Luigi Castelli

University of Padova | UNIPD · Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation

Viewing an averted gaze can elicit saccades towards the corresponding location. Here, the automaticity of this gaze-following behaviour phenomenon was further tested by exploring whether such an effect can be detected in response to briefly-presented masked averted gazes. Participants completed an oculomotor interference task consisting of making l...

Relevant individual differences can be observed in relation to parenting motives. The Parental Care and Tenderness (PCAT) scale is an important tool aimed at assessing them. We here investigated the psychometric properties of an Italian version of the scale (N = 946). The scale had a very high reliability and its internal structure closely reproduc...

Gaze cueing reflects the tendency to shift attention toward a location cued by the averted gaze of others. This effect does not fulfill criteria for strong automaticity because its magnitude is sensitive to the manipulation of different social features. Recent theoretical perspectives suggest that social modulations of gaze cueing could further cri...

Prevention measures aimed at combating COVID-19 pandemic strongly impact several aspects of social life. In particular, interpersonal perception is affected as a function of whether the persons perceived wear or not face masks. In two experimental studies, we here explored whether people rely on the presence vs. absence of face masks when encoding...

Although children are overall sensitive to inequality and prefer fair allocation of resources, they also often display ingroup favouritism. Inquiring about the factors that can shape the tension between these two driving forces in children, we focused on the role of parents. Extending the limited literature in this field, the present work examined...

Interacting with others wearing a face mask has become a regular worldwide practice since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the impact of face masks on cognitive mechanisms supporting social interaction is still largely unexplored. In the present work, we focused on gaze cueing of attention, a phenomenon tapping the essential ability...

The averted gaze of others triggers reflexive attentional orienting in the corresponding direction. This phenomenon can be modulated by many social factors. Here, we used an eye-tracking technique to investigate the role of ethnic membership in a cross-cultural oculomotor interference study. Chinese and Italian participants were required to perform...

Affiliation with others is a basic human need. The lockdown implemented for counteracting the COVID-19 pandemic has determined an unprecedented situation of social deprivation, forcing individuals to dramatically reduce face-to-face interactions. This, in turn, has caused relevant consequences on psychological well-being. However, the impact of loc...

The face of a person is an important source of communication and information especially for politicians who are continuously portrayed through media. Voters may use this information to form an impression about the candidates and several inferences may be drawn. Within this frame, research has largely investigated gender differences. One line of res...

Previous developmental research has consistently detected the presence of an explicit and implicit ingroup preference among preschoolers. More recent research has also demonstrated that this general ingroup bias is influenced by perceived social status when “real” groups are involved (i.e., groups with a previous history of interactions). Indeed, i...

We examined whether the perceived similarity between two individuals can shape social attention shifts during a joint-action task. Initially, a confederate was described to a naïve participant through a personality profile in order to manipulate the degree of attitude similarity between them, and they later performed a joint-action task involving a...

Interacting with others wearing a face mask has become a regular worldwide practice since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the impact of face masks on cognitive mechanisms supporting social interaction is still largely unexplored. In the present work we focused on gaze cueing of attention, a phenomenon tapping the essential ability...

Only recently research in social psychology has started to systematically investigate intergroup attitudes among members of stigmatized minority groups. In particular, the study of the way people with mental health problems perceive the social groups around them is so far very scarce. In this work, we focused on people with schizophrenia, analyzing...

Race-based biases appear very early in life and they can be consistently observed from about 3 years of age. It is currently still debated whether at younger ages children display a preference for their racial ingroup. In the present study, White children belonging to two age groups (i.e., 1-2 years old and 3-4 years old) were assessed in a paradig...

The gaze-cueing effect is a robust phenomenon which illustrates how attention can be shaped by social factors. In four experiments, the present study explored the interaction between the ethnic membership of the participant and that of the face providing the gaze cue. Firstly, we aimed to further investigate the differential impact of White, Black,...

Prolonged fixation can lead to the generation of tiny and fast eye movements called microsaccades, whose dynamics can be associated with higher cognitive mechanisms. Saccade preparation is also reflected in microsaccadic activity, but the few studies on this topic provided mixed results. For instance, fewer microsaccades have been observed when par...

Humans tend to perform reflexive saccades according to the eye-gaze direction of other individuals. Here, in two experiments, we tested whether preparing a saccade before the onset of a task-irrelevant averted-gaze stimulus can abolish this form of gaze-following behavior. At the beginning of each trial, participants received the instruction to pre...

