminary evidence has shown that when also a cognitive component is included, the direction of this relationship seems to emerge more clearly. Specifically, the differential pathways linking specific positive self...

Despite of the number of significant scientific discoveries in Italy, youth engagement with science and technology is still very low in this country. Teaching young generations about the complex relationship between science, technology, and society (STS) is fundamental in order to promote higher level critical thinking skills, foster lifelong civic...

Emotions are our internal compass: not only do they influence a wide range of cognitive processes, including perception, attention, learning and reasoning; they also play a fundamental role in shaping people’s mental health and wellbeing. Thanks to recent advances in software and hardware platforms, virtual and augmented reality systems (hereinaft...

Complexity has been always a part of an individual’s life under different guises. However, it has always been hard to provide a clear definition of what complexity really is. For instance, in the field of science, complexity has been defined in terms of systems. A system can be deemed as complex when multiple interactions occur among different comp...

Despite a rapidly ageing world population, ageism – particularly in its implicit form – is widespread in society. In this article, we propose that a paradigm shift is needed in how we approach ageing-related design research and practice in areas such as assistive technologies. We also put forward the idea of using the Healthy Ageing (HA) framework...

In response to an increasingly ageing world population, the World Health Organization has recently proposed a new framework – called Healthy Ageing – to better cater to older adults’ life needs and desires. This framework calls for transdisciplinary approaches to answer the challenges and opportunities posed by an ageing society. Following this fra...

So far, several aspects of autobiographical memory (AM) have been found to be impaired in depression. Among others, depressed patients show the tendency to recall more negative than positive events (i.e., negative bias) and usually retrieve memories that lack of specificity and details (i.e., overgeneral memories). Based on this, we designed an AM...

The Allocentric Lock theory (ALT) suggests that anorexia (AN) may be the outcome of a primary disturbance in the way the body is “experienced” and “remembered”. A long tradition of research had proved that emotions can influence the encoding, storing and retrieving of memories. The aim of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of a new...

VR effectiveness has been tested before in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) with full-body illusion. The embodiment of patients with AN into a different virtual body to modify their long-term memory of the body is a crucial factor for the onset and maintenance of this disorder. In this pilot study, we aimed to test the usability and User Experience (UX) of th...

In the past years, the field of collaborative robots has been developing fast, with applications ranging from health care to search and rescue, construction, entertainment, sports, and many others. However, current social robotics is still far from the general abilities we expect in a robot collaborator. This limitation is more evident when robots...

Recently, interest in the unique pathways linking discrete positive emotions to specific health outcomes has gained increasing attention, but the role of awe is yet to be elucidated. Awe is a complex and transformative emotion that can restructure individuals' mental frames so deeply that it could be considered a therapeutic asset for major mental...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.547687.].

The sublime–the mixed aesthetic experience of uplift and elevation in response to a powerful or vast object that otherwise is experienced as menacing–has nurtured philosophical discourse for centuries. One of the major philosophical issues concerns whether the sublime is best thought of as a subjective response or as a stimulus. Recently, psycholog...

The goal of this large-scale study was to test the relationship between positive emotion dispositions (i.e., Joy, Contentment, Pride, Love, Compassion, Amusement, and Awe) and two strategies of emotion regulation (i.e., reappraisal and suppression) in the Italian population. 532 Italian-speaking adults completed the Dispositional Positive Emotion S...

Starting from the pro-environmental potential of virtual reality (VR), the aim was to understand how different statistical information formats can enhance VR persuasive potential for plastic consumption, recycling and waste. Naturalistic, immersive virtual reality environments (VREs) were designed ad hoc to display three kinds of statistical eviden...

Come ogni libro che desideri introdurre concetti nuovi ai più, anche questo inizierà con un tentativo di definire il suo oggetto principale. Il primo obiettivo è rispondere alla domanda di chi prende in mano e vuole capire cosa siano i "momenti di eternità". Come spesso accade traducendo un termine straniero in italiano, si sceglie di usare delle p...

This empirical study examines how philosophical work on the sublime relates to contemporary psychological work on awe. We operationalized several aspects of the sublime drawing from prominent philosophical theories and analyzed them in relation to three different measures of awe: the modified Differential Emotions Scale (mDES), the awe sub-scale of...

Despite sophisticated scale-generic guidance for adapting/translating self-report scales and widespread adherence to guidance, low invariance remains a problem in cross-cultural clinical research. This may be due to scale-specific translation challenges, and original scale-creation papers provide little information about item-writing choices. It is...

Self-transcendence has been characterized as a decrease in self-saliency (ego disillusionment) and increased connection, and has been growing in research interest in the past decade. Several measures have been developed and published with some degree of psychometric validity and reliability. However, to date, there has been no review systematically...

Background: Older people's deficits in executive functions (EF) have been shown to lead to higher fall risk, postural sway, and reduced speed. Crucially, EF impairments are even more pronounced in individuals with chronic cerebrovascular disease (CVD), namely vascular cognitive impairment. Methods: In this retrospective cross-sectional study, we...

Due to COVID-19 spreading in Italy, on March 11 the Prime Minister of Italy declared a lockdown and imposed severe restrictive measures impacting citizens’ freedom at several levels. People were required to stay at home and go out only to satisfy basic needs. Several risk models have postulated a link among online searching behavior, affect, anxiet...

Background Living in the time of the COVID-19 means experiencing not only a global health emergency but also extreme psychological stress with potential emotional side effects such as sadness, grief, irritability, and mood swings. Crucially, lockdown and confinement measures isolate people who become the first and the only ones in charge of their o...