Michela Sarlo

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Verified

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• PhD Cognitive Sciences
• Associate Professor at University of Urbino

Objectives The present study aims to investigate the role that cognitive cerebellar lobules, compared to the motor ones, could have on performance abilities control in older individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Methods Thirty-six participants with MCI were retrospectively recruited from the outpatient clinic for Cognitive Decline and...

Research on the cerebellum and its functional organization has significantly expanded over the last decades, expanding our comprehension of its role far beyond motor control, including critical contributions to cognition and affective processing. Notably, the cerebellar lateralization mirrors contralateral brain lateralization, a complex phenomenon...

Sexuality is a fundamental part of human existence and it encompasses thoughts, desires, behaviors, relationships, as well as neuropsychological and physiological components. However, sexuality in older adults is under-researched from the neuropsychological and psychophysiological perspectives and is often neglected by healthcare providers in the c...

Background Making timely moral decisions can save a life. However, literature on how moral decisions are made under time pressure reports conflicting results. Moreover, it is unclear whether and how moral choices under time pressure may be influenced by personality traits like impulsivity and sensitivity to reward and punishment. Methods To addres...

Perspective‐taking (PT) accessibility has been recognized as an important factor in affecting moral reasoning, also playing a non‐trivial role in moral investigation towards autonomous vehicles (AVs). A new proposal to deepen this effect leverages the principles of the veil of ignorance (VOI), as a moral reasoning device aimed to control self‐inter...

Distortions of duration perception are often observed in response to highly arousing stimuli, but the exact mechanisms that evoke these variations are still under debate. Here, we investigate the effect of induced physiological arousal on time perception. Thirty-eight university students (22.89 ± 2.5; 28 females) were tested with spontaneous finger...

In the investigation of moral judgments of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the paradigm of the sacrificial dilemma is a widespread and flexible experimental tool. In this context, the sacrifice of the AV’s passenger typically occurs upon enactment of the utilitarian option, which differs from traditional sacrificial dilemmas, in which the moral agent’s...

The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis, preregistered with PROSPERO, was to investigate empirical evidence about the effectiveness of Information and Communication Technology-based interventions (ICTs) on different psychological outcomes in adults aged over 60 years with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia. We conducted a s...

Emotion regulation (ER) strategies can influence how affective predictions are constructed by the brain (generation stage) to prearrange action (implementation stage) and update internal models according to incoming stimuli (updating stage). However, neurocomputational mechanisms by which this is achieved are unclear. We investigated through high-d...

In a recent study we outlined the link between Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) and the neural correlates of affective predictions, as constructed by the brain (generation stage) to prepare to relevant stimuli (implementation stage), and update predictive models according to incoming stimuli (updating stage). In this study we further explored whethe...

Background and Aims: Quality of life (QoL) is described as the individual’s perception of life in relation to the cultural context and value system in which they live, and their objectives, expectations and interests. The aim of the present study is to investigate the perceptions of QoL on the part of patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) o...

The growing interest in the subject of moral judgment in driver and autonomous vehicle behavior highlights the importance of investigating the suitability of sacrificial dilemmas as experimental tools in the context of traffic psychology. To this aim a set of validated sacrificial trolley problems and a new set of trolley-like driving dilemmas were...

Moral decision-making depends on the interaction between emotional and cognitive control processes, which are also affected by sleep. Here we aimed to assess the potential role of sleep in the modulation of moral decisions over time by testing the change in behavioral responses to moral dilemmas over time (1 week). Thirty-five young adults were tes...

The aim of the present study was to investigate (a) the neural correlates of a love induction task (LIT) including listening to love-related songs and thinking about the romantic relationship, and (b) the effects of romantic love on the emotional processing of love-unrelated stimuli during a passive viewing task. The EEG was recorded in two groups...

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) can influence emotional predictions, constructed by the brain (generation stage) to prearrange action (implementation stage), and update internal models according to incoming stimuli (updating stage). However, neurocomputational mechanisms by which IU affects emotional predictions are unclear. This high-density EEG s...