Background and aims: Many psychopathologies, including addictions, are characterized by inhibitory control deficits. In this regard, recent studies on substance-related disorders (SRD) have shown an impairment in the ability to inhibit potentially interfering memories, despite preserved motor inhibition. To investigate whether the same dissociatio...

Humans tend to shift attention according to others’ eye-gaze direction. This is a core ability as it permits to create pervasive relationships among individuals and with the environment around them. In the beginning, this form of social orienting was considered a reflexive phenomenon, but in recent years evidence has shown that it is also permeable...

Establishing eye contact with an individual can subsequently lead to a stronger gaze-mediated orienting effect. However, studies exploring this phenomenon have, so far, only assessed manual responses and focused on covert attention – namely, without eye movements. Here, in two experiments, we explored for the first time whether eye contact can also...

Research suggests that morality, sociability, and competence exert different effects on impression formation and that morality forms the primary basis for the global evaluation of others. However, prior work has almost exclusively focused on "first" impressions, overlooking that social interactions require flexible updating of initial evaluations....

Microsaccade frequency has recently been shown to be sensitive to high-level cognitive processes such as attention and memory. In the present study we explored the effects of anticipated cognitive conflict. Participants were administered a variant of the flanker task, which is known to elicit cognitive interference. At the beginning of each trial,...

Increasing evidence suggests that individuals are highly sensitive to self-related stimuli. Here, we report two experiments conducted to assess whether two schematic stimuli, arbitrarily associated with either the self or a stranger, can shape attention holding in an oculomotor task. In both experiments, participants firstly completed a manual matc...

A lack of empathy, interpersonal dominance, aggression and the exploitation of others are the key features of both narcissism and psychopathic disorders. With the aim to better capture the shared facets of these traits, this study developed a new tool named the Capability to Influence Others (CIO) Inventory, which is based on the pleasantness evalu...

Introduction: Recent studies have suggested that patients suffering from either anorexia nervosa (AN) or bulimia nervosa (BN) exhibit abnormal performance in the ability to control cognitive interference in response selection. Method: We assessed the status of cognitive control in episodic memory by addressing the ability to inhibit interfering...

Manual response times to peripherally presented targets have been reported to be greater in the presence of task-irrelevant pictorial faces at fixation which establish an eye contact with the observer. This effect is interpreted as evidence that direct-gaze faces hold attention. In three experiments, we investigated whether this attention-holding e...

Background: Social cognition is severely impaired in schizophrenia. Emotion processing, attributional biases, and theory of mind are often impaired, as well as the understanding of shared social knowledge. So far, little is known about stereotype knowledge and endorsement in schizophrenia. Sampling and methods: White patients with schizophrenia...

Substance-related and addictive disorders have been strongly linked to inhibitory control impairment. However, inhibitory deficits in this class of psychiatric disorders have been tested almost exclusively with measures of inhibition of motor, overt behavior. Here, instead, we investigated inhibitory deficits in these disorders by assessing the int...

Microsaccades are tiny eye movements that individuals perform unconsciously during fixation. Despite that the nature and the functions of microsaccades are still lively debated, recent evidence has shown an association between these micro eye movements and higher order cognitive processes. Here, in two experiments, we specifically focused on workin...

Saccades are known to deviate away from distractors, and the amplitude of this deviation seems to reflect the salience of these stimuli, as in the case of human faces. Here, we investigated whether eye contact can modulate attention allocation by examining saccadic curvature when faces with closed vs. open eyes act as distractors. In two experiment...

Research on adult populations has widely investigated the deep differences that characterize individuals who embrace either conservative or liberal views of the world. More recently, research has started to investigate these differences at very early stages of life. One major goal is to explore how parental political ideology may influence children...

This article deals with the theme of innovation in academic didactic through the use of technologies and is one of the outputs of a larger project, "Preparazione alla professionalitŕ docente e innovazione didattica" (PRODID), which aims to establish and develop strategies to support teaching profession at the University of Padua. The authors introd...

Humans typically exhibit a tendency to follow the gaze of conspecifics, a social attention behaviour known as gaze cueing. Here, we addressed whether episodically learned social knowledge about the behaviours performed by the individual bearing the gaze can influence this phenomenon. In a learning phase, different faces were systematically associat...

Recent research revealed that political conservatives and liberals differ in the processing of valenced information. In particular, conservatives (vs. liberals) tend to weigh negative information more than positive information in their perception of the physical and social world. In the present work, we further investigated the ideology-based asymm...

The capacity to devote attentional resources in response to body-related signals provided by others is still largely unexplored in individuals with Anorexia Nervosa (AN). Here, we tested this capacity through a novel paradigm that mimics a social interaction with a real partner. Healthy individuals (Experiment 1) and individuals with AN (Experiment...

