The current economic crisis has been a new and unexpected phenomenon; it is part of the capitalis... more The current economic crisis has been a new and unexpected phenomenon; it is part of the capitalist banking and economic system that has been known until 2008. The crisis has led to banks, states, international institutions, as well as common people, changing profoundly their representations about the economy. In this scenario, some questions arise: how do men and women of different social status face the complex and unknown phenomenon of the economic crisis? Do gender and social status justify the different meanings attributed to the crisis, to its causes and its consequences? When confronted with an external threat like the economic crisis, people draw on social representations to provide meaning to that unfamiliar situation. Through media and interpersonal communication, social groups produce naive theories that improve familiarity with an unexpected and distressing phenomenon. In order to analyze these lay theories elaborated though daily economic thinking and acting, this resear...
In recent years, a remarkable number of studies have investigated sensory characteristics, such a... more In recent years, a remarkable number of studies have investigated sensory characteristics, such as flavor and texture, of edible insect and insect-based foods, their contribution to consumers’ attitudes toward edible insects are important in consumer appeal and their willingness to try eating insects in the future. This paper addresses the problem of describing the sensory characteristics aof edible insect and insect-based foods in terms of preferences. To this end, we conducted a study to explore the representations of sensory experiences related to an insect-based dish involving a voluntary sample of 154 consumers. The quasi-experiment, which we have called projective sensory experience (PSE), follows a two-step procedure. In the first step, we asked the participants to imagine tasting an insect-based dish and then to rate, from 1 (imperceptible) up to 10 (very perceptible), the following taste-olfactory sensations: Sapidity, Bitter tendency, Acidity, Sweet, Spiciness, Aroma, Grea...
Supplemental material, LayPeople_engl_matrix_1 for Public understanding of science and common sen... more Supplemental material, LayPeople_engl_matrix_1 for Public understanding of science and common sense: Social representations of the human microbiome among the expert and non-expert public by Ida Galli and Roberto Fasanelli in Health Psychology Open
When we are interested in the image of a social object, we are interested in what individuals hav... more When we are interested in the image of a social object, we are interested in what individuals have perceived about that object, the ways in which they have interpreted those perceptions, and what they think about that object. Fully agreeing with the idea that the use of iconographic stimuli can enhance the traditional methods and techniques that are used to study any social representation, in this article, two techniques will be presented. The first, the prototypical stimuli technique, was proposed in the second half of the 1980s by Galli and Nigro. The second technique, iconographic stimuli, creatively integrate images and words in a single tool, was designed more recently to study the social representation of culture by Galli, Fasanelli, and Schember. Researches here reviewed clearly shows that the image has the great power to attract to itself the very objects depicted, a power that the word often does not possess. It is images that make people reflect, help them to think about i...
This work is copyrighted by Università del Salento, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attr... more This work is copyrighted by Università del Salento, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale-Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License. For more information see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/it/ In recent years, medical care has come a long way thanks to technological improvements in diagnostics and treatment. Healthcare providers have developed many new care pathways, improving the organisation of care processes. In this context, the care pathway reduces the patient's choices, and the relationship between the health professional and the patient is less personal ; the main drawback of this is that it could lead to dehumanisation of the patient. In 2015, the Local Health Unit of Naples (ASL NA1) set up the "Humanisation" project with the aim of accepting the patient as unique-as a human being-in care pathways. In this paper, we analyse the features of health professionals' satisfaction related to various aspects of a trai...
The increase of immigrants compels local communities to find appropriate responses to encourage s... more The increase of immigrants compels local communities to find appropriate responses to encourage successful intercultural adjustment. The migrant public perception of native population may strongly influence the effectiveness with which migration is managed. Nonetheless, the social understanding of immigrants is not homogeneous among native community members. Functioning within the theory of social representations, this research aimed to capture the differences between the representations of migrants experienced by distinctive groups of native residents, and their relation to the experience of community (Sense of Community - SoC) and ethnic prejudice. Following a quali-quantitative approach, 494 inhabitants of Nardo (51% female), a town in Southern Italy, were asked to fill in a questionnaire including a words association task and measures of SoC, modern prejudice and the perception of impact of immigration on SoC. The dataset was submitted to the analysis of similarity through SIMI2...