Emotions were recently reconsidered as predictions, constructed by the brain (generation stage) to prearrange action (implementation stage), and update internal models according to incoming stimuli (updating stage). However, it is unclear how emotional predictions are shaped by stimuli predictability. This study investigated the role of stimuli pre...

Background: Adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with high comorbidity with other psychiatric diseases, including cocaine use disorder (CocUD). Given the common fronto-striatal dysfunction, ADHD patients often use cocaine as self-medication for ameliorating symptoms by increasing striatal dopamine release. Yet, comorb...

On March 9, 2020, Italy has gone into “lockdown” because of COVID-19 pandemic, with a national quarantine. All non-essential working activities and schools of all levels have been temporarily closed: consequently, the entire population have been forced to dramatically change their daily habits. The pandemic raised important psychological, moral, so...

Sleep is considered the optimal state to consolidate hippocampal-dependent memories. A particular memory process is mnemonic discrimination. Mnemonic discrimination refers to the ability to differentiate between novel and previously encountered information. Previous studies have found that mnemonic discrimination is impaired by sleep deprivation, w...

According to international recommendations, young adults should sleep at least 7 h per night and experience good sleep quality to avoid physical and mental health problems. University students are particularly exposed to the risk of sleep issues due to their tendency to go to bed late at night and other social and environmental factors. Here, we ai...

Starting from the evidence that complex tasks (e.g., driving) require lots of cognitive resources, this research aims at assessing the change of attentional electrophysiological correlates during an oddball task performed while driving a simulator. Twenty-four participants drove along six courses on a moped simulator, preceded by a baseline conditi...

In recent years, conflicting findings have been reported in the scientific literature about the influence of dopaminergic, serotonergic and oxytocinergic gene variants on moral behavior. Here, we utilized a moral judgment paradigm to test the potential effects on moral choices of three polymorphisms of the Oxytocin receptor (OXTR): rs53576, rs22684...

Background: Sleep disturbance is a prominent and common complaint in people with cocaine use disorder (CUD), either during intake or withdrawal. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has shown promise as a treatment for CUD. Thus, we evaluated the relationship between self-perceived sleep quality and cocaine use pattern variables in...

Sleep is crucial for the proper functioning of bodily systems and for cognitive and emotional processing. Evidence indicates that sleep is vital for health, well-being, mood, and performance. Consumer sleep technologies (CSTs), such as multisensory wearable devices, have brought attention to sleep and there is growing interest in using CSTs in rese...

Background: Cocaine is a psychostimulant drug used as performance enhancer throughout history. The prolonged use of cocaine is associated with addiction and a broad range of cognitive deficits. Currently, there are no medications proven to be effective for cocaine-use disorder (CocUD). Previous preliminary clinical work suggests some benefit from r...

Suicide and neuroticism: a multicenter study

Objective: The aim of this multicenter study was to investigate the differences in personality traits, particularly Neuroticism, in three clinical samples and three student samples in Austria and Italy and their impact on suicide. Methods: In total, 1,043 people (410 psychiatric inpatients and 633 university students) were tested in three region...

Wearable sensors are promising instruments for conducting both laboratory and ambulatory research in psychophysiology. However, scholars should be aware of their measurement error and the conditions in which accuracy is achieved. This study aimed to assess the accuracy of a wearable sensor designed for research purposes, the E4 wristband (Empatica,...

The field of suicide prevention has been enriched by research on the association between spirituality and suicide. Many authors have suggested focusing on the various dimensions of religiosity in order to better understand the association between religion and suicidal risk, but it is unclear whether the relationship between spirituality and suicida...

A growing literature suggests that problematic Internet use (PIU) is associated with defective inhibitory control. In this study, we sought to investigate the ability to inhibit prepotent motor responses in an emotional context in individuals with PIU, and to examine the relationship between inhibitory control and resting heart rate variability (HR...

The present study investigated cognitive reappraisal during exposure to vegetarian and nonvegetarian food cues in food-deprived vegetarian and omnivore participants. In particular, we were interested in clarifying the motivational meaning of the foods that vegetarians avoid, as revealed by self-reported food craving, valence, and arousal, as well a...

