Patrice Rusconi

Università degli Studi di Messina | UNIME · Department of Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Education and Cultural Studies (COSPECS)

Health risk behaviors, such as cigarette smoking, may be triggered by failures in thought suppression, a cognitive avoidance strategy associated with rumination. To date, no study has examined the role of personality features in the performance of thought suppression in smokers and nonsmokers. To address this gap in the literature, we aimed to (1)...

Semantic processing is key to our understanding of the external environment and linguistic inputs. It subserves high-level processes such as inferential reasoning, concept formation, and language understanding. We reviewed data from electrophysiological, functional imaging, and lesion studies to highlight that the main brain areas involved in seman...

The social cognitive literature has often investigated the use of trait adjectives (e.g., honest) in impression formation and when making inferences about an individual’s personality starting from some cues such as a behavior (e.g., returning a lost wallet). Here, we considered individuals’ assumptions about the likelihood of behaviors associated w...

The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide...

Reappropriation of derogatory group labels by minority members is a coping strategy against stigmatization. The aim of this research is twofold. First, we intend to replicate Galinsky et al.'s findings (2013), suggesting that self-labelling (i.e., the self-referential use of a derogatory group label), compared to outgroup-labelling (i.e., the use o...

People judge strangers’ trustworthiness based on their facial appearance, but these judgments are biased. Biases towards Black individuals may stem from implicit pro-White attitudes. However, previous studies have not explored if these effects extend to different members within the same social group, like women instead of men, nor considered the ro...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world in many ways; for example, evidence from the United Kingdom indicates that higher rates of discriminatory behaviours against immigrants have been recorded during this period. Prior research suggests that political orientation and trust are instrumental in discriminatory beliefs against immigrants. A long...

We investigated whether organizational change and organizational power are antecedents of working self- and other-objectification by focusing on two facets: fungibility and instrumentality. In Study 1 (N = 118), office workers who had experienced an operational review, compared to no exposure, were found to have significantly higher perceptions of...

Little is known about the behavioural tendencies at the basis of smartphone use. The present research investigates delay discounting, the phenomenon whereby a smaller, immediate reward is preferred over a larger, delayed one, in smartphone use. In line with previous work on delay discounting in other domains, Study 1 (N = 81) showed that the hyperb...

Hope, gratitude, fear, and disgust may all be key to encouraging preventative action in the context of COVID-19. We pre-registered a longitudinal experiment, which involved monthly data collections from September 2020 to September 2021 and a six-month follow-up. We predicted that a hope recall task would reduce negative emotions and elicit higher i...

Personality traits play a role in prosocial behavior in relation to containment measures intended to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical findings indicated that individuals high in socially aversive traits such as callousness are less compliant with containment measures. This study aimed to add cross-cultural data on the relationship between an...

Non-compliance with social and legal norms and regulations represents a high burden for society. Social cognition deficits are frequently called into question to explain criminal violence and rule violations in individuals diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (APD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and psychopathy. In this article,...

Research to address the technical challenges of human missions into space is growing. Knowledge about the social-psychological aspects of individuals’ experiences of confinement within habitats in space missions or extreme environments is also rapidly expanding. Social isolation is among one of the best-known risk factors in these environments. Thi...

Non-compliance with social and legal norms and regulations represents a high burden for society. Social cognition deficits are frequently called into question to explain criminal violence and rule violations in individuals diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (APD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and psychopathy. In this article,...

Measured by psychologists, conceived in critical terms, popularised as satire, and exploited by politicians, meritocracy is a dilemmatic concept that has changed its meanings throughout history. Social psychologists have conceptualised and operationalised meritocracy both as an ideology that justifies inequality and as a justice principle based on...

Over the past few decades, two-factor models of social cognition have emerged as a dominant framework for understanding impression development. These models suggest that two dimensions-warmth and competence-are key in shaping our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions toward social targets. More recently, research has jettisoned the warmth...

Engaging in unhealthy behaviors (e.g., smoking, drinking) and not engaging in healthy ones (e.g., exercising, consuming fruit and vegetables) are both relatively prevalent among individuals despite the available information about their risks for health. People's perception of an event's time course can be used to gauge their risk perception for tha...

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...

This study focuses on Saudi mothers’ and their children’s judgments and reasoning about exclusion based on religion. Sixty Saudi children and their mothers residing in Saudi Arabia and 58 Saudi children and their mothers residing in the United Kingdom were interviewed. They were read vignettes depicting episodes of exclusion based on the targets’ r...

