Andrea Guazzini

University of Florence | UNIFI · Department of Education Literatures Intercultural studies Languages and Psychology

People are known to adjust their behavior based on social information. Starting from 2004, social media rapidly became a new social arena for human interaction, and scholars widely studied the effect of likes on people’s psyche and behavior. However, likes are just one of the possible social feedbacks among many others on social media. Moreover, so...

The use of new technologies and information communication technology services (ICTs) has greatly increased, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in an irrevocable change in people’s work-life balance (WLB). Despite the thriving literature on the dysfunctional use of new technologies, a functional use of ICTs also seems to be possible....

Starting in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has been responsible, worldwide, for millions of deaths and patients with long-COVID syndrome. In an attempt to stop the spread of the virus, the blanket administration of COVID-19 vaccines proved to be the most effective measure, yet the existence and availability of functional vaccines did not and, st...

The study examined how 807 undergraduate Italian students coped with synchronous, asynchronous, and blended learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Strengths and weaknesses of online learning were collected via an electronic platform (SurveyMonkey) and then categorized by grounded theory analysis using ATLAS.ti 8.0 software. The results...

The aim of this research was to explore Italian students’ lockdown experience during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand their emotions and the coping strategies they played out during their daily lives at home through photo diaries. The research was carried out in six Italian universities involving 109 participants. The task required each student...

Social media (SM) are the new standard for social interaction and people with OCD use such platforms like everyone else. However, the research on these individuals provides limited, sporadic, and difficult-to-generalize data outside of social-media evidence for one specific context concerning how SM is experienced by people with OCD. Our cross-sect...

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) has proven to be a technology that can benefit the dissemination of cultural content. In 2019 was the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Leonardo Da Vinci. Given the few works that develop IVR technologies to explain the genius of the master, we decided to take advantage of the opportunity to learn about the...

Online activities are a fundamental part of daily life in this digital era and Internet self-efficacy (ISE) became a central construct for the psychologists of virtual environments. The Internet Self-Efficacy Scale developed by Kim and Glassman (2013) is a recent, valid, and reliable 17-item test to assess the ISE. The aim of this research, compose...

We conducted a series of studies in order to develop a tool to assess social media capital, that is, more specifically, individual confidence in the use of social media sites and in their application to maintain and increase social capital. In our first study, we created the social media capital (SMC) scale by adapting parts of two already existing...

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought important changes to how we engage in relationships of any kind. To combat the spread of the virus, schools resorted to remote-learning, and teenagers had to rely on various technologies to meet many of the needs that they used to satisfy offline (e.g., social, informational, and recreational/leisure purposes). Thi...

Study design: Multicentric psychometric study. Objectives: The aim of this study is to introduce the development of the Sitting Balance Assessment for Spinal Cord Injury (SitBASCI) and assess its inter-rater reliability and internal consistency. Setting: The study was developed among the three Spinal Units of San Bortolo Hospital in Vicenza, N...

A systematic review of the literature investigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on psychological and psychosocial factors was completed. Published literature was examined using electronic databases to search psychosocial factors such as beliefs and media persuasion, social support, coping, risk perception, and compliance and social distanc...

Research on Phubbing has received a lot of attention in recent years from the research community. However, the studies conducted are mainly based on linear statistics, which is a very conservative method for data analysis. To overcome this limitation, we adopted a data mining and machine learning-based approach to identify the patterns related to P...

More than a year has passed since “patient 0” was found and COVID-19 is now an established reality that a lot of people have had to accept and coexist with. In Italy, the pandemic hit in “waves”, but the studies assessing the longitudinal impact of the pandemic in the general population are not many. In this paper, we compared data collected during...

Aim: Few studies in the literature specifically address the hardiness of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, the primary aim of this study was to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the hardiness levels in an Italian cohort of nurses. The secondary aims were to assess the level of hardiness in nurses directly caring for patients with COVID-19...