Abstract:. In our opinion the study of poverty has to be considered essential for social psycholo... more Abstract:. In our opinion the study of poverty has to be considered essential for social psychologists today; their efforts should be devoted to obtain fast and direct social benefits. We think that the main theoretical problem is represented by the "re-definition " of the object "poverty". The pilot phase of this research is based on three separate studies carried out with different samples. The aim of the research is to get acquainted with attitudes, perceptions and the social representation of poverty. In order to get data as "pure " as possible, only children entered the study. So the obtained results will set up the basis for a wider research project. Social psychologists must face strongly the problem of poverty. Their aim has to be devoted to obtain results characterized by an immediate heuristic value and quick social effects. Nevertheless, social studies on poverty have not yet reached a realistic phase in Italy. The European Community approach...
La reflexión propuesta en las páginas siguientes tiene como objetivo retornar a las prácti- ca... more La reflexión propuesta en las páginas siguientes tiene como objetivo retornar a las prácti- cas operacionales de reconocimiento en el campo de situaciones de comunicación com- plejas centradas en la reciprocidad. La perspectiva epistemológica propuesta es la de la psicología social socioconstructivista. El marco teórico-metodológico es el de las represen- taciones sociales. A partir del rol de los actores involucrados en el proceso, en el ensayo se describen las tres distintas clases de variables que, en opinión de los autores, influyen en el reconocimiento mutuo: las variables psicológicas, las variables cognitivas y las variables sociales. Las dimensiones subyacentes de cada una de las variables consideradas se ana- lizan en detalle, subrayando los posibles efectos sobre las prácticas sociales relacionadas con los mismos. Estos muestran claramente que las influencias múltiples que entran en juego en la “situación comunicativa” de reconocimiento producen una realidad c...
Social representations theory offers a useful framework to analyse the construction of lay explan... more Social representations theory offers a useful framework to analyse the construction of lay explanations of social risks The current study used this theoretical framework to investigate lay explanations of the COVID-19 outbreak Risk psychology generally focuses on individual perceptions and cognitive errors or the notion of the fallibility of human information processing According to Moscovici, society is not a source of information, but of meanings People, on topics of interest, construct questions and look for answers, rather than merely perceiving and processing obtained information Social psychologists, therefore, cannot be interested in risk responses as erroneous or correct, nor as false, deficient, or biased Instead, they must be concerned with how social awareness of risk is built, in other words, how and why people need to co-construct social representations of such a risk To identify the structure and content of COVID-19 SRs, we used a non-probabilistic sample composed by s...
Electronic Journal of Applied Statistical Analysis, 2017
In recent years, medical care has come a long way thanks to technological improvements in diagnos... more In recent years, medical care has come a long way thanks to technological improvements in diagnostics and treatment. Healthcare providers have developed many new care pathways, improving the organisation of care processes. In this context, the care pathway reduces the patient’s choices, and the relationship between the health professional and the patient is less personal; the main drawback of this is that it could lead to dehumanisation of the patient. In 2015, the Local Health Unit of Naples (ASL NA1) set up the “Humanisation” project with the aim of accepting the patient as unique – as a human being – in care pathways. In this paper, we analyse the features of health professionals’ satisfaction related to various aspects of a training course for health workers involved in the Humanisation project. We use a recent implementation of classification trees for ordered categorical response variables in order to identify the most relevant determinants of satisfaction. The results show th...