Being targets of an «objectifying gaze» increases women’s objectified body consciousness and self-objectification. Little is known about what can protect women from such effects. Here we investigated the role of perceived personal and interpersonal control. Study 1 examined the relations between personal and interpersonal control with self-objectif...

Four studies analyzed how sexual orientation (heterosexual vs. gay) and age categories (young vs. elderly) referring to men are cognitively combined. In Study 1, young gay men were judged as more prototypical of gay men than adult or elderly gay men, while young, adult, and elderly heterosexual men were perceived as equally prototypical of heterose...

Cognitive modeling tools have been widely used by researchers and practitioners to help design, evaluate, and study computer user interfaces (UIs). Despite their usefulness, large-scale modeling tasks can still be very challenging due to the amount of manual work needed. To address this scalability challenge, we propose CogTool+, a new cognitive mo...

Cognitive models and software tools have been widely used for both research and commercial purposes. Although they have proved very useful, there are some limitations preventing large-scale modeling and simulation tasks to be carried out efficiently and effectively. In this book, we aim to provide readers with a systematic overview of state-of-the-...

This chapter presents a proposed conceptual framework to address the issues and challenges of large-scale cognitive modeling. UI/UX designers are considered as the main target users of the framework with additional support from computer programmers and psychologists. The framework has the following features: (1) it supports high-level parameterizat...

As demonstrated in previous chapters, human cognitive modeling techniques and related software tools have been widely used by researchers and practitioners to evaluate user interface (UI) designs and related human performance. However, for a system involving a relatively complicated UI, it could be difficult to build a cognitive model that accurate...

A large number of cognitive models have been developed and widely used in the HCI domain. GOMS (Gray et al (1993) Hum Comput Interact 8(3):237–309; John and Kieras (1996) ACM Trans Comput-Hum Interact 3(4):320–351) is one of the well-established models for predicting human performance and facilitating UI design. As mentioned in Chap. 10.1007/978-3-...

This chapter presents a brief overview of theories and concepts that ar some well-established and widely used cognitive architectures, such as ACT-R (Anderson et al (2004) Psychol Rev 111(4):1036–1060; Anderson (2007) How can the human mind occur in the physical universe? Oxford series on cognitive models and architectures. Oxford University Press,...

This book reviews and explores the applications and implications of cognitive models and related software modeling tools in the HCI field and a particular application area – cyber security. To facilitate the modeling process, the incorporation of human behavioral data (i.e., eye tracking data) is also introduced in this book. In addition, by addres...

In this chapter, we demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of the developed software prototype CogTool+. In particular, we present our work of using CogTool+ to model three existing systems. The first system is an observer-resistant password system called Undercover; the second one is a 6-digit PIN entry system, and the third one...

Morality, which refers to characteristics such as trustworthiness and honesty, has a primary role in social perception and judgment. A negativity effect characterizes the morality dimension, whereby negative information is weighed more than positive information in trait attribution and impression formation. This article reviews the literature on th...

Background: Despite the established evidence and theoretical advances explaining human judgments under uncertainty, developments of mobile health (mHealth) Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) have not explicitly applied the psychology of decision making to the study of user needs. We report on a user needs approach to develop a prototype of a...

Background An mHealth-based support systems promise to deliver objective data about the patient’s healthcare status to the clinician in a timely manner but at the same time, risks increasing ‘technical uncertainty”, by increasing the amount of available information, but not necessarily its utility in making medical decisions.The study aim was to in...

Proactive password checkers have been widely used to persuade users to select stronger passwords by providing machine-generated strength ratings of passwords. If such ratings do not match human-generated ratings of human users, there can be a loss of trust in PPCs. In order to study the effectiveness of PPCs, it would be useful to investigate how h...

http://rdcu.be/wKuE The Attentional Blink (AB) is a temporary deficit for a second target (T2) when that target appears after a first target (T1). Although sophisticated models have been developed to explain the substantial AB literature in isolation, the current study considers how the AB relates to perceptual dynamics more broadly. We show that...

Despite all the information about the risks, many people still smoke. Several studies investigated risk perceptions in smokers. The adequate perceptions of the risks from smoking is particularly important and this study investigated the risk perception of young smokers vs non-smokers by a new time-estimation task in which we required participants (...

Trait inference in person perception is based on observers’ implicit assumptions about the relations between trait adjectives (e.g., fair) and the either consistent or inconsistent behaviors (e.g., having double standards) that an actor can manifest. This article presents new empirical data and theoretical interpretations on people’ behavioral expe...

