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Negli ultimi anni l'Ordine delle Psicologhe e degli Psicologi della Liguria ha indagato la salute psicologica dei cittadini liguri, a fronte di un crescente malessere psicologico e un eleva-to utilizzo di antidepressivi nella popolazione ligure rispetto alla popolazione nazionale (Rap-porti SISM 2015 ? 2018). Lo studio attuale riporta i dati di due rilevazioni su campioni indi-pendenti relative al benessere psicologico dei cittadini liguri prima e durante la pandemia da COVID-19, tramite l'utilizzo di una batteria di test psicometrici online. I risultati suggeriscono che la pandemia abbia avuto un impatto sul benessere dei cittadini. In particolar modo si è os-servato un aumento di possibili disturbi depressivi e la presenza di disturbo post-traumatico da stress. Nonostante una diminuzione del benessere psicologico percepito, non si è osservato un aumento della proporzione di individui che riferiscono di essersi rivolti a servizi di supporto psicologico, in particolare per quanto riguarda gli uomini, che si rivolgono a tali servizi in mi-sura nettamente minore rispetto alle donne. É stato inoltre rilevato che le fasce più scolarizzate della popolazione tendono a mostrare una intenzione maggiore di rivolgersi a professionisti della salute mentale.

This study investigates the relations of resilience with coping, personality traits, emotional intelligence, sense of coherence and maladaptive personality traits.The study employs network analysis techniques to the study of resilience, showcasing how these methods can estimate a model that is simple to interpret while still retaining the most important relations and that can even suggest the direction of causality despite using a cross-sectional design (N = 305).The results highlight several important variables that should be considered for fostering resilience, foremost among them the use of positive reappraisal coping, sense of coherence, and the social management aspect of emotional intelligence.The results successfully replicated known associations between resilience and other psychological constructs (emotional intelligence, personality, sense of coherence, coping) and shed light on relations between resilience and maladaptive personality traits. Network analysis considered all these constructs together, so as to take into account the complex pattern of relations between them and offer a bird's eye view of the whole network of associations centred on resilience. The resulting model is parsimonious and easy to interpret while still striving to preserve the complexity of the variables' interrelations.

In the present study we analyzed how attitudes toward touch have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic in an Italian sample, through two different studies: in the first we contacted participants of the Italian validation study of the Touch Avoidance Questionnaire, asking them to take part in a follow-up study (N = 31, 64.5% women, age 42.58 ± 15.15); in the second we recruited a new sample of 717 people (73.92% women, age 34.25 ± 13.11), comparing it to the full validation sample of the Touch Avoidance Questionnaire (N = 335, 64.48% women, age = 35.82 ± 14.32) to further investigate the relationship between the pandemic, stress responses, fear of contagion, anxiety, and attitudes toward touch. Overall, we found higher post-pandemic scores for touch avoidance toward strangers and family members and lower scores in touch avoidance toward friends of either gender, along with a slight increase in anxiety and stress. Touch avoidance was also positively related to anxiety and/or stress levels except for touch avoidance toward same-sex friends, for which the relationship with anxiety was negative. Surprisingly, we found that young people were the most anxious, despite older people being more at-risk of dying from COVID-19. Women were slightly more stressed out. COVID-19-related fears were significant predictors of touch avoidance toward partners, friends and strangers, but not of touch avoidance toward family. The results suggest that touch avoidance increased during the pandemic (except toward same-sex friends), together with anxiety and stress levels, but the change was relatively small.

This study reports the outcomes of a survey investigating the beliefs and self-reported behaviours of a sample of 238 in-service school teachers in Italy and Spain concerning their self-regulated professional learning about the design of learning interventions, an activity generally referred to as Learning Design (LD). The study adopts the lens of the 4C Framework for Self-Regulated Professional Learning, which distinguishes between Consume, Create, Connect and Contribute behaviours. The results indicate that all four Cs are deemed important by respondents, but there are statistically significant differences between perceived importance and behaviours, especially for the two Cs that can be termed 'altruistic' (Connect and Contribute). As for the 'individualistic' behaviours (Consume and Create), the gap between perceived importance and practice is narrower, especially for Create. The main conclusion is that, at least in the teaching populations of the two countries involved, the participatory culture of LD is far from being a reality, despite being strongly advocated in the literature. To this end, the authors believe that to achieve truly collaborative professionalism, responsive actions should be directed especially towards removing motivational and emotional barriers hindering 'altruistic' behaviours.