The aim of the present study is to investigate how children think culture, in the theoretical per... more The aim of the present study is to investigate how children think culture, in the theoretical perspective of the Moscovici’s (1961) Social Representations. The research was carried out in Naples (Italy) on 138 pupils of two lower secondary schools. According to the Community Profile of the City of Naples (Comune di Napoli, 2012), through a non random judgment sampling, the interviewees were divided into two different subsamples: mid-high economic status and mid-low economic status. The main purpose was to explore the influence of participants’ status differences on their representation of the object. Research methodology is based on the Drawing Technique that is considered one of the best tool to interview developmental age subjects (Galli, Nigro & Poderico, 1989; Galli & Fasanelli, 1995; ). Effectively, the drawing represents the most powerful and direct way of children expression. Participants were asked “to draw culture”, then to comment on their drawings and in the end to define...
Simple Summary In recent years, a remarkable number of studies have investigated entomophagy from... more Simple Summary In recent years, a remarkable number of studies have investigated entomophagy from different perspectives. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework of social representations (SRs) has never been used. SRs are organized sets of opinions, knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about a social object—such as novel foods—co-constructed and shared by a social group. The present research is the first attempt to study entomophagy in the theoretical and methodological framework of SRs. We followed a double trajectory corresponding to two different ways to imagine the contribution of SRs to entomophagy studies. The first one focuses on the role of SRs in the social construction of meanings attached to entomophagy and on their introduction in individuals’ and groups’ thinking frameworks. The second proposes SRs as predictors, even if non-deterministic, of consumers’ behaviors. The results stimulate consideration of social knowledge and cultural variables in food studies using the theo...
Simple Summary Feeding the world in a sustainable way has become a very important topic in both s... more Simple Summary Feeding the world in a sustainable way has become a very important topic in both scientists’ and policymakers’ agenda, in order to limit the repercussions of traditional food systems on planet resources. Edible insects have already proven to be safe for the environment and with a high nutritional value, but Westerners are still reluctant towards this novel food. Therefore, the aims of this paper are twofold, and were tested on a sample of 202 Italian consumers. On one hand, we aimed to further develop a recently validated psychological instrument, the Entomophagy Attitude Questionnaire (EAQ), by combining it with a measure of perceived risk. On the other hand, we wanted to test whether different animals fed with insects would be accepted by consumers. Our results clearly show that the perceived risk does not significantly improve the predictive validity of EAQ, while, with respect to the second aim, we found that beef and pork reared with insects were less accepted th...
ABSTRACT This study demonstrated that it is possible to differentiate wild boars living in habita... more ABSTRACT This study demonstrated that it is possible to differentiate wild boars living in habitats with different animal densities by the measurement of oxidative stress markers. Therefore, reactive oxygen metabolites, the antioxidant barrier, i.e., the biological antioxidant potential and the antioxidative power (OXY-Adsorbent), as well as cortisol were measured in freely ranging wild boars. In two different areas of a State Forest in the Campania Region (Italy), 42 freely ranging, managed wild boars were captured with a corral trap, and blood samples were collected. The wild boars were divided by age (>1 year old and <1 year old) and sex (male and female). Animals in one area showed significantly higher values of oxidative stress parameters than those living in the other area. The annual boar censuses of areas highlighted a higher population density in the first area than in the second one, and this would explain the results obtained. Since the health or nutritional status of animals is reflected by oxidative stress, wild boars in areas with higher animal densities may live under worse conditions than animals in areas with lower densities which becomes evident by measuring oxidative stress markers. As cortisol in blood is only reflecting a short period, the measurement of oxidative stress level may be a better indicator to evaluate the living conditions of wild boars.
The overall objective of this study is to improve the usability of the SWOT analysis. The ultimat... more The overall objective of this study is to improve the usability of the SWOT analysis. The ultimate goal is to create a procedure that can overcome its limitations by integrating it with the Hierarchised evocations technique. Specifically, respondents will be asked to express themselves in three different steps: 1. freely associating five words to each of the factors (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) 2. verbally justifying the choice of each of the evoked terms; 3. classifying them according to the importance attributed. The output is a body of items treatable qualitatively and two quantitative indicators for each associated element: its frequency of appearance and the score of importance accorded to it. The intersection of these criteria, by using a similarity analysis and cognitive salience index, will identify weight, role and interdependence in respondents cognitions about each SWOT’s factor.