Pretest on concrete trait-inconsistent behaviors. (DOCX)

Analyses of trait-inconsistent behavior frequency in Study 3 with the cue-validity index. (DOCX)

Participants’ prior probability estimates of traits and derived probabilities of occurrence of behaviors. (DOCX)

Original version in Italian and the English translation of the 48 items used in Study 3. (DOCX)

Pretest on Trait-Domain Relatedness. (DOCX)

General variability as a measure of trait-behavior relations. (DOCX)

Preliminary study. (DOCX)

Trait valence pretest. (DOCX)

Human cognitive modeling techniques and related software tools have been widely used by researchers and practitioners to evaluate the effectiveness of user interface (UI) designs and related human performance. However, they are rarely used in the cyber security field despite the fact that human factors have been recognized as a key element for cybe...

Previous studies have indicated that high status people are prone to use leading questions during interpersonal interaction. The present study (N = 254) aimed to investigate if asymmetry between high and low status individuals is likely to bias the social hypothesis testing toward asymmetric questions, namely queries for which the «yes» and the «no...

Evidence evaluation is a crucial process in many human activities, spanning from medical diagnosis to impression formation. The present experiments investigated which, if any, normative model best conforms to people’s intuition about the value of the obtained evidence. Psychologists, epistemologists, and philosophers of science have proposed severa...

Two experiments examined how people perceive the diagnosticity of different answers ("yes" and "no") to the same question. We manipulated whether the "yes" and the "no" answers conveyed the same amount of information or not, as well as the presentation format of the probabilities of the features inquired about. In Experiment 1, participants were pr...

In two studies, we investigated how people use base rates and the presence versus the absence of new information to judge which of two hypotheses is more likely. Participants were given problems based on two decks of cards printed with 0-4 letters. A table showed the relative frequencies of the letters on the cards within each deck. Participants we...

When examining social targets, people may ask asymmetric questions, that is, questions for which “yes” and “no” answers are neither equally diagnostic nor equally frequent. The consequences of this information-gathering strategy on impression formation deserve empirical investigation. The present work explored the role played by the trade-off betwe...

Three studies using abstract materials tested possible moderators of the feature-positive effect in hypothesis evaluation whereby people use the presence of features more than their absence to judge which of 2 competing hypotheses is more likely. Drawing on a distinction made in visual perception research, we tested whether the feature-positive eff...

This article examines individuals' expectations in a social hypothesis testing task. Participants selected questions from a list to investigate the presence of personality traits in a target individual. They also identified the responses that they expected to receive and the likelihood of the expected responses. The results of two studies indicated...

In three studies, we investigated whether and to what extent the evaluation of two mutually exclusive hypotheses is affected by a feature-positive effect, wherein present clues are weighted more than absent clues. Participants (N = 126) were presented with abstract problems concerning the most likely provenance of a card that was drawn from one of...

Research has shown that warmth and competence are core dimensions on which perceivers judge others and that warmth has a primary role at various phases of impression formation. Three studies explored whether the two components of warmth (i.e., sociability and morality) have distinct roles in predicting the global impression of social groups. In Stu...

Three experiments examined how people gather information on in-group and out-group members. Previous studies have revealed that category-based expectancies bias the hypothesis-testing process towards confirmation through the use of asymmetric-confirming questions (which are queries where the replies supporting the prior expectancies are more inform...

Research on the two fundamental dimensions of social judgment, namely warmth and competence, has shown that warmth has a primary and a dominant role in information gathering about others. In two studies we examined whether the sociability and morality components of warmth play distinct roles in such a process. Study 1 (N = 60) investigated which tr...

Research on decision making suggests that a wide range of spontaneous processes may influence medical judgment. We considered an easily accessible strategy, anchoring and insufficient adjustment, which might contribute to health care professionals' miscalibration of patients' pain. A sample (n=423) of physicians, nurses, medical students, and nursi...

Previous studies on hypothesis-testing behaviour have reported systematic preferences for posing positive questions (i.e., inquiries about features that are consistent with the truth of the hypothesis) and different types of asymmetric questions (i.e., questions where the hypothesis confirming and the hypothesis disconfirming responses have differe...

This article presents two experiments aiming to investigate the adoption of a graduated measure to describe credibility attribution by observers who evaluate patients' pain accounts. A total of 160 medical students were required to express a credibility judgment on the pain intensity level of hypothetical patients. We used 16 vignettes based on a f...

Two experiments investigated whether dealing with a homogeneous subset of syllogisms with time-constrained responses encouraged participants to develop and use heuristics for abstract (Experiment 1) and thematic (Experiment 2) syllogisms. An atmosphere-based heuristic accounted for most responses with both abstract and thematic syllogisms. With the...