Publications by authors named "Andrea Carnaghi"

We analyzed the age stereotypes of heterosexual, gay, and bisexual men and the implications of such stereotypes for the conceptualization of older gay and bisexual men, specifically. In Study 1a ( = 158) and 1b ( = 155), we found that compared to heterosexual men, participants stereotyped gay men more on young- than elderly-stereotypical traits. Participants represented bisexual men not as "somewhere in between" the stereotypes about heterosexual and gay men, but were characterized more by young- than elderly-stereotypical traits.

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We reconcile interactive and additive models of category intersection by recasting these theoretical efforts within the conceptual combination framework. In three studies (N = 364), we showed that, in line with an interactive approach, combining 'elderly men' with 'gay men' generated an atypical subtype with unique attributes that could not be reduced to the sum of the attributes of the constituent categories (Studies 1-3). Moreover, consistent with the additive models, combining 'heterosexual men' with age categories (i.

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Extensive experimental research has been conducted to investigate how individuals empathise with others depending on contextual and motivational factors. However, the effect of sexual objectification (i.e.

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The goal of the present study was to investigate the causal direction of influence between the ingroup as a whole and the self or another ingroup member considering a key feature of groups, i.e., their perceived meaningfulness.

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The current research aims to study the link between the type of vision experienced in a collaborative immersive virtual environment (active vs. multiple passive), the type of error one looks for during a cooperative multi-user exploration of a design project (affordance vs. perceptual violations), and the type of setting in which multi-user perform (field in Experiment 1 vs.

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Recent research has shown that a brief, casual touch administered by an outgroup member reduces prejudice towards the group to which the toucher belongs. In this study, we take the research on physical contact and prejudice a step further by addressing the relation between individuals' amount of Experienced Intergroup Physical Contact (EIPC), across distinct contexts and involving different body parts, and attitudes towards foreign people. Specifically, we hypothesized that the amount of EIPC would be positively associated with both quantity and quality of intergroup contact, but that only quality would mediate the relationship between the amount of EIPC and outgroup attitudes, quality being more directly linked to the evaluative component of outgroup attitudes.

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In this set of research, we investigated the effects of intergroup physical contact on intergroup attitudes by relying on indirect contact strategies, namely the imagined contact paradigm. We implemented the imagined contact paradigm by leading participants to shape the mental imagery upon pictorial information. Specifically, in Study 1 participants saw a picture of a white hand touching a black hand [i.

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A controversial hypothesis, named the Sexualized Body Inversion Hypothesis (SBIH), claims similar visual processing of sexually objectified women (i.e., with a focus on the sexual body parts) and inanimate objects as indicated by an absence of the inversion effect for both type of stimuli.

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Sexual objectification is a widespread phenomenon characterized by a focus on the individual's physical appearance over his/her mental state. This has been associated with negative social consequences, as objectified individuals are judged to be less human, competent, and moral. Moreover, behavioral responses toward the person change as a function of the degree of the perceived sexual objectification.

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In this study, we investigate whether hormonal shifts during the menstrual cycle contribute to the dehumanization of other women and men. Female participants with different levels of likelihood of conception (LoC) completed a semantic priming paradigm in a lexical decision task. When the word 'woman' was the prime, animal words were more accessible in high versus low LoC whereas human words were more inhibited in the high versus low LoC.

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Ample evidence attests that social intention, elicited through gestures explicitly signaling a request of communicative intention, affects the patterning of hand movement kinematics. The current study goes beyond the effect of social intention and addresses whether the same action of reaching to grasp an object for placing it in an end target position within or without a monitoring attendee's peripersonal space, can be moulded by pure social factors in general, and by social facilitation in particular. A motion tracking system (Optotrak Certus) was used to record motor acts.

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In our daily lives, we often have to quickly estimate the emotions of our conspecifics in order to have successful social interactions. While this estimation process seems quite easy when we are ourselves in a neutral or equivalent emotional state, it has recently been shown that in case of incongruent emotional states between ourselves and the others, our judgments can be biased. This phenomenon, introduced to the literature with the term Emotional Egocentricity Bias (EEB), has been found to occur in young adults and, to a greater extent, in children.