The current economic crisis has been a new and unexpected phenomenon; it is part of the capitalis... more The current economic crisis has been a new and unexpected phenomenon; it is part of the capitalist banking and economic system that has been known until 2008. The crisis has led to banks, states, international institutions, as well as common people, changing profoundly their representations about the economy. In this scenario, some questions arise: how do men and women of different social status face the complex and unknown phenomenon of the economic crisis? Do gender and social status justify the different meanings attributed to the crisis, to its causes and its consequences? When confronted with an external threat like the economic crisis, people draw on social representations to provide meaning to that unfamiliar situation. Through media and interpersonal communication, social groups produce naive theories that improve familiarity with an unexpected and distressing phenomenon. In order to analyze these lay theories elaborated though daily economic thinking and acting, this resear...
In recent years, a remarkable number of studies have investigated sensory characteristics, such a... more In recent years, a remarkable number of studies have investigated sensory characteristics, such as flavor and texture, of edible insect and insect-based foods, their contribution to consumers’ attitudes toward edible insects are important in consumer appeal and their willingness to try eating insects in the future. This paper addresses the problem of describing the sensory characteristics aof edible insect and insect-based foods in terms of preferences. To this end, we conducted a study to explore the representations of sensory experiences related to an insect-based dish involving a voluntary sample of 154 consumers. The quasi-experiment, which we have called projective sensory experience (PSE), follows a two-step procedure. In the first step, we asked the participants to imagine tasting an insect-based dish and then to rate, from 1 (imperceptible) up to 10 (very perceptible), the following taste-olfactory sensations: Sapidity, Bitter tendency, Acidity, Sweet, Spiciness, Aroma, Grea...
Supplemental material, LayPeople_engl_matrix_1 for Public understanding of science and common sen... more Supplemental material, LayPeople_engl_matrix_1 for Public understanding of science and common sense: Social representations of the human microbiome among the expert and non-expert public by Ida Galli and Roberto Fasanelli in Health Psychology Open
When we are interested in the image of a social object, we are interested in what individuals hav... more When we are interested in the image of a social object, we are interested in what individuals have perceived about that object, the ways in which they have interpreted those perceptions, and what they think about that object. Fully agreeing with the idea that the use of iconographic stimuli can enhance the traditional methods and techniques that are used to study any social representation, in this article, two techniques will be presented. The first, the prototypical stimuli technique, was proposed in the second half of the 1980s by Galli and Nigro. The second technique, iconographic stimuli, creatively integrate images and words in a single tool, was designed more recently to study the social representation of culture by Galli, Fasanelli, and Schember. Researches here reviewed clearly shows that the image has the great power to attract to itself the very objects depicted, a power that the word often does not possess. It is images that make people reflect, help them to think about i...
This work is copyrighted by Università del Salento, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attr... more This work is copyrighted by Università del Salento, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale-Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License. For more information see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/it/ In recent years, medical care has come a long way thanks to technological improvements in diagnostics and treatment. Healthcare providers have developed many new care pathways, improving the organisation of care processes. In this context, the care pathway reduces the patient's choices, and the relationship between the health professional and the patient is less personal ; the main drawback of this is that it could lead to dehumanisation of the patient. In 2015, the Local Health Unit of Naples (ASL NA1) set up the "Humanisation" project with the aim of accepting the patient as unique-as a human being-in care pathways. In this paper, we analyse the features of health professionals' satisfaction related to various aspects of a trai...
The increase of immigrants compels local communities to find appropriate responses to encourage s... more The increase of immigrants compels local communities to find appropriate responses to encourage successful intercultural adjustment. The migrant public perception of native population may strongly influence the effectiveness with which migration is managed. Nonetheless, the social understanding of immigrants is not homogeneous among native community members. Functioning within the theory of social representations, this research aimed to capture the differences between the representations of migrants experienced by distinctive groups of native residents, and their relation to the experience of community (Sense of Community - SoC) and ethnic prejudice. Following a quali-quantitative approach, 494 inhabitants of Nardo (51% female), a town in Southern Italy, were asked to fill in a questionnaire including a words association task and measures of SoC, modern prejudice and the perception of impact of immigration on SoC. The dataset was submitted to the analysis of similarity through SIMI2...