The 4Cs framework, concerning self-regulated professional learning in knowledge intensive domains, is the lens through which participatory practices in learning design are investigated in this paper. The framework identifies four types of participatory behaviours: Consuming, Creating, Connecting and Contributing. A survey involving 117 Italian practicing teachers reveals that they regard all the 4Cs as important, but self-reported behaviours do not align with such beliefs. This misalignment is most significant for Connecting and Contributing behaviours (herein called altruistic behaviours). As for Consuming and Creating (individualistic behaviours), the former is rather scant while the latter is the most practiced, despite a wealth of research addressing the need to make Learning Designs reusable. Besides, the majority of the interviewees do not know the most well-known learning design tools produced by academic research. These data reveal limited impact of learning design research and indicate the way ahead for promoting teachers’ participatory practices.

Digital technologies and social media platforms have been used in museum communication for over a decade now, and Holocaust museums have increasingly adopted them in their modes of commemoration and provision of educational content. Nevertheless, very limited research has been conducted into the potential of social media as new memory ecologies. In this exploratory study, we conceive social media platforms as socio-technical-ecological systems whereby users develop and engage with memory practices of the Holocaust. We adopt a networked socio-ecological approach to analyse how a sample of Holocaust museums (N = 69) develop practices of digital Holocaust memory in social media. The institutions are analysed in terms of "size" (small, medium, or large), how they differ in their attitudes towards these practices, and to what extent they circulate Holocaust memory on social media. The study adopts multiple quantitative approaches and combines the results of a survey with a set of social media metrics analysing how museums engage on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube in terms of generated content, interactivity, popularity, and type of content. Results show that museums have an overall positive attitude towards social media although some concerns were expressed, mostly by smaller institutions; they tend to use mostly Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and to share educational content and information about the museum's activities. However, despite a tendency to aggregate a large number of fans and followers, especially in the case of larger institutions, interaction with users remains limited. Prospects for more interactive participation and its implications are also discussed.

The goal of this work is to provide evidence for the cognitive objectification of sexualized targets via a change blindness paradigm. Since sexual objectification involves a fragmented perception of the target in which individuating features (i.e., the face) have less information potential than sexualized features (i.e., body parts), we hypothesized that changes in faces of sexualized targets would be detected with less accuracy than changes in faces of nonsexualized targets. Conversely, we expected that changes in body parts would be detected with higher accuracy for sexualized than nonsexualized targets. These hypotheses were supported by the results of two studies that employed a change blindness task in which stimuli with changes both to faces and bodies of sexualized and nonsexualized images were presented. Unexpectedly, the hypothesized effects emerged both for female and male targets.

This paper presents an empirical study to investigate students’ perspectives and attitude towards distance-learning at the university level in Iraq. Universities were forced to convert from face-to-face (f2f) learning to fully virtual due to the coronavirus covid-19 pandemic. The transition was within two weeks, which probably causes some challenges students might encounter due to this rapid transition. This study aims to highlight any challenges students might face. This would help prevent such challenges in the future time, which could ensure a smooth and seamless learning process over the internet. A mixed methods approach was used with data being gathered using a questionnaire technique with 79 questions; multichoice, scales and open-ended questions; this paper focuses on the quantitative data only. 2746 students responded to this questionnaire from different age groups and different study levels. A set of four challenges’ themes is introduced in this paper, which was driven based on the results of this study. Themes include infrastructure related, pedagogy related, context related, and self-support related.

Social touch is essential in relationships and well-being, but the unique personal experience of touch is not assessed and taken into account in health and social care services. The pleasantness of gentle stroking is influenced by gender, toucher genre, toucher familiarity, culture, and age. Moreover, pleasantness is influenced by touch avoidance, the attitude toward interpersonal touch. The aim of this article is to present the translation, adaptation, and validation in Italian of two scales to measure touch avoidance. For translation and validation, we selected the most used scale, the Touch Avoidance Measure (TAM) and a more recent scale, the Touch Avoidance Questionnaire (TAQ). Confirmatory factor analyses reported good model fit for the TAM [comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.947, Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) = 0.940, root-mean-square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.065] and excellent model fit for the TAQ (CFI = 0.954, TLI = 0.950, RMSEA = 0.058). Internal consistency was high for all subscales, except the TAQ "Stranger" subscale. One-month test-retest reliability ranged from 0.67 to 0.90 for each subscale. Lastly, convergent validity between the TAM and TAQ was also found to be high. We conclude that the TAM and TAQ can be used to assess touch avoidance with Italian samples. The instrument can be used to support healthcare professionals and to assess attitudes toward touch in individuals with interpersonal difficulties.

