Andrea Carnaghi

• Phd
• Professor (Full) at University of Trieste

Four studies analyzed how sexual orientation (heterosexual vs. gay) and age categories (young vs. elderly) referring to men are cognitively combined. In Study 1, young gay men were judged as more prototypical of gay men than adult or elderly gay men, while young, adult, and elderly heterosexual men were perceived as equally prototypical of heterose...

The current research analyzed whether race categories concerning Black and Asian men could lead to extrapolative inferences concerning the sexual orientation (i.e., extrapolative sexual orientation stereotyping [ESOS]) of these category members. Study 1 assessed perceived culturally based ESOS and showed that Black men, compared with Asian men, wer...

This research examined age stereotyping of male individuals displaying intersectional memberships stemming from the combination of age (Young vs. Elderly) and sexual orientation categories (Gay vs. Heterosexual). We found that the age stereotypes of ‘Elderly gay men’ were blurred: ‘Elderly gay men’ were stereotyped less on elderly‐ and more on youn...

Two studies analyzed whether, at the cognitive level, ‘Elderly gay man’ is “invisible” both when processing the labels ‘Gay man’ and ‘Elderly man’. We suggest that ‘Gay man’ is conflated with ‘Young man’, and that ‘Elderly man’ is conflated with ‘Heterosexual man’. Contact with elderly gay men did not alter the perception of ‘Gay man’ as prevalentl...

Despite the fact that gay men and lesbian women face significant economic disparities compared to their heterosexual counterparts, people appear to believe that the opposite is true, a phenomenon which has been dubbed the “myth of gay affluence.” In the current research (Ntot=2162), we address the consequences of this belief. Specifically, we hypot...

Reappropriation of derogatory group labels by minority members is a coping strategy against stigmatization. The aim of this research is twofold. First, we intend to replicate Galinsky et al.'s findings (2013), suggesting that self-labelling (i.e., the self-referential use of a derogatory group label), compared to outgroup-labelling (i.e., the use o...

We reconcile interactive and additive models of category intersection by recasting these theoretical efforts within the conceptual combination framework. In three studies ( N tot = 364), we showed that, in line with an interactive approach, combining ‘elderly men’ with ‘gay men’ generated an atypical subtype with unique attributes that could not be...

The world is witnessing the highest level of displacement of people on record. Public discourse often uses labels to describe people on the move such as ‘migrants’, ‘asylum seekers’, or ‘refugees’ interchangeably. A preregistered study in nine countries (Australia, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U...

Although perceived social isolation (i.e., feelings of loneliness and a perceived lack of social support) has been shown to be associated with the involvement in cyberbullying behaviors, little is known about the mediating mechanisms underlying this relationship. This study tested the mediating role of a preference for online social interaction in...

Recent research showed that body image concerns (i.e., drive for thinness and body dissatisfaction) may be associated with exposure to images on social networking sites. We analysed this relationship by taking into account the possible mediating role of both the appearance‐related comparisons (i.e., the comparison with others on a specific dimensio...

To test the “sex sells” assumption, we examined how Italian men and women react to sexualized advertising. Women showed lower product attractiveness and purchase intentions toward products presented with sexualized female models than with neutral ads, whereas men were unaffected by ads’ sexualization (Study 1, n = 251). Study 2 (n = 197) replicated...

Extensive experimental research has been conducted to investigate how individuals empathise with others depending on contextual and motivational factors. However, the effect of sexual objectification (i.e. focus on the individual’s physical appearance over his/her mental state) on empathy is scarce at best thus far. The aim of this work is to shed...

Individuals possess an innate capacity to communicate and understand non-verbal cues (i.e., touch). In addition, touch affects individuals at the intrapersonal level (e.g., physiological reactions) and at the interpersonal level (e.g., impression formation, pro-social behavior). Recent studies testify to the effects of touch also at the intergroup...

