Andrea Gaggioli

Catholic University of the Sacred Heart | UNICATT · Department of Psychology

Ubiquitous computing technologies offer exciting new possibilities for monitoring and analyzing user’s experience in real time. In this paper, we describe the design and development of Psychlog, a mobile phone platform designed to collect users’ psychological, physiological, and activity information for mental health research. The tool allows admin...

Until now, information and communication technologies have been mostly conceived as a mean to support human activities – communication, productivity, leisure. However, as the sophistication of digital tools increases, researchers are starting to consider their potential role in supporting the fullfilment of higher human needs, such as self-actualiz...

More and more of our daily activities depend on some kind of inter-active device or digital service. Furthermore, the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is not limited to the long hours that we spend at the office. Computers and other digital devices have become regular companions in our daily lives, but have they made us any...

The recent model of Networked flow (NF) mapped out factors underlying optimal creative collaboration in blended spaces (physical and digital). NF conceives creativity as an evolving network bridging material and symbolic resources of the creative collaboration process at both inter and the intra-group levels. First, this model posits that optimal g...

Awe, a complex emotion composed by the appraisal components of vastness and need for accommodation, is a profound and often meaningful experience. Despite its importance, psychologists have only recently begun empirical study of awe. At the experimental level, a main issue concerns how to elicit high intensity awe experiences in the lab. To address...

Cutting-edge tools such as ChatGPT can greatly increase research effectiveness and productivity, but it is crucial to document their appropriate use

As ubiquitous technology is increasingly mediating our relationships with the world and others, we argue that the sublime is struggling to find room in product design primarily aimed at commercial and transactional goals such as speed and efficiency. We suggest a new category of products to promote deeper and more meaningful experiences, specifical...

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...

Personal change is generally considered as a gradual and linear process, which occurs either as a result of maturation over the lifespan or as the result of a therapeutic interventions. However, research from different disciplines – including anthropology, philosophy and psychology – suggests the existence of a second type of change – transformativ...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest towards the potential hybridation of digital and physical spaces, an emerging technology paradigm also known as "phygital". Enabled by the convergence of virtual/augmented/mixed/extended reality, mobile tools, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, the growing symbiosis between human space...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest towards the potential hybridation of digital and physical spaces, an emerging technology paradigm also known as "phygital". Enabled by the convergence of virtual/augmented/mixed/extended reality, mobile tools, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, the growing symbiosis between human space...

Since Mark Zuckerberg's announcement about the development of new three-dimensional virtual worlds for social communication, a great debate has been raised about the promise of such a technology. The metaverse, a term formed by combining meta and universe, could open a new era in mental health, mainly in psychological disorders, where the creation...

In a society where advances and innovations occur on a daily basis, outreach and meaningful engagement with the general public become more challenging. The amount of information produced and repackaged surpasses existing systems in place to ensure truthful and factual engagement with the public, especially with complex matters regarding health scie...

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...

Background: The transformative storytelling technique is an innovative top-down approach to narrative therapy that aims to provide building blocks for creating flourishing narratives for target groups or populations. This approach acts as a facilitator for implementing the human-centered design in developing digital self-help tools for larger sampl...

Mindfulness is one of the most popular psychotherapeutic techniques that help to promote good mental and physical health. Combining mindfulness with immersive virtual reality (VR) has been proven to be especially effective for a wide range of mood disorders for which traditional mindfulness has proven valuable. However, the vast majority of immersi...

Cognitive frailty is defined as a clinical condition characterized by both physical frailty and cognitive impairment, without reaching the criteria for dementia. The major goal of rehabilitation intervention is to assist patients in performing ordinary personal duties without the assistance of another person, or at the very least to remove the need...

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...

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...

The paper, based on an experiment in which human subjects are paired with either another human or an anthropomorphic robot, when playing an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, investigates whether (and how) the level of mental state attributed to an anthropomorphic robot by subjects depends on the the “earnestness” of the robot, i.e. the correspondence of...

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...

BACKGROUND The Transformative Storytelling Technique is an innovative top-down approach to narrative therapy that aims to provide building blocks for creating flourishing narratives for target groups or populations. This approach acts as a facilitator for implementing the human-centred design in developing digital self-help tools for larger samples...

Background: The Transformative Storytelling Technique is an innovative top-down approach to narrative therapy that aims to provide building blocks for creating flourishing narratives for target groups or populations. This approach acts as a facilitator for implementing the human-centred design in developing digital self-help tools for larger sample...

p class="Abstract"> Developing automatic methods to measure psychological stress in everyday life has become an important research challenge. Here, we describe the design and implementation of a personalized mobile system for the detection of psychological stress episodes based on Heart-Rate Variability (HRV) indices. The system’s architecture cons...

The Metaverse can be defined as a hybrid (digital/physical) environment offering places for rich user interaction. In this view, the main feature of the Metaverse is a twofold link between the virtual and physical worlds: (a) behavior in the physical world influences the experience in the virtual one and, (b) behavior in the virtual world influence...

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...

The increase of People with Dementia (PwD) living at home underscores the need for innovative eHealth technologies that support both patients and informal caregivers (IC). Sustainable implementation of eHealth technologies within this target group can, however, be difficult. Our study aims at providing an overview of (1) technologies employed in th...

Background: The worldwide increase in community-dwelling people with dementia underscores the need for innovative eHealth technologies that aim to provide support to both patients and their informal caregivers in the home setting. However, sustainable implementation of eHealth technologies within this target group can be difficult. Objective: Th...

