Affective norms for italian words in older adults: Age differences in ratings of valence, arousal and dominance

In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a less-curved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging. Figure

Age-related effects on spatial memory across viewpoint changes relative to different reference frames

Remembering object positions across different views is a fundamental competence for acting and moving appropriately in a large-scale space. Behavioural and neurological changes in elderly subjects suggest that the spatial representations of the environment might decline compared to young participants. However, no data are available on the use of different reference frames within topographical space in aging. Here we investigated the use of allocentric and egocentric frames in aging, by asking young and older participants to encode the location of a target in a virtual room relative either to stable features of the room (allocentric environment-based frame), or to an unstable objects set (allocentric objects-based frame), or to the viewer's viewpoint (egocentric frame). After a viewpoint change of 0$,^{circ}$ (absent), 45$,^{circ}$ (small) or 135$,^{circ}$ (large), participants judged whether the target was in the same spatial position as before relative to one of the three frames. Results revealed a different susceptibility to viewpoint changes in older than young participants. Importantly, we detected a worst performance, in terms of reaction times, for older than young participants in the allocentric frames. The deficit was more marked for the environment-based frame, for which a lower sensitivity was revealed as well as a worst performance even when no viewpoint change occurred. Our data provide new evidence of a greater vulnerability of the allocentric, in particular environment-based, spatial coding with aging, in line with the retrogenesis theory according to which cognitive changes in aging reverse the sequence of acquisition in mental development

How Does Featural Salience Affect Semantic Control Processes? A Preliminary Study

Patients with multimodal semantic impairment following stroke (referred to here as ‘semantic aphasia’, SA) are highly sensitive to the cognitive control demands of the task being performed and poor at inhibiting strongly associated distracters and focusing on less dominant aspects of meaning. Here, using feature selection tasks, we tested the role played by a semantic measure of featural salience on the control processes in healthy participants (Experiment 1) and SA patients (Experiment 2). Healthy participants showed a worse performance when the distracter feature was highly salient and the target feature was less salient for the concept, i.e., when there was an interference with voluntary selection of the target feature (Experiment 1). Consistent with these results, the SA patients showed a poorer performance than older controls when the target feature was weakly related to the concept (Experiment 2). In line with the feature-based models of the semantic memory, we discuss these preliminary results in term of greater demands of controlled semantic retrieval when the features are weakly related to the concept in the semantic network

Online search trends and word-related emotional response during COVID- 19 lockdown in Italy: a cross-sectional online study

Background. The strong and long lockdown adopted by the Italian government to limit COVID-19 spreading represents the first threat-related mass isolation in history that can be studied in depth by scientists to understand individuals' emotional response to a pandemic. Methods. We investigated the effects on individuals' mental wellbeing of this long-term isolation by means of an online survey on 71 Italian volunteers. They completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and Fear of COVID-19 Scale and judged valence, arousal, and dominance of words either related or unrelated to COVID-19, as identified by Google search trends. Results. Emotional judgments changes from normative data varied depending on word type and individuals' emotional state, revealing early signals of individuals' mental distress to COVID-19 confinement. All individuals judged COVID-19-related words to be less positive and dominant. However, individuals with more negative feelings and COVID-19 fear also judged COVID-19-unrelated words to be less positive and dominant. Moreover, arousal ratings increased for all words among individuals with more negative feelings and COVID-19 fear but decreased among individuals with less negative feelings and COVID-19 fear. Discussion. Our results show a rich picture of emotional reactions of Italians to tight and 2-month long confinement, identifying early signals of mental health distress. They are an alert to the need for intervention strategies and psychological assessment of individuals potentially needing mental health support following the COVID-19 situation

No grammatical gender effect on affective ratings: evidence from Italian and German languages

In this study, we tested the linguistic relativity hypothesis by studying the effect of grammatical gender (feminine vs. masculine) on affective judgments of conceptual representation in Italian and German. In particular, we examined the within- and cross-language grammatical gender effect and its interaction with participants’ demographic characteristics (such as, the raters’ age and sex) on semantic differential scales (affective ratings of valence, arousal and dominance) in Italian and German speakers. We selected the stimuli and the relative affective measures from Italian and German adaptations of the ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words). Bayesian and frequentist analyses yielded evidence for the absence of within- and cross-languages effects of grammatical gender and sex- and age-dependent interactions. These results suggest that grammatical gender does not affect judgments of affective features of semantic representation in Italian and German speakers, since an overt coding of word grammar is not required. Although further research is recommended to refine the impact of the grammatical gender on properties of semantic representation, these results have implications for any strong view of the linguistic relativity hypothesis