Gaze cuing of attention is a well established phenomenon consisting of the tendency to shift attention to the location signaled by the averted gaze of other individuals. Evidence suggests that such phenomenon might follow intrinsic object-centered features of the head containing the gaze cue. In the present exploratory study, we aimed to investigat...

Two experiments were aimed at investigating whether the implementation of voluntary saccades in White participants could be modulated more strongly by gaze distractors embedded in White versus Black faces. Participants were instructed to make a rightward or leftward saccade, depending on a central directional cue. Saccade direction could be either...

It is known that an averted gaze can trigger shifts of attention in an observer, a phenomenon known as gaze-cuing effect. Recently, Dodd et al. (Atten Percept Psychophys 73:24–29, 2011) have reported a reliable gaze- cuing effect for liberals but not for conservatives. The present study tested whether this result is gaze-specific or extends over no...

Previous research has shown that human adults and children personally endorse egalitarian behaviours and reward individuals who display them. In an experimental study we explored this latter effect among children. In particular, we assessed how children evaluate unselfish in-group members who distribute all their resources to two targets in either...

Previous research has consistently shown a preference for the racial in-group among very young White children. The goal of the present study (N = 72, age from 36 to 60 months) was to investigate the generality of these attitudes. To this end, we assessed the attitudes toward both Black and Asian children and results supported the idea of early gene...

Research has demonstrated that people who embrace different ideological orientations often show differences at the level of basic cognitive processes. For instance, conservatives (vs. liberals) display an automatic selective attention for negative (vs. positive) stimuli, and tend to more easily form illusory correlations between negative informatio...

Fixating someone suddenly moving the eyes is known to trigger a corresponding shift of attention in the observer. This phenomenon, known as gaze-cueing effect, can be modulated as a function of the social status of the individual depicted in the cueing face. Here, in two experiments, we investigated the temporal dynamics underlying this modulation....

Objective: The nature of possible impairments in orienting attention to social signals in schizophrenia is controversial. The present research was aimed at addressing this issue further by comparing gaze and arrow cues. Unlike previous studies, we also included pointing gestures as social cues, with the goal of addressing whether any eventual impa...

Inspired by an incident that happened some years ago during the Italian elections, the current research investigated the effects of a specific case of negative campaigning: attacks against the electorate of the opposite party. Participants were presented with an alleged candidate of the opposing party and several statements that he ostensibly said...

Using the event-related potential (ERP) approach, we tracked the time-course of white participants’ empathic reactions to white (own-race) and black (other-race) faces displayed in a painful condition (i.e. with a needle penetrating the skin) and in a nonpainful condition (i.e. with Q-tip touching the skin). In a 280–340 ms time-window, neural resp...

Presents a taxonomy of some of the main prejudice measures available to social psychologists, the decision dilemma regularly faced by researchers when selecting these measures, the need for a consideration of both situational and personality variables in the selection process, and open problems in the field. Measures discussed include traditional s...

During political races, candidates have to decide how to deal with the negative remarks from opposing candidates: just ignore or counterattack? In two studies, we investigated some of the consequences of this choice. In Study 1, participants were presented with a political candidate who systematically attacked his opponent and with the reactions of...

Attitudes are often shaped through social influence processes. We examined how observation of nonverbal behaviors can impact on implicit and explicit racial attitudes. In Study 1, participants observed an interracial interaction in which a White actor expressed friendly or unfriendly nonverbal behaviors toward a Black target (e.g., low eye contact,...

Recent studies have tried to shed light on the automaticity of attentional shifts triggered by gaze and arrows with mixed results. In the present research, we aimed at testing a strong definition of resistance to suppression for orienting of attention elicited by these two cues. In five experiments, participants were informed with 100% certainty ab...

In the present paper, relying on event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we investigated the automatic nature of gender categorization focusing on different stages of the ongoing process. In particular, we explored the degree to which gender categorization occurs automatically by manipulating the semantic vs. nonsemantic processing goals requested b...

Humans tend to shift attention in response to the averted gaze of a face they are fixating, a phenomenon known as gaze cuing. In the present paper, we aimed to address whether the social status of the cuing face modulates this phenomenon. Participants were asked to look at the faces of 16 individuals and read fictive curriculum vitae associated wit...

Research has widely explored the differences between conservatives and liberals, and it has been also recently demonstrated that conservatives display different reactions toward valenced stimuli. However, previous studies have not yet fully illuminated the cognitive underpinnings of these differences. In the current work, we argued that political i...