The present study was aimed at investigating whether and how the explicit representation of the decision outcome, framed in terms of lives saved or lost, could affect decision choices, emotional experience, and decision times in the course of a moral dilemma task. Decision outcomes were framed in a between-group design by means of smiling (POS grou...

Although there is a wide consensus on how sleep processes declarative memories, how sleep affects emotional memories remains elusive. Moreover, studies assessing the long-term effect of sleep on emotional memory consolidation are scarce. Studies testing subclinical populations characterized by REM abnormalities are also lacking. Here we aimed to (i...

The present study aimed at investigating the impact of cultural conventions about food-drink pairings on subjective, behavioral, and neural responses to pictures of food with different rewarding properties (i.e., meat, pizza, and dessert). Viewing times, subjective ratings of appetite, valence and arousal, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were m...

The present research is aimed at investigating processes associated with learning how to drive safely. We were particularly interested in implicit mechanisms related to the automatic processing system involved in decision making in risky situations (Slovic et al., 2007). The operation of this system is directly linked to experiential and emotional...

Background Sleep has a crucial role in physical and mental health across the lifespan. In addition to an excessive intrusive sleep‐related cognitive activity, another factor that may influence sleep quality in old age is sleep‐related metacognitive activity, such as metacognitive beliefs about sleeping difficulties, and night‐time thought control s...

In the context of colorectal cancer screening, we aimed to compare the effectiveness of different emotion-laden narratives, to investigate the specific emotions elicited at both subjective and physiological levels, and to test the effects of emotions explicitly expressed by the narrative character. Study 1 used a between-participants design compari...

Excel file with data from Studies 1 and 2. (XLSX)

Narratives. Narratives used in Study 2 (translated from Italian). The text reported here in Italics was shown only in the condition with expressed emotions (EE). (DOCX)

Invitation letter and information leaflet. Invitation letter and information leaflet adapted from (translated from Italian). (DOCX)

Baseline randomization checks for Study 2. (DOCX)

Baseline randomization checks for Study 1. (DOCX)

Nei dilemmi morali “sacrificali” si deve decidere se provocare la morte di una persona per salvarne un numero maggiore. Nei dilemmi Strumentali la morte del singolo è utilizzata come mezzo per salvare le persone in pericolo, mentre nei dilemmi Incidentali è una conseguenza prevista ma non intenzionale. Secondo il modello del doppio processo, nei di...

Moral decision-making depends on the interaction between automatic emotional responses and rational cognitive control. A natural emotional regulator state seems to be sleep, in particular rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. We tested the impact of daytime sleep, either with or without REM, on moral decision. Sixty participants were presented with 12 sa...

Moral behavior has been a key topic of debate for philosophy and psychology for a long time. In recent years, thanks to the development of novel methodologies in cognitive sciences, the question of how we make moral choices has expanded to the study of neurobiological correlates that subtend the mental processes involved in moral behavior. For inst...

Examples of moral dilemmas administered to the subjects enrolled in the study.

Contrary to other phobias, individuals with blood phobia do not show a clear-cut withdrawal disposition from the feared stimulus. The study of response inhibition provides insights into reduced action disposition in blood phobia. Twenty individuals with and 20 without blood phobia completed an emotional go/no-go task including phobia-related pictur...

Based on the dual-process theory of moral judgment, it has been suggested that in Footbridge-type dilemmas the anticipation of the emotional consequences of causing intentional harm might contribute to the decision of rejecting utilitarian resolutions. However, no empirical data have been reported on the emotions felt by participants after their de...

Hazard perception is considered one of the most important abilities in road safety. Several efforts have been devoted to investigating how it improves with experience and can be trained. Recently, research has focused on the implicit aspects of hazard detection, reaction, and anticipation. In the present study, we attempted to understand how the ab...

Hazard perception is considered one of the most important abilities in road safety. Several efforts have been devoted to investigating how it improves with experience and can be trained. Recently, research has focused on the implicit aspects of hazard detection, reaction, and anticipation. In the present study, we attempted to understand how the ab...