The goal of the present study was to investigate the causal direction of influence between the ingroup as a whole and the self or another ingroup member considering a key feature of groups, i.e., their perceived meaningfulness. To this goal, in Study 1, 2, and 3 we predicted a preference for self-stereotyping and ingroup-stereotyping in the meaning...

Recent research has examined the sexualization–objectification link (i.e., whether sexualized individuals are appraised as if they were objects rather than persons). This research has found that sexualized individuals are more likely to be processed and categorized as if they were objects and are also perceived as possessing fewer humanlike traits...

This cross-sectional research investigates the individual (i.e., sexual prejudice, contact with lesbian and gay [LG] people, and perceived seriousness of homophobic epithets) and contextual (i.e., homophobic bullying observed by school staff and perceived colleague reactions to homophobic bullying) factors as predictors of school staff intervention...

Reclaiming implies that homophobic labels used by gay individuals are perceived as less offensive and their use as empowering speakers. We examined whether listeners in Italy and Britain perceived homophobic labels as “reclaimed” when men’s voices implied their homosexuality. Gay and straight male speakers used neutral or homophobic labels referrin...

By using a pseudoword paradigm, we tested whether derogatory labels (e.g., pejorative labels addressing group members) differed from category labels and general slur in their descriptive (i.e., pointing to group membership) and expressive functions (i.e., perceived offensiveness and social acceptability). Results indicated that derogatory labels we...

In the present research we analyzed the social influence mechanisms that back the relation between peer group norms regarding cyberbullying behaviors and individual cyberbullying perpetration. In a sample of adolescents (N = 3511, age: M = 16.27, SD = 1.58), we showed that the relation between perceived peer-norm and cyberbullying perpetration was...

The current research aims to study the link between the type of vision experienced in a collaborative immersive virtual environment (active vs. multiple passive), the type of error one looks for during a cooperative multi-user exploration of a design project (affordance vs. perceptual violations), and the type of setting in which multi-user perform...

Recent research has shown that a brief, casual touch administered by an outgroup member reduces prejudice towards the group to which the toucher belongs. In this study, we take the research on physical contact and prejudice a step further by addressing the relation between individuals’ amount of Experienced Intergroup Physical Contact (EIPC), acros...

Supplemental analysis of Study 1

In this set of research, we investigated the effects of intergroup physical contact on intergroup attitudes by relying on indirect contact strategies, namely the imagined contact paradigm. We implemented the imagined contact paradigm by leading participants to shape the mental imagery upon pictorial information. Specifically, in Study 1 participant...

Preference for one's own group is a widespread phenomenon. Results with dominant and minority group participants, however, are not consistent about whether the ingroup is always implicitly favored. The majority of these findings is related mostly to the northern-American context. Also, these findings are from studies that relied on a single implici...

In three studies, heterosexual participants were presented with descriptions of heterosexual and gay-male parents. Importantly, the level of gender-role conformity of the gay-male parents was experimentally manipulated, resulting in their level of gender-role conformity ranging from high to low. Compared to the son of a heterosexual couple, the son...

In three studies, heterosexual participants were presented with descriptions of heterosexual and gay-male parents. Importantly, the level of gender-role conformity of the gay-male parents was experimentally manipulated, resulting in their level of gender-role conformity ranging from high to low. Compared to the son of a heterosexual couple, the son...

A controversial hypothesis, named the Sexualized Body Inversion Hypothesis (SBIH), claims similar visual processing of sexually objectified women (i.e., with a focus on the sexual body parts) and inanimate objects as indicated by an absence of the inversion effect for both type of stimuli. The current study aims at shedding light into the mechanism...

Group status influences individuals' identity. Low-status group members identify with their in-group more strongly than high-status group members. However, previous research has mostly analyzed explicit identification with a single in-group. We examined effects of both double group membership, namely gender and sexual orientation, which are two int...

Sexual objectification is a widespread phenomenon characterized by a focus on the individual's physical appearance over his/her mental state. This has been associated with negative social consequences, as objectified individuals are judged to be less human, competent, and moral. Moreover, behavioral responses toward the person change as a function...

