This dissertation examines social cognitive processes that promote perceived inclusion of outgroup members in the human group. We first review the literature on social categorization, highlighting the role of multiple and complex categorisations, as social cognitive processes reducing intergroup prejudice. Then, we review research on dehumanisation, addressing antecedents and consequences of this tendency to exclude the “others” from the human group, assessing that research is needed to address the construens role of categorisation in including outgroups in the human group. The first line of research pursued in this contribution investigates the effectiveness of multiple categorisation as a human-enhancing mechanism towards outgroups at stake. Study 1 shows that perceiving members of a rival University along multiple categorical dimensions enhances the tendency to attribute them human traits. Study 2, involving a highly threatening outgroup, that is, immigrants, goes further beyond previous findings showing that multiple categorisation increases not only attribution of human traits to the target, but also supports for policies in defense of outgroup members’ health. Furthermore, de-categorisation as well as perceived threat from immigrants explains the relationship between categorisation and their inclusion in the human group. The second line of research extends the issue of social inclusion of outgroups, through attribution of humanness, by investigating counter-stereotypical (vs. stereotypical) expectations of others. Across three studies we provide evidence that counter-stereotypical vs. stereotypical category combinations elicits more positive and less stereotypical judgments towards different outgroups and more interestingly, the attribution of higher humanness to unrelated outgroups. Furthermore, the extension of humanising outcomes to different discriminated outgroups is explained by an increase of cognitive flexibility, such as the inhibition of reliance on heuristic thoughts. In the general discussion, we highlight the relevance of our findings in the contexts of impression formation, groups perception and intergroup relationships.

Se realizaron tres estudios cualitativos que tuvieron como propósito conocer las representaciones que ha construido la población general, los pacientes oncológicos y los profesionales de la salud, sobre el cáncer, la quimioterapia y el trasplante de médula ósea y realizar un análisis sobre las semejanzas y diferencias entre ellos. Se realizó en la ciudad de Bogotá (Colombia) con 55 personas: 20 pacientes con cáncer en proceso de trasplante de médula ósea, 20 personas no diagnosticadas con cáncer y 15 personas que trabajan en la atención de pacientes con cáncer. Se realizó una entrevista en profundidad con todos los participantes y asociaciones libres, clásicas y por sustitución sobre las palabras “cáncer”, “quimioterapia” y “trasplante de médula”. Los datos conseguidos se analizaron a la luz de la Teoría de las Representaciones Sociales (TRS). El análisis de la información siguió la técnica de análisis cualitativo de contenido para encontrar significados simbólicos y construir, denominar y definir categorías. Para los tres grupos el cáncer es una enfermedad terrible, que puede llevar a la muerte. El personal de salud y la población general creen que la enfermedad genera terror, angustia y miedo. Los pacientes tienen conciencia de la gravedad y del temor consecuente por una enfermedad que lo cambia todo, produce sufrimiento, dolor, obliga a depender de alguien y puede conducir a la muerte. El personal de salud considera que los pacientes lo pueden vivir como un castigo y la población general que puede ser la consecuencia de estilos de vida poco saludables. Para todos, la quimioterapia es un tratamiento para la enfermedad, que por un lado presenta efectos colaterales difíciles y visibles y que producen sentimientos negativos de temor y de angustia y al mismo tiempo constituye una opción y posibilidad de curación. El Trasplante de Médula Ósea representa para todos una oportunidad. / The present study consists of three qualitative studies whose purpose was to know the representations constructed by the general population, by oncological patients and health professionals, regarding cancer, chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant. This study also carried out an analysis of similarities and differences between them. It was done in Bogotá (Colombia) with 55 people: 20 patients with cancer in process for bone marrow transplant, 20 people without cancer diagnosis and 15 people who work with patients with cancer. An in-depth interview was performed with each of the participants, as well as free, classical and by substitution associations of the words “cancer”, “chemotherapy” and “bone marrow transplant”. The data obtained was analyzed in light of the Theory of Social Representations (TSR). The analysis of the information followed the research technique of qualitative analysis of content in order to find symbolic significances and to construct, to denominate and to define categories. For the three groups, cancer is a terrible disease that could lead to death. Health personnel and the general population believe that the disease creates terror, anxiety and fear. Patients are aware of the seriousness and the consequent fear triggered by a disease that changes everything, produces suffering, pain, obliges them to depend of someone else and that could lead to death. Health professionals consider that patients can live cancer as a punishment and the general population believes that it can be the consequence of unhealthy life habits. For all, chemotherapy is a treatment for the disease that, one the one hand, produces difficult and visible collateral effects and creates negative feelings of fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, constitutes an option and a possibility for healing. The bone marrow transplant represents, for all of them, an opportunity to live.