We investigate the influence of a recommendation system on the formation of communities in a simulated social media system.

Currently, mobile phones are widely used worldwide. Thus, phubbing rapidly became a common phenomenon in our social life. Phubbing is considered by the literature as a new form of technology-related addiction that may undermine interpersonal relationships and mental health. Our study contributed to exploring phubbers’ emotional activation as no oth...

We investigate the problem of the formation of communities of users that selectively exchange messages among them in a simulated environment. This closed community can be seen as the prototype of the bubble effect, i.e., the isolation of individuals from other communities. We develop a computational model of a society, where each individual is repr...

Together with vaccines, contact tracing systems (CTS) have proved to be one of the best strategies to deal with the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, the adoption of such systems has been quite limited in EU countries, and Italy was no exception. The present research aimed to investigate the factors drawn from the most relevant psychological mode...

The Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a tingling sensation across the scalp that occur in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli, connected with the Default Mode Network. Our study (N = 76) aimed to test the neurophysiology of ASMR by examining pupil diameter and brain activity. Assuming the idiosyncratic nature of AS...

Current technological advancements have allowed robots to be successfully employed in the healthcare sector. However, the recently acquired ability of social robots to process social information and act according to it has potentially made them very well suited to support or conduct psychological interventions. The present paper carried out a syste...

Background: Nurses, particularly emergency nurses, are among the health workers most exposed to workplace violence (WPV). Despite WPV recording systems are becoming more common, the under-reporting is still widespread. Studies suggest that the use of simple and easy registration systems could facilitate the reporting of violent events. Aim: To v...

Background: Nurses, particularly emergency nurses, are among the health workers most exposed to workplace violence (WPV). Despite WPV recording systems are becoming more common, the under-reporting is still widespread. Studies suggest that the use of simple and easy registration systems could facilitate the reporting of violent events. Aim: To veri...

The aim of this pilot, feasibility study was to assess health improvements in 16 institutionalized older people with Alzheimer's disease, after the Biodanza intervention, a nonpharmacological dance movement-based treatment. Biodanza significantly decreased agitated and neuropsychiatric behaviors. Effectiveness studies will be performed in order to...

This study investigated the phenomena of group polarisation with particular attention to the differences between offline and online settings. Polarisation is a process that leads people to develop extreme ideologies. Three hundred and seven participants were recruited and randomly assigned to different experimental conditions, i.e. antisocial and p...

The 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has drastically changed people’s lifestyles and forced them to adopt new behaviors. To assess Italians’ reported compliance to the behavioral provisions issued by the Italian Ministry of Health against the COVID-19 pandemic and identify the socio-demographic and psychological profile of a person who is more...

Following an ecological perspective, reactions to a disaster—such as the COVID-19 pandemic—should be analysed in the interdependence between individual and community dimensions. The present study aims to analyse individual emotional dimensions (anxiety, joy, fear or depressive feelings) and their community dimensions (connectedness, emotional shari...

No psychological tools have yet been developed to assess the locus of control that people experience when in the Internet environment. In a first study, we developed the Internet Locus of Control (I-LOC) Scale and validated it through a sample of 743 participants. The I-LOC consisted of 18 items revolving around two dimensions, Internal and Externa...

Investigating how much people extend “human-human interaction” rules (such as fairness) to artificial intelligence within CMC seems of great importance given the widespread presence of artificial agents in our daily lives. As to do so, we designed an experiment based on a customized version of the Ultimatum Game (UG) online in which we introduced a...

The stranger on the Internet effect has been studied in relation to self-disclosure. Nonetheless, quantitative evidence about how people mentally represent and perceive strangers online is still missing. Given the dynamic development of web technologies, quantifying how much strangers can be considered suitable for pro-social acts such as self-disc...

Technological advancement is constantly evolving, and it is also developing in the mental health field. Various applications, often based on virtual reality, have been implemented to carry out psychological assessments and interventions, using innovative human–machine interaction systems. In this context, the LEAP Motion sensing technology has rais...