Additional explorative analysis of Experiment 3. (DOC)

Description of the questionnaire and the related statistical analyses. (DOC)

Viewing a face with averted gaze results in a spatial shift of attention in the corresponding direction, a phenomenon defined as gaze-mediated orienting. In the present paper, we investigated whether this effect is influenced by social factors. Across three experiments, White and Black participants were presented with faces of White and Black indiv...

Ideological orientation shapes the perception of the social world and conservatism is associated to an increased weighting of negative over positive information. In the present work we explored how this ideology-based difference is also related to basic cognitive processes involved in attitude formation. In particular, we hypothesized that conserva...

We tested the ability of white participants to encode and retain over a brief period of time information about the identity of white and black people, using faces as stimuli in a standard change detection task and tracking neural activity using electroencephalography. Neural responses recorded over the posterior parietal cortex reflecting visual wo...

Il presente contributo si propone di analizzare la trasmissione degli stereotipi di genere all'interno dell'ambito familiare, considerando la relazione tra gli stereotipi impliciti (misurati con uno IAT) di entrambi i genitori e gli stereotipi di genere dei loro figli, rilevati sia a livello implicito che esplicito. Allo studio hanno partecipato 66...

Viene presentato l'adattamento italiano della misura quadri-fattoriale della motivazione a bere alcoolici (DMQ-R) proposta da Cooper (1994), sulla base del modello concettuale di Cox e Klinger (1988). Usando i dati di due campioni di adolescenti (N = 282) e giovani universitari (N = 238) e la tecnica dell'analisi fattoriale confermativa, viene forn...

People perceive and organise their social world on the basis of their previous semantic knowledge as well as on the basis of their emotional responses. We tested the hypothesis that emotional response categorisation, namely the tendency to group stimuli on the basis of the emotion they evoke, increases across the lifespan. Young and older adults we...

In the last decades there has been a growing interest in the measurement of implicit attitudes among adults. Research suggests that automatic components can be strong predictors of specific spontaneous behaviors. More recently, implicit attitude measures have also been adapted to investigate developmental aspects and we will review the existing lit...

According to a social cognitive perspective, stereotypes have been defined as cognitive structures that contain the perceiver's knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about social groups (Hamilton & Trolier, 1986). Perceivers regularly rely on stereotypes to simplify the complex social environment and quickly make sense of the social world. Because o...

The Italian adaptation of the four-factor measure of drinking motives (DMQ-R) proposed by Cooper (1994), based on a conceptual model by Cox & Klinger (1988) is presented. Based on data from two Italian samples of adolescents (N = 282) and young university students (N = 238), and on the technique of confirmatory factor analysis, substantial support...

Previous research demonstrated that individuals spontaneously prefer ingroup members who display ingroup favoritism rather than egalitarian behaviors (Castelli, Tomelleri, & Zogmaister, 2008). In the current work, we explored what specific strategies toward ingroup favoritism are spontaneously preferred. Results from four studies showed that ingrou...

It is often assumed that implicit evaluations are influenced by early childhood experiences, whereas explicit evaluations reflect recent experiences. However, previous findings supporting this assumption remain ambiguous as to whether the differential effects of early versus recent experiences are driven by their temporal distance or their affectiv...

Despite the widespread use of negative campaigns, research has not yet provided unambiguous conclusions about their effects. So far studies, however, have mainly focused on very explicit measures. The main goal of the present work was to explore the effects of different types of negative campaigns on both implicit and explicit attitudes, as well as...

The current research investigated the effects of negative as compared to positive person-based political campaigns on explicit and implicit evaluations of the involved candidates. Participants were presented with two political candidates and statements that one of them ostensibly said during the last political campaign. For half of the participants...

a b s t r a c t Previous research demonstrated that inferences of competence from the face are good predictors of elec-toral outcomes [Todorov, A., Mandisoza, A. N., Gore, A., & Hall, C. C. (2005). Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science, 308, 1623–1626]. In the current work we examined the role of another key dimensi...

Interpersonal dynamics may play a crucial role in the perpetuation of stereotypes. In an experimental study, participants interacted with a confederate who provided either stereotype-consistent or stereotype-inconsistent descriptions about the elderly. Based on the assumption that mimicry represents a social glue that fosters interpersonal liking a...

The perception of similarity between voters and politicians deeply affects political judgments. In the present work we investigated how voters may selectively attempt to increase their perceived similarity with liked political leaders by means of projection processes. In two studies, participants had to guess the month of birth of several politicia...