The current study investigated both sympathetic and vagal autonomic patterns during a daytime sleep in 25 healthy adults (23.2 ± 2.4 years). Pre-ejection period (PEP; related inversely to beta-adrenergic sympathetic activity), the interval between consecutive R-waves (RR) and frequency-domain heart rate variability (HRV) were computed during pre-na...

Introduction. Many adults experience poor sleep quality, and personality traits have emerged as important predictors of self-reported sleep. However, it is still unclear whether personality predicts sleep quality independent of other correlates, including mood, emotion regulation, and hyperarousal. Aims and method. The aim of this study was twofold...

A large body of research on gender differences in response to erotic stimuli has focused on genital and/or subjective sexual arousal. On the other hand, studies assessing gender differences in emotional psychophysiological responding to sexual stimuli have only employed erotic pictures of male-female couples or female/male nudes. The present study...

Threat stimuli typically elicit a psychophysiological response pattern supporting the organism's preparation for active defence. Differently, blood stimuli prompt a distinctive autonomic response pattern and sustained processing, which do not call for clear-cut mobilisation for action. However, the contribution of motor disposition in these respons...

We tested if post-decisional emotions of regret, guilt, shame, anger, and disgust can account for individuals’ choices in moral dilemmas depicting the choice of letting some people die (non-utilitarian option) or sacrificing one person to save them (utilitarian option). We collected participants’ choices and post-decisional emotional ratings for ea...

In recent years, a great deal of research has relied on hypothetical sacrificial dilemmas to investigate decision-making processes involved in pro-social utilitarian choices. Recent evidence, however, has suggested that moral sacrificial choices may actually reflect reduced harm aversion and antisocial dispositions rather than an utilitarian inclin...

Sleep may play a role in consolidating emotional memories. However, studies on the effects of REM sleep on negative vs. neutral memories have produced inconsistent evidence. Here, we assess the role of NREM and REM sleep before and after learning in promoting the consolidation of neutral and arousing pleasant and unpleasant memories. Forty-six (32...

This research investigated whether emotional hyporeactivity affects moral judgements and choices of action in sacrificial moral dilemmas and in everyday moral conflict situations in which harm to other's welfare is differentially involved. Twenty-six participants with high trait psychopathy (HP) and 25 with low trait psychopathy (LP) were selected...

The current study examined the time course of implicit processing of distinct facial features and the associate event-related potential (ERP) components. To this end, we used a masked priming paradigm to investigate implicit processing of the eyes and mouth in upright and inverted faces, using a prime duration of 33 ms. Two types of prime-target pa...

The aim of the present research was to compare different methods of training for safe moped use, especially focusing on physiological reactions during risky experiences. By recording skin conductance response (SCR), we investigated whether training that requires active riding behavior in different risky situations through the use of the Honda Ridin...

Abstract Adequate temporal abilities are crucial for adaptive behavior. In time processing, variations in the rate of pulses’ emission by the pacemaker are often reported to be an important cause of temporal errors. These variations are often associated with physiological changes, and recently it has also been proposed that physiological changes ma...

Only a few studies investigated whether animal phobics exhibit attentional biases in contexts where no phobic stimuli are present. Among these, recent studies provided evidence for a bias toward facial expressions of fear and disgust in animal phobics. Such findings may be due to the fact that these expressions could signal the presence of a phobic...

In any modern society killing is regarded as a severe violation of the legal codes that is subjected to penal judgment. Therefore, it is likely that people take legal consequences into account when deciding about the hypothetical killing of one person in classic moral dilemmas, with legal concerns contributing to decision-making. In particular, by...

Although low blood pressure has been associated with lower affect and higher depressive symptoms in the elderly, the presence of possible impairment in emotional reactivity in chronic hypotensive individuals in early adulthood remains largely unexplored. Using a combination of transcranial Doppler sonography, beat-to-beat blood pressure recording a...