Intergroup relations shape group members’ linguistic choices, and group members’ language molds the quality of intergroup relations. Indeed, intergroup relations are often connoted by conflict, asymmetrical status, and prejudice, and the quality of intergroup relations dramatically affects the manner in which people speak about individual members a...

This study investigates whether homophobic labels and category-neutral terms are differently appraised as a function of levels of coming-out. After reporting their coming-out status, participants were exposed to either homophobic or category labels and reported their semantic associations, level of internalized homophobia, and body perceptions. Res...

We investigated within-person co-variations from the perspective of knowledge-and-appraisal theories of personality. Knowledge structures were idiographically assessed as personal beliefs on the relevance of personality characteristics in facilitating successful actions in interpersonal situations. Three main findings emerged. First, beliefs of sit...

In this study, we investigate whether hormonal shifts during the menstrual cycle contribute to the dehumanization of other women and men. Female participants with different levels of likelihood of conception (LoC) completed a semantic priming paradigm in a lexical decision task. When the word ‘woman’ was the prime, animal words were more accessible...

Ample evidence attests that social intention, elicited through gestures explicitly signaling a request of communicative intention, affects the patterning of hand movement kinematics. The current study goes beyond the effect of social intention and addresses whether the same action of reaching to grasp an object for placing it in an end target posit...

Data from the experiment. Two worksheets are included in the file: (1) DATASET_reach_to_grasp, with the relevant kinematics of the reach-to-grasp phase of the movement, and (2) DATASET_lift_to_place, with the relevant kinematics of the lift-to-place phase of the movement. (XLS)

Pre-test for curriculum vitae selection. Short description of how the four curricula used in the Experiment have been selected experimentally. (DOC)

Why restricting the study to only male participants? Detailed overview of the reasons behind our choice to include only male participants in the study. (DOC)

In our daily lives, we often have to quickly estimate the emotions of our conspecifics in order to have successful social interactions. While this estimation process seems quite easy when we are ourselves in a neutral or equivalent emotional state, it has recently been shown that in case of incongruent emotional states between ourselves and the oth...

Australia and Italy are both nations where complex contradictions exist in the current social roles and expectations for women. The current study used the Conformity to Feminine Norms Inventory (CFNI: Mahalik et al. 2005) to compare the endorsement of eight feminine norms (Nice in Relationships, Thinness, Care for Children, Modesty, Domestic, Roman...

Homophobic epithets have become commonly-used insults among adolescents. However, evidence suggests that there are differences in how these homophobic epithets are evaluated based on beliefs held by the observer, and by the context in which they are used. In order to examine this, Italian high school students were asked to rate the offensiveness of...

Extensive research has been conducted to investigate how individuals empathize with other humans [1]. However, people are likely to rely on their own emotional state to infer other's emotions, consequently this could lead on to biased judjments (EEB) [2]. Although it has been assumed that individuals show empathic reactions towards humans but not t...

We examined whether homophobic epithets (e.g., faggot) function as labels of deviance for homosexuals that contribute to their dehumanization and physical distance. Across two studies, participants were supraliminally (Study 1) and subliminally (Study 2) exposed to a homophobic epithet, a category label, or a generic insult. Participants were then...

There is evidence that discrimination directed toward gay men from some heterosexual men is partially driven by heterosexual men attempting to distance themselves from gay men’s perceived femininity. There is also evidence that many gay men wish they were more masculine than they currently are and will distance themselves from other gay men perceiv...

Objective and background. Patterns of deficits affecting either living or nonliving categories in brain-damaged individuals have provided evidence for a particular organization of semantic knowledge in the brain. Recent work on patients with dementia suggested that the social-groups knowledge is different from the knowledge about living or non-livi...

This research investigated the behavioural consequences of homophobic epithets. After exposure to either a category or a homophobic label, heterosexual participants allocated fictitious resources to two different prevention programmes: one mainly relevant to heterosexuals (Sterility Prevention), the other to homosexuals (AIDS-HIV Prevention). Respo...