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Homophobic epithets have become commonly used insults among adolescents. However, evidence suggests that there are differences in how these homophobic epithets are evaluated based on beliefs held by the observer and the context in which they are used. To examine this, Italian high school students were asked to rate the offensiveness of homophobic epithets, as well as to consider how they or others would react to homophobic epithets across various situations.

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A person can be appraised as an individual or as a member of a social group. In the present study we tested whether the knowledge about social groups is represented independently of the living and non-living things. Patients with frontal and temporal lobe tumors involving either the left or the right hemisphere performed three tasks--picture naming, word-to-picture matching and picture sorting--tapping the lexical semantic knowledge of living things, non-living things and social groups.

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Objective And Background: Patterns of brain-damaged individuals' deficits in categorizing living versus non-living things indicate separation of semantic knowledge categories in the brain. Recent work in patients with dementia suggested that semantic knowledge about social groups differs from knowledge about living and non-living things. In this study we analyzed patients' social appraisal by testing whether their degree of impairment in social-group knowledge predicted their social-group evaluative reactions (prejudice).

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This research investigated the behavioural consequences of homophobic epithets. After exposure to either a category or a homophobic label, heterosexual participants allocated fictitious resources to two different prevention programmes: one mainly relevant to heterosexuals (sterility prevention), the other to homosexuals (AIDS-HIV prevention). Responses on allocation matrices served to identify strategies that favoured the ingroup over the outgroup.

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According to the Spatial Agency Bias (SAB), more agentic groups (men) are envisioned to the left of less agentic groups (women). This research investigated the role of social status in shaping the spatial representation of gender couples. Participants were presented pairs consisting of one male and one female target who confirmed gender stereotypes.

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The most relevant evidence for the organization of the conceptual knowledge in the brain was first provided by the patterns of deficits in brain-damaged individuals affecting one or another semantic category. Patients with various etiologies showed a disproportionate impairment in producing and understanding names of either living (fruits, vegetables, animals) or nonliving things (tools, vehicles, clothes). These double dissociations between spared and impaired recognition of living and nonliving things led to suggest that these categories are discretely represented in the brain.

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Two studies address the role of hormonal shift across menstrual cycle in female dehumanization of other women. In Study 1, normally ovulating women (NOW) and women who use hormonal contraceptives (HCW) are compared in terms of how much they dehumanize other women and two other control targets (men and elderly people). In NOW, the level of dehumanization of other women, but not of men and elderly people, increases as the conception risk is enhanced.

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The current studies investigate the effects of homophobic labels on the self-perception of heterosexual males, hypothesizing that when exposed to homophobic epithets, they are motivated to underline their masculinity and claim a distinctly heterosexual identity by taking distance from homosexuals and, to a lesser degree, from women. Heterosexual male participants were subliminally (Study 1) and supraliminally (Study 2) primed either by a homophobic epithet or by a category label, and completed the Traditional Beliefs About Gender and Gender Identity scale. Participants stressed their heterosexual identity, but not their gender distinctiveness, when exposed to homophobic epithets, compared to category labels.

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The present work looks at the self-stereotyping process and reveals its underlying cognitive structure. When this process occurs, it is necessarily the result of an overlap between the representation of the ingroup and that of the self. Two studies measured this overlap and showed that it was higher on stereotype-relevant than on stereotype-irrelevant traits, it involved both positive and negative stereotypical traits, and it implied a deduction-to-the-self process of ingroup stereotypical dimensions.

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Objectives: This study investigated the relationship between participants' expected levels of pain intensity before a colonoscopy, pain intensity experienced while they were undergoing this medical procedure (real-time pain), and their retrospective evaluation of this experience.

Design: Correlational design. Regression analyses were performed and mediational models were tested.

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Six studies (N = 491) investigated the inductive potential of nouns versus adjectives in person perception. In the first 5 studies, targets were either described by an adjective (e.g.

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