This research project has the goal to verify whether the application of neuromarketing techniques, such as implicit association test (IAT) techniques and emotional facial expressions analyses may contribute to the assessment of user experience (UX) during and after website navigation. These techniques have been widely and positively applied in asse...

Objective: This review paper examines the concept of vulnerability in the overall literature and its relation to informal caregivers. Vulnerability is frequently associated with the sense of being at risk of harm instead of being acknowledged as a human trait to embrace. Taking a cue from two well-known videos of Brene Brown on how to enact "vulner...

The investigation of emerging adults' expectations of development of the next generation of robots is a fundamental challenge to narrow the gap between expectations and real technological advances, which can potentially impact the effectiveness of future interactions between humans and robots. Furthermore, the literature highlights the important ro...

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...

Background: The COVID-19 lockdown could engender disruption to lifestyle behaviors, thus impairing mental wellbeing in the general population. This study investigated whether sociodemographic variables, changes in physical activity, and sleep quality from pre- to during lockdown were predictors of change in mental wellbeing in quarantined older ad...

The existing interventions for informal caregivers assist with managing health outcomes of the role burden. However, the deeper meaning-making needs of informal caregivers have been generally neglected. This paper reflects on the meaning-making needs of informal caregivers, through the theory of narrative identity, and proposes a new approach – the...

The existing interventions for informal caregivers assist with managing health outcomes of the role burden. However, the deeper meaning-making needs of informal caregivers have been generally neglected. This paper reflects on the meaning-making needs of informal caregivers, through the theory of narrative identity, and proposes a new approach – the...

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

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...

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...

(1) Background: The COVID-19 pandemic forced people from all around the globe to strongly modify their daily routines, putting a significant strain on the social aspects of daily lives. While the first wave of the pandemic was a very challenging time in all countries, it is still uncertain whether various lockdown intensities and infection rates di...

The goal of this large-scale study was to test the relationship between positive emotion dis-positions (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...

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...

La scuola rappresenta il luogo principe della crescita culturale e civile delle future generazioni. Ma qual è il suo ruolo nella promozione del benessere degli alunni e degli insegnanti? Il volume affronta questa domanda attraverso l’introduzione di un approccio innovativo – l’Educazione Positiva Integrata – che offre una serie di strumenti didatti...

Social welfare is riddled with ingrained problems that have already defeated all standard approaches, and reform calls for counterintuitive action. Digital Social Innovation (DSI) is primarily about promoting grassroots initiatives to address localized societal problems and is not normally talked about in relation to welfare reform, but perhaps soc...

In this contribution, we introduce the concept of Positive Innovation Networks (PINs) as a framework to understand the processes of co-creation and open collaboration involved in digital social innovation. Drawing on positive psychology, an emerging field focused on the empirical investigation of optimal human functioning, we deconstruct two assets...

A promising field of application to analyze and better comprehend the impact of the flow concept is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), in that the analysis and the design of computer interfaces pose notable challenges to its application. For example, in which cases the experience of flow should be promoted in the users, and in which other cases it s...

The existing interventions for caregivers address concrete issues arising from the caregiving role, neglecting the deeper meaning-making needs of informal caregivers. The TVD technique proposed in this study aims to provide directions for helping caregivers self-manage stress and maintain wellbeing within the caregiving context by facilitating a me...

The emerging convergence of new technologies and health care is offering a new approach to support effective interventions. This chapter aims to describe how Positive Technology can help people cope with stress in several contexts. On the one hand, the potential capacity of sensor technologies to offer individuals the technology with which to monit...

Symptoms of psychological distress and disorder have been widely reported in people under quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic; in addition to severe disruption of peoples' daily activity and sleep patterns. This study investigates the association between physical-activity levels and sleep patterns in quarantined individuals. An international Go...

Brain science research often involves the use of low-dimensional tools and stimuli that lack several of the potentially valuable features of everyday activities and interactions. Although this research has provided important information about cognitive, affective, and social processes for both clinical and nonclinical populations, there is growing...

The aim of this paper is to present an innovative tablet-based application with 360° videos for the motor rehabilitation of frail elderly, Bal-App. This app was developed for iPad and exploits the potentiality of 360° videos to improve bal-ance in frail patients throught several exercises with an increasing level of difficulty. The app includes 10...

Background Public health recommendations and government measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have enforced restrictions on daily-living. While these measures are imperative to abate the spreading of COVID-19, the impact of these restrictions on mental health and emotional wellbeing is undefined. Therefore, an international online survey (ECLB-COVI...

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...

Recent years have seen a growing research interest towards designing computer-assisted health interventions aiming to improve mental health services. Digital technologies are becoming common methods for diagnosis, therapy, and training. With the advent of lower-cost VR head-mounted-displays (HMDs) and high internet data transfer capacity, there is...

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...

Informal care is described in the literature as a chronic stress experience, leading to numerous health issues and overall adverse health outcomes. Ongoing mental health interventions for caregivers provide a variety of skills and education according to the care recipient’s chronic condition, as a means for helping caregivers cope with the role. Th...

Public health recommendations and governmental measures during the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic have enforced numerous restrictions on daily living including social distancing, isolation, and home confinement. While these measures are imperative to mitigate spreading of COVID-19, the impact of these restrictions on psychosocial healt...

Although recognised as effective measures to curb the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak, social distancing and self-isolation have been suggested to generate a burden throughout the population. To provide scientific data to help identify risk factors for the psychosocial strain during the COVID-19 outbreak, an international cross-disciplinary online...