This research investigated the behavioural consequences of homophobic epithets. After exposure to either a category or a homophobic label, heterosexual participants allocated fictitious resources to two different prevention programmes: one mainly relevant to heterosexuals (Sterility Prevention), the other to homosexuals (AIDS-HIV Prevention). Respo...

In Paolo Bernardis, Carlo Fantoni, Walter Gerbino (eds.) "TSPC2014. Proceedings of the Trieste Symposium on Perception and Cognition, November 27-28", Trieste, EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, pp. 130-131. E-ISBN 978-88-8303-610-1 In the current study we address the role of hormonal fluctuations across menstrual cycle in female dehumanization o...

The purpose of this study was to test the influence of combined hormonal contraceptive (CHC) use on women's objectification of other women and men (i.e., the tendency to attribute appearance-related body features rather than competence-related body features). A regression analysis showed that the higher the dose of the synthetic estrogen contained...

In the present study, we aimed at investigating what factors affect the judgment of a typical reader when he or she deals with numerical information in an ecological context. Participants read a story about a man who was not treated with heparin after hernia surgery and then died. Their task was to assess the liability of the medical staff after re...

Traditionally neuropsychological observations have constrained the view that semantic knowledge is organized in categories: animals, plants or tools (Warrington & Shallice, 1984; Caramazza & Shelton, 1998; Tyler & Moss, 2001). Recently it has suggested that social groups, defined as categories of individuals that share category-relevant characteris...

According to the Spatial Agency Bias (SAB), more agentic groups (men) are envisioned to the left of less agentic groups (women). This research investigated the role of social status in shaping the spatial representation of gender couples. Participants were presented pairs consisting of one male and one female target who confirmed gender stereotypes...

The most relevant evidence for the organization of the conceptual knowledge in the brain was first provided by the patterns of deficits in brain-damaged individuals affecting one or another semantic category. Patients with various etiologies showed a disproportionate impairment in producing and understanding names of either living (fruits, vegetabl...

Two studies address the role of hormonal shift across menstrual cycle in female dehumanization of other women. In Study 1, normally ovulating women (NOW) and women who use hormonal contraceptives (HCW) are compared in terms of how much they dehumanize other women and two other control targets (men and elderlies). In NOW the level of dehumanization...

In 2007, the two most important Italian left-wing parties merged into a single political entity. This study intends to analyze the merging process. Specifically, and in line with the ingroup projection hypothesis of Mummendey & Wenzel, we have explored whether the identification and the favoritism toward the upcoming common group was affected by th...

A long-lasting question for philosophers and cognitive neuroscientists has been how knowledge is organized in our brain. Insights from neuropsychological studies reporting patients with a selective impairment for processing natural or artificial objects in cognitive tasks led to the development of important theoretical advancements on semantic know...

This article investigates the role of relational motives in the saying-is-believing effect (Higgins & Rholes, 1978). Building on shared reality theory, we expected this effect to be most likely when communicators were motivated to “get along” with the audience. In the current study, participants were asked to describe an ambiguous target to an audi...

We compared self-stereotyping, in-group-stereotyping, and out-group-stereotyping, among members of high- and low-status groups. Because gender inequality is still present in society, we operationalized status in terms of gender. We considered the male (female) gender category to possess relatively high (low) status. As predicted on the basis of an...

This study was conducted to investigate whether heterosexual perceivers’ appraisal of HIV-risk from unsafe sexual practices could be biased by the availability of group-based information about high-risk groups (i.e., homosexuals) and by the perceivers’ state of mood (i.e., happy vs. sad mood). Specifically, participants were confronted with cartoon...

The current studies investigate the effects of homophobic labels on the self-perception of heterosexual males, hypothesizing that when exposed to homophobic epithets, they are motivated to underline their masculinity and claim a distinctly heterosexual identity by taking distance from homosexuals and, to a lesser degree, from women. Heterosexual ma...