Abstract:. In our opinion the study of poverty has to be considered essential for social psycholo... more Abstract:. In our opinion the study of poverty has to be considered essential for social psychologists today; their efforts should be devoted to obtain fast and direct social benefits. We think that the main theoretical problem is represented by the "re-definition " of the object "poverty". The pilot phase of this research is based on three separate studies carried out with different samples. The aim of the research is to get acquainted with attitudes, perceptions and the social representation of poverty. In order to get data as "pure " as possible, only children entered the study. So the obtained results will set up the basis for a wider research project. Social psychologists must face strongly the problem of poverty. Their aim has to be devoted to obtain results characterized by an immediate heuristic value and quick social effects. Nevertheless, social studies on poverty have not yet reached a realistic phase in Italy. The European Community approach...
La reflexión propuesta en las páginas siguientes tiene como objetivo retornar a las prácti- ca... more La reflexión propuesta en las páginas siguientes tiene como objetivo retornar a las prácti- cas operacionales de reconocimiento en el campo de situaciones de comunicación com- plejas centradas en la reciprocidad. La perspectiva epistemológica propuesta es la de la psicología social socioconstructivista. El marco teórico-metodológico es el de las represen- taciones sociales. A partir del rol de los actores involucrados en el proceso, en el ensayo se describen las tres distintas clases de variables que, en opinión de los autores, influyen en el reconocimiento mutuo: las variables psicológicas, las variables cognitivas y las variables sociales. Las dimensiones subyacentes de cada una de las variables consideradas se ana- lizan en detalle, subrayando los posibles efectos sobre las prácticas sociales relacionadas con los mismos. Estos muestran claramente que las influencias múltiples que entran en juego en la “situación comunicativa” de reconocimiento producen una realidad c...
Social representations theory offers a useful framework to analyse the construction of lay explan... more Social representations theory offers a useful framework to analyse the construction of lay explanations of social risks The current study used this theoretical framework to investigate lay explanations of the COVID-19 outbreak Risk psychology generally focuses on individual perceptions and cognitive errors or the notion of the fallibility of human information processing According to Moscovici, society is not a source of information, but of meanings People, on topics of interest, construct questions and look for answers, rather than merely perceiving and processing obtained information Social psychologists, therefore, cannot be interested in risk responses as erroneous or correct, nor as false, deficient, or biased Instead, they must be concerned with how social awareness of risk is built, in other words, how and why people need to co-construct social representations of such a risk To identify the structure and content of COVID-19 SRs, we used a non-probabilistic sample composed by s...
Electronic Journal of Applied Statistical Analysis, 2017
In recent years, medical care has come a long way thanks to technological improvements in diagnos... more In recent years, medical care has come a long way thanks to technological improvements in diagnostics and treatment. Healthcare providers have developed many new care pathways, improving the organisation of care processes. In this context, the care pathway reduces the patient’s choices, and the relationship between the health professional and the patient is less personal; the main drawback of this is that it could lead to dehumanisation of the patient. In 2015, the Local Health Unit of Naples (ASL NA1) set up the “Humanisation” project with the aim of accepting the patient as unique – as a human being – in care pathways. In this paper, we analyse the features of health professionals’ satisfaction related to various aspects of a training course for health workers involved in the Humanisation project. We use a recent implementation of classification trees for ordered categorical response variables in order to identify the most relevant determinants of satisfaction. The results show th...
