Personal dispositions explain differences in physical health benefits of nature exposure: the role of restorativeness and affect.

Introduction: Urbanization processes are constantly increasing, and most of the European population currently live in urban areas. Nevertheless, evidence is consistent in highlighting the positive association between nature exposure and human wellbeing, although individual differences might affect this association.

Methods: The present study aimed to investigate the association among nature connectedness, conceptualized as Love and Care for Nature, place identity, and physical wellbeing, via restorativeness and positive and negative affect.

Impact of COVID-19 on Mothers Raising Children with Special Needs: Insights from a Survey Study.

Home confinement during the COVID-19 outbreak had psychological effects that continue to be explored by researchers. This study investigated factors influencing the mental health of mothers caring for special needs children in Italy's first lockdown. Specifically, we investigated the relationships between emotional states of depression, anxiety, stress, perceived distress related to home confinement, coping strategies, and other contextual variables (such as opportunities for distance learning and remote working) in a group of 68 mothers of children with special needs and 68 matched mothers of typically developing children.

Effectiveness of a Brief Online Mindfulness-Based Intervention for University Students.

Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a dramatic increase in Web-based education, lacking face-to-face student-teacher and student-student interaction, and consequently impairing students' sense of belonging to a community, interoceptive awareness, and academic self-efficacy. This study examined how a brief mindfulness-based intervention in an online university course can be effective in enhancing attention resources, developing a stronger sense of academic self-efficacy, and improving the sense of belonging to a community, which represent critical factors affecting students' participation in online and blended courses.

Method: Four-hundred and eighty-six participants ( 22.

Psychophysiological and behavioral responses to descriptive labels in modern art museums.

Educational tools in art exhibitions seem crucial to improve the cultural and aesthetic experience, particularly of non-expert visitors, thus becoming a strategic goal for museums. However, there has not been much research regarding the impact of labels on the quality of visitors' aesthetic experience. Therefore, here we compared the impact on the cognitive and emotional experience of naïve visitors between essential and descriptive labels, through multiple objective and subjective measurements, focusing on the controversial modern art museum context.

Extension of Dancer's Legs: Increasing Angles Show Motion.

Usain Bolt's pose, one arm highly extended to one side, suggests action. Likewise, static pictures of animals, legs extended, show animation. We tested a new cue for motion perception-extension-and in particular extension of dancer's legs.

Pupil responses to implied motion in figurative and abstract paintings.

Motion can be perceived in static images, such as photos and figurative paintings, representing realistic subjects in motion, with or without directional information (e.g., motion blur or speed lines).

Psychological Predictors of Energy Saving Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Approach.

Understanding how psychological processes drive human energy choices is an urgent, and yet relatively under-investigated, need for contemporary society. A knowledge gap still persists on the links between psychological factors identified in earlier studies and people's behaviors in the energy domain. This research applies a meta-analytical procedure to assess the strength of the associations between five different classes of individual variables (i.

Visits to figurative art museums may lower blood pressure and stress.

Background: The research aimed to assess, through physiological measurements such as blood pressure and heart rate, whether exposure to art museums and to different art styles (figurative vs. modern art) was able to enhance visitors' well-being in terms of relaxing and stress reduction.

Method: Participants (n = 77) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, on the basis of the typology of the art style they were exposed to in the museum visit: (1) figurative art, (2) modern art and (3) museum office (as a control condition).

Social-Cultural Processes and Urban Affordances for Healthy and Sustainable Food Consumption.

In this paper, we provide an overview of research highlighting the relation between cultural processes, social norms, and food choices, discussing the implication of these findings for the promotion of more sustainable lifestyles. Our aim is to outline how environmental psychological research on urban affordances, through the specific concepts of restorative environments and walkability, could complement these findings to better understand human health, wellbeing and quality of life. We highlight how social norms and cultural processes are linked to food choices, and we discuss the possible health-related outcomes of cultural differences in food practices as well as their relation to acculturation and globalization processes.

Pot/Lid Illusion.

A new everyday visual size illusion is presented-the Pot/Lid illusion. Observers choose an unduly large lid for a pot. We ask whether the optic slant of the pot brim would increase its apparent size or if vision underestimates the size of tilted lids.

Futurist Art: Motion and Aesthetics As a Function of Title.

Very often the titles of Futurist paintings contain words denoting movement in order to satisfy their artistic poetic focused on motion and velocity. The aim of the present study is to investigate the reported dynamism and aesthetic quality of several Futurist artworks as a function of their title. Ten Futurist artworks with a movement-related word in the title were selected for this study.

'Beauty is no quality in things themselves': epistemic motivation affects implicit preferences for art.

Art preferences are affected by a number of subjective factors. This paper reports two studies which investigated whether need for closure shapes implicit art preferences. It was predicted that higher need for closure would negatively affect implicit preferences for abstract art.

Flashbulb memories of the Pope's resignation: explicit and implicit measures across differing religious groups.

In the present paper, we aimed to provide evidence in support of the idea tested in a recent study by Lanciano and colleagues that flashbulb memories (FBMs) are a special class of autobiographical memories that can be assessed through the autobiographical implicit association test (aIAT). FBMs and event memories (EMs) for the news of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI were evaluated in three samples of churchgoer Catholic, non-churchgoer Catholic and Evangelical Italian participants through the traditional self-report measures (specificity/accuracy, confidence, consistency) and aIAT indices. Results confirmed the strength of the association between FBM and true information.

Picture surface illusion: small effects on a major axis.

Perception of 2-D ellipses on a picture surface is inaccurate-if the ellipses depict circles that are tilted in 3-D, receding from the viewer (Hammad, Kennedy, Juricevic, & Rajani, 2008a, Perception, 37, 504-510). Notably, the minor axis of the ellipse is seen as larger than is true. This illusory effect could be due to the simultaneous presence of optical information for the 2-D ellipse and optical information for the 3-D tilted circle.

Do automatic mental associations detect a flashbulb memory?

Flashbulb memories (FBMs) are defined as detailed memories for the reception context in which people first heard of a public and emotionally relevant event. For many years researchers have been debating whether FBMs can be considered a special class of emotional memories, or whether they suffer the same fate as ordinary autobiographical formations. The debate on the real existence of this special class of memories reflects the difficulty of establishing their accuracy.