Research on perceptions of homosexuals implicitly assumes that individuals think about lesbians as an undifferentiated group. By contrast, this paper investigated the stereotypes of the overall category as well as of different subgroups of lesbians within the frame of the stereotype content model (SCM). Participants (N = 70) rated the overall categ...

In considerazione della crescente ostilità verso gli omosessuali rilevata nella società italiana (Eurobarometer, 2008), il presente studio investiga le rappresentazioni stereotipiche della categoria generale e di quattro sottocategorie di maschi gay in rapporto al Modello del Contenuto degli Stereotipi (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick e Xu, 2002). Giovani stud...

Considering that the hostility toward homosexuals is widespread in Italy (Eurobarometer, 2008), the present research explored the stereotypes of the overall category as well as of different subgroups of gay men within the frame of the Stereotype content model (SCM). Participants (N = 92) rated the overall category and four subgroups on perceived wa...

The present work looks at the self-stereotyping process and reveals its underlying cognitive structure. When this process occurs, it is necessarily the result of an overlap between the representation of the ingroup and that of the self. Two studies measured this overlap and showed that it was higher on stereotype-relevant than on stereotype-irrelev...

Previous work has examined the relative valence (positivity or negativity) of ethnophaulisms (ethnic slurs) targeting European immigrants to the United States. However, this relied on contemporary judgments made by American researchers. The present study examined valence judgments made by citizens from the countries examined in previous work. Citiz...

Riassunto. L'obiettivo di questa ricerca è quello di studiare le ipotesi del Modello del Fallimento (Patterson e Capaldi, 1990), secondo il quale il comportamento antisociale produrrebbe molteplici fallimenti in diversi contesti e all'interno di differenti tipologie di relazioni, fallimenti che a loro volta sarebbero responsabili di elevati livelli...

Six studies (N = 491) investigated the inductive potential of nouns versus adjectives in person perception. In the first 5 studies, targets were either described by an adjective (e.g., Mark is homosexual) or by the corresponding noun (e.g., Mark is a homosexual) or by both (Study 3). The authors predicted and found that nouns, more so than adjectiv...

Two studies investigated the effect of stereotypes held by a prospective audience on participants' reactions to a stereotype-disconfirming member. In Study 1, participants formed an impression of a positive disconfirming gay in order to communicate it to an audience known to hold a negative versus positive stereotype about gays. As predicted, parti...

This research investigates whether derogatory group labels (fag, fairy) elicit different automatic reactions than do category labels (gay, homosexual). In a study (N = 55), involving both heterosexual and homosexual participants, the authors investigated the effects of subliminally represented derogatory versus category labels on the recognition of...

The present study addressed how individuals in high versus low need for cognition react to a persuasive message (concerning safer sexual conduct) presented either in a written format or in a comic-strip format. A control group that did not receive any persuasive message was also included. With reference to the Theory of Reasoned Action, we analyzed...

The present study investigated whether and how social consensus affects the way perceivers encode information concerning a deviant member of a stereotyped group. Participants formed an impression of a gay person described by means of both positive and negative behaviours. Participants also learned that they had to communicate their impression to an...

Nowadays, mammography is the most effective early detection screening technique, yet it remains under-utilized despite its life-saving potential. This study compared the effectiveness of two differently framed messages to promote mammography, in a sample of women of 38-69 years old. The relation between frame (gain- vs. loss-framed messages) and sa...

The present study aimed to examine whether neutral vs. derogatory labels may differ in terms of automatic evaluation. We decided to rely on the approach-avoidance task (IAAT, Castelli, Zogmaister, Smith, e Arcuri, 2004) in order to measure participants' behavioral responses towards two different classes of stimuli, namely the derogatory group label...

This study aimed at investigating whether stereotyping could be moderated by situations of accountability. In the present study all participants were solicited to form an impression about a target (a gay man) but experimental participants were also asked to communicate it to an audience: psychology students (known audience: KA) vs. other persons (u...