This study investigated how young Italian people experienced the period of peak spread of COVID-19 in their country by probing their emotions, thoughts, events, and actions related to interpersonal and community bonds. This approach to the pandemic will highlight social dimensions that characterized contextual interactions from the specific perspec...

Background: Nurses, particularly emergency nurses, are among the health workers most exposed to workplace violence. Although reporting systems are increasingly used, under-reporting remains high. Recent studies suggest that the use of easy registration systems could facilitate violence reporting. Objectives: To verify if a friendly reporting sys...

Background: Nurses, particularly emergency nurses, are among the health workers most exposed to workplace violence. Although reporting systems are increasingly used, under-reporting remains high. Recent studies suggest that the use of easy registration systems could facilitate violence reporting. Objectives: To verify if a friendly reporting syste...

COVID-19 (Corona-Virus Disease 2019) in Italy and the measures that were adopted to contain its diffusion had a strong impact on people’s quality of life and mental health. The objective of the study was to quantify the psychological impact of the lockdown period on the general Italian population during the two weeks when the COVID-19 emergency in...

In many Western societies there are rising concerns about increasing polarization in public debate. However, statistics on private attitudes paint a different picture: the average attitudes in societies are more moderate and remain rather stable over time. The present paper presents an agent-based model of how such discrepancies between public opin...

The prolonged lockdown imposed to contain the COrona VIrus Disease 19 COVID-19 pandemic prevented many people from direct contact with nature and greenspaces, raising alarms for a possible worsening of mental health. This study investigated the effectiveness of a simple and affordable remedy for improving psychological well-being, based on audio-vi...

Psycho-social dynamics affecting online radicalisation represent a field of studies currently attracting the main attention of psychological research. In particular, the role played by the Internet in persuading people to join extremist groups, as well as the usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as information tool, can be cons...

The prolonged lockdown imposed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic prevented many people from direct contact with nature and greenspaces, raising alarms for a possible worsening of mental health. This study investigates the effectiveness of a simple and affordable remedy for improving psychological well-being, based on audio-visual stimuli brought by...

Reputational systems promote pro-social behaviors, also in virtual environments, therefore their study contributes to the knowledge of social interactions. Literature findings emphasize the power of reputation in fostering fairness in many circumstances, even when its influence is not directly oriented towards specific individuals. The present stud...

Worldwide, organizations and small and medium-sized enterprises have already disruptively changed in many ways their physiological inner mechanisms, because of information and communication technologies (ICT) revolution. Nevertheless, the still ongoing COVID-19 worldwide emergency definitely promoted a wide adoption of teleworking modalities for ma...

Humans create teams to be more successful in a large variety of tasks. Groups are characterized by an emergent property called collective intelligence, which leads them to be smarter than single individuals. Previous studies proved that collective intelligence characterizes both real and online environments, focusing on adults’ performances. In thi...

Does social media addiction impair the well-being of non-clinical individuals? Despite the Internet being able to be considered as a promoting factor for individual empowerment, previous literature suggests that the current massive availability of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) may be dangerous for users' well-being. This article...

Among the negative interactions between nurses there are the lateral dynamics, exerted between peers, within the working groups. Some authors have theorized the presence of a continuum of behaviors ranging workplace incivility up to the lateral violence, and horizontal bullying. Although these phenomena are widespread and important, currently, reac...

Introduzione La violenza sul lavoro (workplace violence - WPV) in ambito sanitario è un fenomeno di rilevanza mondiale per dimensioni e gravità. Gli infermieri di Pronto Soccorso, soprattutto durante l’attività di triage, sono tra i lavoratori più esposti. Nonostante i sistemi di registrazione (report- keepping) e monitoraggio della WPV siano sempr...

According to the Bystander Effect, the tendency to help a victim in a problematic situation decreases with the number of spectators to whom the request for help is made The main aim of this study is to investigate this phenomenon in an online environment characterised by synchronous communication. This paper evaluates how some subjective variables...

