Positive and negative touch differentially modulate metacognitive memory judgements for emotional stimuli.

Touch plays a crucial role in providing humans with information from the external environment and can be perceived by humans as positively or negatively valenced. It is well documented that touch can differentially influence social functions, but very little is known about how touch can modulate (meta)cognition. Utilizing a within-subject design, participants were exposed to (a) positive, (b) negative, and (c) no touch, alongside encoding of emotionally valenced (positive and negative) images.

An exploration of Italian laypeople's belief in how human memory works.

We present the first study to measure the beliefs held by Italian laypeople about how human memory works, using a newly developed tool: the Italian Memory Belief Questionnaire (IMBQ). Research conducted in other countries has demonstrated that beliefs about memory vary widely between different professional and non-professional groups, indicating that limitations exist regarding the dissemination of empirically researched scientific knowledge. To ascertain what Italian people understand about memory-related topics, including eyewitness testimony, repression of traumatic memories and factors influencing memory recall, 301 native Italian participants completed the IMBQ in Study 1.

Enhancing mental health and well-being in adults from lower-resource settings: A mixed-method evaluation of the impact of problem management plus.

Mental health conditions, recognised as a global crisis, were further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Access to mental health services remains limited, particularly in low-income regions. Task-sharing interventions, exemplified by Problem Management Plus (PM+), have emerged as potential solutions to bridge this treatment gap.

Dimensions of a hyper memory: investigating the factors modulating exceptional retrieval in a single case of highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM).

Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) is a rare form of exceptional memory, characterised by an ability to recall personal episodes in response to dates. The single case "DT" is one of less than 100 HSAM individuals globally, and little is known about how these individuals organise the vast number of events they can recollect. We administered 2 novel priming tasks to explore between autobiographical memories.

From vector spaces to DRM lists: False Memory Generator, a software for automated generation of lists of stimuli inducing false memories.

The formation of false memories is one of the most widely studied topics in cognitive psychology. The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm is a powerful tool for investigating false memories and revealing the cognitive mechanisms subserving their formation. In this task, participants first memorize a list of words (encoding phase) and next have to indicate whether words presented in a new list were part of the initially memorized one (recognition phase).

One wave or another in the pandemic: psychological well-being during the third COVID-19 wave.

Background: After a year from the emergence of COVID-19 in February 2020, between March and May 2021 Italy faced its third wave of infections. Previous studies have shown that in the first phases of the pandemic certain factors had a protective effect against distress. However, little is known regarding the role of possible protective variables after prolonged pandemic situations.