The aim of the present study is to investigate how children think culture, in the theoretical per... more The aim of the present study is to investigate how children think culture, in the theoretical perspective of the Moscovici’s (1961) Social Representations. The research was carried out in Naples (Italy) on 138 pupils of two lower secondary schools. According to the Community Profile of the City of Naples (Comune di Napoli, 2012), through a non random judgment sampling, the interviewees were divided into two different subsamples: mid-high economic status and mid-low economic status. The main purpose was to explore the influence of participants’ status differences on their representation of the object. Research methodology is based on the Drawing Technique that is considered one of the best tool to interview developmental age subjects (Galli, Nigro & Poderico, 1989; Galli & Fasanelli, 1995; ). Effectively, the drawing represents the most powerful and direct way of children expression. Participants were asked “to draw culture”, then to comment on their drawings and in the end to define...
Simple Summary In recent years, a remarkable number of studies have investigated entomophagy from... more Simple Summary In recent years, a remarkable number of studies have investigated entomophagy from different perspectives. Nevertheless, the theoretical framework of social representations (SRs) has never been used. SRs are organized sets of opinions, knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs about a social object—such as novel foods—co-constructed and shared by a social group. The present research is the first attempt to study entomophagy in the theoretical and methodological framework of SRs. We followed a double trajectory corresponding to two different ways to imagine the contribution of SRs to entomophagy studies. The first one focuses on the role of SRs in the social construction of meanings attached to entomophagy and on their introduction in individuals’ and groups’ thinking frameworks. The second proposes SRs as predictors, even if non-deterministic, of consumers’ behaviors. The results stimulate consideration of social knowledge and cultural variables in food studies using the theo...
Simple Summary Feeding the world in a sustainable way has become a very important topic in both s... more Simple Summary Feeding the world in a sustainable way has become a very important topic in both scientists’ and policymakers’ agenda, in order to limit the repercussions of traditional food systems on planet resources. Edible insects have already proven to be safe for the environment and with a high nutritional value, but Westerners are still reluctant towards this novel food. Therefore, the aims of this paper are twofold, and were tested on a sample of 202 Italian consumers. On one hand, we aimed to further develop a recently validated psychological instrument, the Entomophagy Attitude Questionnaire (EAQ), by combining it with a measure of perceived risk. On the other hand, we wanted to test whether different animals fed with insects would be accepted by consumers. Our results clearly show that the perceived risk does not significantly improve the predictive validity of EAQ, while, with respect to the second aim, we found that beef and pork reared with insects were less accepted th...
ABSTRACT This study demonstrated that it is possible to differentiate wild boars living in habita... more ABSTRACT This study demonstrated that it is possible to differentiate wild boars living in habitats with different animal densities by the measurement of oxidative stress markers. Therefore, reactive oxygen metabolites, the antioxidant barrier, i.e., the biological antioxidant potential and the antioxidative power (OXY-Adsorbent), as well as cortisol were measured in freely ranging wild boars. In two different areas of a State Forest in the Campania Region (Italy), 42 freely ranging, managed wild boars were captured with a corral trap, and blood samples were collected. The wild boars were divided by age (>1 year old and <1 year old) and sex (male and female). Animals in one area showed significantly higher values of oxidative stress parameters than those living in the other area. The annual boar censuses of areas highlighted a higher population density in the first area than in the second one, and this would explain the results obtained. Since the health or nutritional status of animals is reflected by oxidative stress, wild boars in areas with higher animal densities may live under worse conditions than animals in areas with lower densities which becomes evident by measuring oxidative stress markers. As cortisol in blood is only reflecting a short period, the measurement of oxidative stress level may be a better indicator to evaluate the living conditions of wild boars.
The overall objective of this study is to improve the usability of the SWOT analysis. The ultimat... more The overall objective of this study is to improve the usability of the SWOT analysis. The ultimate goal is to create a procedure that can overcome its limitations by integrating it with the Hierarchised evocations technique. Specifically, respondents will be asked to express themselves in three different steps: 1. freely associating five words to each of the factors (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) 2. verbally justifying the choice of each of the evoked terms; 3. classifying them according to the importance attributed. The output is a body of items treatable qualitatively and two quantitative indicators for each associated element: its frequency of appearance and the score of importance accorded to it. The intersection of these criteria, by using a similarity analysis and cognitive salience index, will identify weight, role and interdependence in respondents cognitions about each SWOT’s factor.
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