It is a fact that technologies do not have fixed effects on people. Some researches show how phenomena such as social influence and conformity appear increasingly multiform and complex, in particular, because people engage more and more in web interactions. The study of conformity in the online environment has highlighted how, to model these dynami...

Conjunction fallacy (together with other systematic reasoning errors) is usually explained in terms of the dual process theory of reasoning: Biases should be ascribed to fast and automatic processes, whereas slow and deliberative processes are responsible of producing answers that are correct with respect of normative criterion. The dual process th...

“Reputation systems” are widely used in a high number of web‐based services to enhance cooperation among users, as well as to ensure they function well. However, the acquired reputation within such systems does not always reflect people's actual behavior. Consequently, this bias can reduce the effectiveness and robustness of a web‐based system. The...

The study of conformity from a neurobiological point of view has interested many authors: among them, Shestakova and colleagues (2013) have showed how conformity can be assessed through the analysis of event related potentials (ERPs). More specifically, the P300 component of the ERP was shown to be sensitive to the behavioral adjustment that an ind...

The ability to form groups to overcome problems has been crucial for the evolution of human beings. To favour the formation of cooperating groups, one of the mechanisms developed is the inter-group bias, namely the tendency of individuals to favour members of their group and hinder the external ones. It is the cognitive equivalent of the “green bea...

We report the results of a game-theoretic experiment with human players who solve problems of increasing complexity by cooperating in groups of increasing size. Our experimental environment is set up to make it complicated for players to use rational calculation for making the cooperative decisions. This environment is directly translated into a co...

Phubbing could be defined as a new form of addiction; however, checking the phone and ignoring the speaker could also be linked to the increased availability of virtual social environments. We developed a multidimensional model for phubbing considering psychological dimensions and information and communication technology related habits. We collecte...

Background Lateral violence and bullying affect nurses’ professional and health status. Worldwide prevalence ranges from 1 to 87%. Aim To investigate prevalence and risk factors of lateral violence and bullying among Italian nurse peers in different work settings, inside and outside hospitals. Methods Web‐survey using the 17‐item ‘Negative Intera...

Online reputational systems are nowadays widely and effectively adopted by several online platforms to support and improve peoples’ interactions and communication. Despite the research approached and modeled social dynamics of reputational systems in different domains, adopting different frameworks, the role played by psycho-social factors, and per...

Research on social influence shows that different patterns take place when this phenomenon happens within computer-mediated-communication (CMC), if compared to face-to-face interaction. Informational social influence can still easily take place also by means of CMC, however normative influence seems to be more affected by the environmental characte...

The 21st century is characterized by unpredictable and changing environments that require individuals and organizations to adapt to these challenges and prepare for continuous transitions in the work environment. Optimism and hope are positive resources that are key factors in navigating this post-modern work scenario. Emotional intelligence can be...

Human social instinct often leads to better solutions than rational thinking, for the individual and the community. Can we measure the real usefulness of individual instinctive decisions within a group of humans that are collaboratively solving a problem? We designed an on-line game in which players solve problems of increasing complexity by cooper...

Background: Negative interactions among nurses are well recognized and reported in scientific literature, even because the issues may have major consequences on professional and private lives of the victims. The aim of this paper is to detect specifically the prevalence of workplace incivility (WI), lateral violence (LV) and bullying among nurses....

Collective problem-solving and decision-making, along with other forms of collaboration online, are central phenomena within ICT. There had been several attempts to create a system able to go beyond the passive accumulation of data. However, those systems often neglect important variables such as group size, the difficulty of the tasks, the tendenc...

Reputation supports pro-social behaviors in a variety of social settings and across different ages. When re-encounters are possible, developing a positive reputation can be a valuable asset that will result in better outcomes. However, in real life, cooperative acts are ambiguous and happen in noisy environments in which individuals can have multip...