Vaporwave: la prima scena musicale nata nel web. anacronismi audiovisivi, tra ironia, nostalgia e memes

Youth (sub)cultures and music scenes have usually been bound to geographic and social contexts. Yet, as the Internet became more ubiquitous in everyday practices and interactions, it has started to appear as the epicenter of trends and aesthetics which themselves portray new subjectivities. The main case is that of vaporwave, an Internet-born music genre and aesthetic. Gaining traction online around 2011 and reaching popularity across social media and digital platforms in the subsequent years, vaporwave is peculiar for its audio-visual anachronism. Its most recurrent visual elements include ‘80s and ‘90s technological artefacts, early digital graphics, classic sculptures, Japanese characters, exotic and metropolitan landscapes. Sonically, it heavily relies on samples from ‘80s and ‘90s semi forgotten pop, smooth jazz, new age and muzak, usually slowed down, looped and altered. Vaporwave is characterized by ambiguity, not only in its bizarre anachronism, but especially for what concerns its supposed political stance: addressing in almost grotesque ways late capitalism utopianism and obsolete technologies, together with cheesy muzak, vaporwave unmasks its hollowness; at the same time, though, its ironic critique seems distant and passive, showing a sense of disillusion and detached look at society. Moreover, vaporwave is exemplar insofar as it is based upon media and cultural archaeology, drawing on the past to act on and reshape cultural memory through its foregrounding of minor, obsolete or forgotten products, both technological and musical. Vaporwave visual aesthetics eventually became autonomous and spread as memes across the Internet, while the music has been losing popularity in more recent years. Nevertheless, vaporwave is a pivotal element in contemporary pop culture, as it may be considered the first music scene to fully grow, develop and rise to fame online. As such, Vaporwave is the first scene to be born into and designed for the Internet

The Stroop legacy: A cautionary tale on methodological issues and a proposed spatial solution

The Stroop task is a seminal paradigm in experimental psychology, so much that various variants of the classical color-word version have been proposed. Here we offer a methodological review of them to emphasize the importance of designing methodologically rigorous Stroop tasks. This is not an end by itself, but it is fundamental to achieve adequate measurement validity, which is currently hindered by methodological heterogeneity and limitations. Among the several Stroop task variants in the literature, our methodological overview shows that the spatial Stroop task is not only a potentially methodologically adequate variant, which can thus assure measuring the Stroop effect with the required validity, but it might even allow researchers to overcome some of the methodological limitations of the classical paradigm due to its use of verbal stimuli. We thus focused on the spatial Stroop tasks in the literature to verify whether they really exploit such inherent potentiality. However, we show that this was generally not the case because only a few of them (1) are purely spatial, (2) ensure both all the three types of conflicts/facilitations (at the stimulus, response, and task levels) and the dimensional overlaps considered fundamental for yielding a complete Stroop effect according to the multiple loci account and Kornblum's theory, respectively, and (3) controlled for low-level binding and priming effects that could bias the estimated Stroop effect. Based on these methodological considerations, we present some examples of spatial Stroop tasks that, in our view, satisfy such requirements and, thus, ensure producing complete Stroop effects

lmeEEG: Mass linear mixed-effects modeling of EEG data with crossed random effects

Background: Mixed-effects models are the current standard for the analysis of behavioral studies in psycholinguistics and related fields, given their ability to simultaneously model crossed random effects for subjects and items. However, they are hardly applied in neuroimaging and psychophysiology, where the use of mass univariate analyses in combination with permutation testing would be too computationally demanding to be practicable with mixed models. New method: Here, we propose and validate an analytical strategy that enables the use of linear mixed models (LMM) with crossed random intercepts in mass univariate analyses of EEG data (lmeEEG). It avoids the unfeasible computational costs that would arise from massive permutation testing with LMM using a simple solution: removing random-effects contributions from EEG data and performing mass univariate linear analysis and permutations on the obtained marginal EEG. Results: lmeEEG showed excellent performance properties in terms of power and false positive rate. Comparison with existing methods: lmeEEG overcomes the computational costs of standard available approaches (our method was indeed more than 300 times faster). Conclusions: lmeEEG allows researchers to use mixed models with EEG mass univariate analyses. Thanks to the possibility offered by the method described here, we anticipate that LMM will become increasingly important in neuroscience. Data and codes are available at osf.io/kw87a. The codes and a tutorial are also available at github.com/antovis86/lmeEEG