Ricerc@Sapienza

Dream experience (DE) represents a fascinating condition linked to emotional processes and the human inner world. Although the overlap between REM sleep and dreaming has been overcome, several studies point out that emotional and perceptually vivid contents are more frequent when reported upon awakenings from this sleep stage. Actually, it is well-known that REM sleep plays a pivotal role in the processing of salient and emotional waking-life experiences, strongly contributing to the emotional memory consolidation.

The present study examined predictions of the early-phase-elevated-attention hypothesis of the attentional boost effect (ABE), which suggests that transient increases in attention at encoding, as instantiated in the ABE paradigm, should enhance the recognition of neutral and positive items (whose encoding is mostly based on controlled processes), while having small or null effects on the recognition of negative items (whose encoding is primarily based on automatic processes).

Both scholars and practitioners acknowledge that the major factors explaining behavior are cognition, emotion, and context. However, existing theories tend to only focus on a combination of two. Furthermore, not all models are rooted in a specific theory of mind. Finally, there is no consistent definition of ‘mind.’ To address these issues, we review the major models explaining behavior.

The performance impairment (attentional blink, AB) on a second target (T2) when it is presented within 200-500 ms after a first target (T1) during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) is typically attributed to resource depletion. The AB does not occur when targets appear in immediate sequence (sparing). Recently, this account has been challenged by findings that the lag 1 sparing can spread to later lags when using a 3-target RSVP.

Children shift their attention based on the gaze direction of another person but it is unclear whether they prioritize only the gaze of fearful faces over neutral ones or more generally, the gaze of emotional faces. School children performed a gaze-cueing task, in which central, non-predictive happy, angry, and neutral face-cues were briefly presented with averted gaze. Findings for 9–10-year-old children showed that the magnitude of gaze-cueing effects for happy and angry face-cues was similar and it was particularly larger with angry compared to neutral face-cues.

With the rapid rise in robot presence in a variety of life domains, understanding how robots influence people's emotions during human-robot interactions is important for ensuring their acceptance in society. Mental health care, in particular, is considered the field in which robotics technology will bring the most dramatic changes in the near future. In this context, the present study sought to determine whether a brief cognitive assessment conducted by a robot elicited different interaction-related emotional processes than a traditional assessment conducted by an expert clinician.

Sporadically advocated over the last two centuries, a cerebellar role in cognition and affect has been rigorously established in the past few decades. In the clinical domain, such progress is epitomized by the ‘cerebellar cognitive affective syndrome’ (‘CCAS’) or ‘Schmahmann syndrome’. Introduced in the late 1990s, CCAS reflects a constellation of cerebellar-induced sequelae, comprising deficits in executive function, visuospatial cognition, emotion-affect, and language, over and above speech.

Several studies in mindfulness and meditation research have used the Attentional Network Task (ANT) to assess changes in the efficiency of attentional networks. The approaches used for mental training, the experimental designs, and the results in such studies are however heterogeneous, and in most cases, do not involve an assessment of dispositional mindfulness in its different facets.

The present mini-review was aimed at exploring the frontal EEG asymmetry of mood.
With respect to emotion, interpreted as a discrete affective process, mood is more
controllable, more nebulous, and more related to mind/cognition; in addition, causes
are less well-defined than those eliciting emotion. Therefore, firstly, the rational for the
distinction between emotion and mood was provided. Then, the main frontal EEG
asymmetry models were presented, such as the motivational approach/withdrawal,

To what extent old individuals are able to automatically shift their attention based on observed direction eye-gaze, and whether the emotional expression and age of the central face-cue modulate gaze cueing effects and preference acquisition was investigated. Thirty-nine 70-80 year old individuals completed a non- predictive gaze cueing task with happy, angry and neutral faces of old and young individuals gazing left or right. Targets were kitchen and garage objects and, at the end of the experiment, participants rated their preferences toward each target-object.