Language scientists have broadly addressed the problem of explaining how language users recognize the kind of speech act performed by a speaker uttering a sentence in a particular context. They have done so by investigating the role played by the illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs), i.e., all linguistic elements that indicate the illocutionary force of an utterance. The present work takes a first step in the direction of an experimental investigation of non-verbal IFIDs because it investigates the role played by facial expressions and, in particular, of upper-face action units (AUs) in the comprehension of three basic types of illocutionary force: assertions, questions, and orders. The results from a pilot experiment on production and two comprehension experiments showed that (1) certain upper-face AUs seem to constitute non-verbal signals that contribute to the understanding of the illocutionary force of questions and orders; (2) assertions are not expected to be marked by any upper-face AU; (3) some upper-face AUs can be associated, with different degrees of compatibility, with both questions and orders.

Formative assessment is regarded as one of the main challenges in MOOC research and practice. While MOOC participants need formative assessment and feedback to self-regulate their own learning, providing timely and personalised feedback to large cohorts of students poses issues in terms of scalability and sustainability that require designers to work out technological solutions to produce effective feedback. This paper puts forward a proposal for a type of feedback which is particularly suited to assess non declarative knowledge, like critical thinking about a complex subject. The feedback proposed relies on the power of comparison with peers' opinions and practice, and is complementary to the most well-known technique of peer review, which requires some degree of synchronicity between participants. The proposed feedback consists in visualising a table containing the answers and behaviours of individual participants side-by-side to descriptive statistics of the analogous data concerning the whole cohort. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected to investigate self-reported usefulness and potential of the feedback. While usefulness was statistically higher the mid-point of the scale, no significant difference was found when considering the nature of data (answers to surveys vs actions carried out) as an independent variable. A few suggestions on how to improve this feedback were also identified.

La pandemia por el COVID-19 tomó al mundo por sorpresa en muchos aspectos. Uno de los campos más afectados es la educación, en México millones de estudiantes cambiaron alaprendizaje en línea de un día para otro. En este documento se presentan los resultados de un cuestionario aplicado a profesores universitarioscon la finalidad de entender su percepción acerca de este cambio. Participaron 187 maestros, principalmente del estado de Jalisco (51%) y al menos un profesor de 25 de los 32 estados de la República Mexicana. Los principales resultados muestran que, con esta experiencia, los profesores han cambiado su perspectiva acerca de la educación en línea, mostrando su interés por utilizar esta modalidaden el futuro, y considerándolasustentable y viable. Sin embargo, también extrañan el salón de clase; la falta delaboratorios y la interacción personal, y la desigualdad económica son las principales desventajasde la educación a distancia.

Detecting the emotional state of others from facial expressions is a key ability in emotional competence and several instruments have been developed to assess it. Typical emotion recognition tests are assumed to be unidimensional, use pictures or videos of emotional portrayals as stimuli, and ask the participant which emotion is depicted in each stimulus. However, using actor portrayals adds a layer of difficulty in developing such a test: the portrayals may fail to be convincing and may convey a different emotion than intended. For this reason, evaluating and selecting stimuli is of crucial importance. Existing tests typically base item evaluation on consensus or expert judgment, but these methods could favor items with high agreement over items that better differentiate ability levels and they could not formally test the item pool for unidimensionality. To address these issues, the authors propose a new test, named Facial Expression Recognition Test (FERT), developed using an item response theory two-parameter logistic model. Data from 1,002 online participants were analyzed using both a unidimensional and a bifactor model, and showed that the item pool could be considered unidimensional. The selection was based on the items' discrimination parameters, retaining only the most informative items to investigate the latent ability. The resulting 36-item test was reliable and quick to administer. The authors found both a gender difference in the ability to recognize emotions and a decline of such ability with age. The PsychoPy implementation of the test and the scoring script are available on a Github repository. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).