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Introduction
I am a postdoctoral researcher in social psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca. My main research interests focus on social exclusion, social connectedness, and belongingness among disadvantaged social groups, such as immigrants (asylum-seekers and refugees), people in jail, and homeless people. I investigate individual, social, and situational factors that influence individuals’ responses to persistent social exclusion.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (28)
The status-legitimacy hypothesis posits that low-status groups more strongly endorse social hierarchies and disadvantageous systems (i.e., engage in system justification), particularly under extreme societal inequality. Buchel et al. (2021) found supportive evidence for this hypothesis based on a 28-nation survey (N = 48,802). However, other large-...
Introduction
Empathy is a key driver of prosocial behaviors, including motivations to participate in clinical trials. Our study aimed to explore how individuals’ levels of empathy influence their intention to participate in a trial, examining scenarios where participants envision the decision for themselves (Condition 1 - “Self”) and when they cons...
This paper frames imprisonment as a form of chronic social exclusion and analyzes its impact on prisoners’ well-being, reactions, recidivism and rehabilitation. Drawing from the Temporal Need-Threat Model of Ostracism, the Multimotive Model of Interpersonal Rejection, and the literature on imprisonment, it proposes an integrative theoretical model...
Purpose-Prison officers face severe work-related stressors stemming from their interactions with detained people and the professional attitudes they enact, both of which are shaped by the prison culture's social norms. However, research neglected to investigate the role of prison social norms on officers' behaviors and well-being. This study aims t...
This research examined the association of national identity with system justification and collective action against economic inequality specifically relating to socioeconomic status (Study 1), ethnicity (Study 2) and gender (Study 3) among both disadvantaged and advantaged groups. Additionally, in Study 3, we investigated the competing predictive r...
Ostracism research has shown that even being ostracized by a computer or observing ostracism hurts. Intersecting these two standpoints with human–robot interaction (HRI) research, we conducted three preregistered experiments to investigate observers’ evaluations of vicarious robot ostracism. In Study 1 ( N = 140), people observing an excluded (vs....
The aim of this study is to evaluate whether the level of perceived choice and the frequency of use of services is associated with the perceived health of people experiencing homelessness (PEH), accounting for the possible mediating role of resignation. A convenience sample was recruited by homeless services in the Municipality of a major Italian c...
Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...
Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...
The theoretical models propose that chronic social exclusion inevitably leads individuals into a state of psychological resignation and behavioral withdrawal. After reviewing the literature addressing chronic exclusion among general and marginalized populations, we propose that the chronic exclusion–resignation link might not be inevitable and that...
Objectives:
This study aims to assess the effects of immersive Virtual Reality in people with cancer undergoing antiblastic therapy, on anxiety, fatigue and pain.
Data sources:
This is a randomized controlled three-arm trial. Seventy-four cancer patients were recruited from a regional hospital in Italy, and randomly allocated into three groups:...
Despite the relevance of social exclusion and economic inequality for homelessness, empirical studies investigating how these issues relate to homeless people's psychological well-being are scarce. We aimed to fill this gap by conducting two quasi-experimental studies on homeless and non-homeless groups. The first study (N = 200) showed that homele...
Members of disadvantaged groups sometimes support societal systems that enable the very inequalities that disadvantaged them. Is it possible to explain this puzzling system-justifying orientation in terms of rational group-interested motives, without recourse to a separate system motive? The social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA) claims...
Unlike one-time lab manipulations of exclusion, in real life, many people experience exclusion, from others and from groups, over extended periods, raising the question of whether individuals could, over time, develop hypo- or hypersensitive responses to chronic exclusion. In Study 1, we subjected participants to repeated experiences of inclusion o...
Peer status – the regard other group members have of an individual – is fundamental for youth development. Different research traditions developed independent theoretical frameworks conceiving the dimensions underlying social status, and this led to identifying a variety of peer status prototypes. In this work, we explored whether a classification...
Persistent social exclusion can detrimentally impact marginalized individuals' psychological well-being. However, little is known about the social factors that could moderate the psychological cost of social exclusion in persistently excluded social groups. Focusing on asylum-seekers, refugees, and voluntary economic immigrants, we tested if interg...
This preregistered study examined whether positive and negative intergroup contact with migrants relates to collective action supporting and opposing migrants as well as to interpersonal exclusion toward them via the key processes identified in the Social Identity Model of Collective Action. Structural equation models conducted on cross-sectional d...
Recent theoretical perspectives proposed that online social connections could benefit human well-being when face-to-face interactions are impeded. However, the literature lacks empirical tests of this proposition, especially those considering online and face-to-face interactions simultaneously. This longitudinal study (N = 1113) investigated how fa...
People usually prefer to appear with an inclusive and positive attitude to others’ eyes. For this reason, the self-report scales assessing social exclusion intentions are often biased by social desirability. In this work, we present an innovative graphical tool, named Social Exclusion Bench Tool (SEBT), for assessing social exclusion not influenced...
Actively thinking of one's future as an older individual could increase perceived risk and risk aversion. This could be particularly relevant for COVID‐19, if we consider the common representation of the risk of being infected by COVID‐19 as associated with being older. Increased perceived risk could bear consequences on the adoption of preventive...
Most countries have been struggling with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic imposing social isolation on their citizens. However, this measure carried risks for people's mental health. This study evaluated the psychological repercussions of objective isolation in 1,006 Italians during the first, especially strict, lockdown in spring 2020. Although...
Intergroup contact can be as casual as members of different groups walking past one another on the street or as intimate as developing cross-group friendships or romantic
relationships. To date, however, the majority of intergroup contact research has focused on examining the effects of contact through self-report measures of interactions and frien...
The current knowledge of the long‐term consequences of social exclusion mostly relies on theoretical assumptions. (Williams, 2009, Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol., 41, 275) hypothesized that chronic ostracism drives individuals into a stage of resignation (depression, alienation, unworthiness, helplessness). We focused on asylum seekers (N = 112) as a soci...
Social exclusion, especially when prolonged over time––has a strong impact on the individuals’ health and wellbeing. According to the Temporal Need‐Threat Model (Williams, 2009), the experience of chronic social exclusion inescapably leads to a condition of resignation, characterized by feelings of alienation, depression, helplessness, and unworthi...
Countries are tackling the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic imposing people to social isolate. However, this measure carries risks for people's mental health. This study evaluated the psychological repercussions of isolation in 1006 Italians locked down. Although varying for the regional spread-rate of the contagion, results showed that the length o...
Ethnic‐based rejection, especially when prolonged over time, can result in withdrawal (e.g., resignation) and antisocial (e.g., delinquent) behaviors. Rejection (dis)identification literature suggests that identification with the minority (ethnic) group and disidentification with the majority (national) group mediate the relationship between reject...
K. D. Williams (2009) theorized that chronic social exclusion would inescapably lead to a detrimental stage of resignation, characterized by depression, alienation, unworthiness, and helplessness. However, few studies empirically addressed this assumption. Considering immigrants as a population at risk of persistent exclusion, we investigated how s...