To examine how impulsiveness influences the emotional modulation of behavioral and neural correlates of response inhibition. Twenty-nine healthy individuals scoring high (HI, N=16) or low (LI, N=13) on motor impulsiveness performed an emotional Go/Nogo task, including the presentation of pleasant, neutral and unpleasant pictures. Behavioral [reacti...

The current investigation focused on attentional processes in spider phobia. Twenty phobics and 20 controls performed a dot-probe task while event-related potentials were recorded. In each trial they viewed a picture pair (a spider or a generally disgust eliciting picture that was paired with a neutral picture) for either 100 or 1500ms. After the o...

The purpose of this study was to adapt the Austrian-German version of the Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being (MI-RSWB) into the Italian language and culture, and to investigate possible associations between the RSWB dimensions, “Big Five” personality factors and mental illness within an Italian student sample. Hence, the...

The present study investigated whether dysphoric individuals have a difficulty in disengaging attention from negative stimuli and/or reduced attention to positive information. Sad, neutral and happy facial stimuli were presented in an attention-shifting task to 18 dysphoric and 18 control participants. Reaction times to neutral shapes (squares and...

Compelling evidence indicates that sleep can facilitate the off-line consolidation of declarative, perceptual, emotional and procedural memories. Here we assessed the sleep-related off-line consolidation of motor skills in 13 young primary insomniacs (23.31 ± 2.5 yrs) compared to 13 healthy sleepers (24.31 ± 1.6 yrs) using the sequential finger tap...

We investigated memory performance and cardiovascular activity in 13 primary insomniacs (PI) compared to 13 good sleepers (GS). Cardiovascular and hemodynamic measures, including heart rate, pre-ejection period and blood pressure, were continuously recorded at rest and during two memory tasks. PI showed working memory impairment under high cognitiv...

At the present time, the growing interest in the topic of moral judgment highlights the widespread need for a standardized set of experimental stimuli. We provide normative data for a sample of 120 undergraduate students using a new set of 60 moral dilemmas that might be employed in future studies according to specific research needs. Thirty dilemm...

Purpose: Patient narratives or personal stories are often used in resources for patients, but there is a paucity of research on what their active ingredients are (Bekker et al., 2012; Shaffer & Zickmund-Fisher, 2013). This study investigated the emotions elicited, at both subjective and physiological level, while reading narratives about colorect...

This event-related potential (ERP) study investigated neuronal correlates of cognitive reappraisal during the exposure to food cues. Thirty-three healthy, normal-weight women viewed images of high-caloric food and non-food items after an overnight fast. The participants were instructed to either passively look at the pictures, or to change (increas...

It has now become widely accepted that economic decisions are influenced by cognitive and emotional processes. In the present study, we aimed at disentangling the neural mechanisms associated with the way in which the information is formulated, i.e., framing effect, in terms of gain or loss, which influences people's decisions. Participants played...

In this work, we aimed to clarify the autonomic involvement in the cardiovascular down-regulation in essential hypotension. The relationships between cardiovascular response and sleep quality were also examined. Thirteen female hypotensives and 13 female normotensives performed a stress task followed by polysomnography. Measures derived from blood...

How we compute time is not fully understood. Questions include whether an automatic brain mechanism is engaged in temporally regular environmental structure in order to anticipate events, and whether this can be dissociated from task-related processes, including response preparation, selection and execution. To investigate these issues, a passive t...

CNV amplitude and slope values for single subjects. (TIFF)

Introduction Cardiovascular features seem to modulate performance in attention tasks. Methods We investigated the relationship between blood pressure, resting heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) and performance in a visuospatial attention task comparing normotensive and hypotensive young adults. Conclusions We found an association betw...

Traditional studies on moral judgement used resolutions of moral dilemmas that were framed in terms of acceptability of the consequentialist action promoting a greater good, thus overlooking the deontological implications (choices cannot be justified by their consequences). Recently, some authors have suggested a parallelism between automatic, unre...

The widespread need for standardized moral dilemmas has been increasingly motivated by the recent criticism raised against the stimulus material employed by Greene et al. (2001). The present study aimed at presenting a novel and standardized set of moral dilemmas, controlled for some relevant features that affect people's moral judgment. Specifical...