Esta investigación tuvo como objetivo general develar las representaciones sociales sobre la Medicina Popular en tres grupos poblacionales, pacientes oncológicos (n=100), familiares de los pacientes (n=25) y miembros del equipo de salud (n=26). Para ello, se realizaron tres estudios cualitativos con cada grupo poblacional y un cuarto en el que se describen las similitudes y las diferencias entre ellos en relación con el objeto de representación. En general, se utilizaron entrevistas en profundidad, ejercicios de asociaciones libres y grupos focales (7 con 62 pacientes). Resultados: paciente oncológico: Medicina Popular representada como una salida optimista a la angustiante situación que está viviendo frente al cáncer; una apuesta a la vida. Para la familia: una contra capaz de mantener con vida y fortaleza al paciente y para el equipo de salud, una realidad incombatible de los pacientes y de la familia, que tiene efecto placebo sobre ellos y que está relacionada con el pensamiento mágico religioso, la fé y la ignorancia de quienes la realizan. En cuanto a las diferencias, el paciente y la familia consideran que la Medicina Popular es una alternativa en la que depositan su fé y confianza; el personal de salud no cree en sus efectos sobre el cáncer y la considera como estafa y engaño para el paciente. En las similitudes, todos coinciden en que es una alternativa, generadora de esperanza, basada en compuestos naturales que le permiten al paciente contribuir a la curación del cáncer y a sobrellevar el malestar provocado por la quimioterapia. Finalmente, se presentan conclusiones generales, se discuten algunos de los hallazgos y la importancia de las RS de la Medicina Popular y su impacto sobre la atención y la calidad de vida del paciente y se plantean algunos interrogantes que podrían favorecer el desarrollo de una línea de investigación en el tema. / This research aimed to analyze social representations of folk medicine in three population groups, cancer patients (n=100), patients' families (n=25) and members of the health care team (n=26). To this end, three qualitative studies were conducted, one with each population group; a fourth study was focused in describing the similarities and differences between the three groups in relation to the object of representation. Methodology: in-depth interviews were used, free association exercises, and focus groups (7 with 62 patients). Results: For cancer patients, folk medicine is represented as an optimistic exit from the desperate situation they are living against cancer and a commitment for life. For the family, this is a counter able to maintain life and strength for cancer patients. For the health team, a reality for patients and family, with a placebo effect on them, that definitely applies to the religious magic thinking, faith and ignorance of those who perform these practices. As to the differences, the patient and the family believe that folk medicine is an alternative in which they place their faith and trust, whereas health care team does not believe on its supposed effects on cancer and considered it as fraud and deception for the patient. In terms of similarities, all agree that folk medicine is an alternative, generating hope, based on natural compounds that allow patients to contribute to cancer cure and overcome the discomfort of chemotherapy. Finally, some general conclusions, where we discuss some of the findings, focusing on the importance of the RS of folk medicine and its impact on health and quality of life of patients and some questions were raised that may favor the development of a new line of research on the topic.

The latter part of the 20th century was a period characterized by a fundamental demographic transition of western society. This substantial and structural demographic change proposes several challenges to contemporary society and fosters the emergence of new issues and challenges. Among these, none is more crucial than the comprehension of the mechanisms and the processes that lead people to positive aging. Rowe and Kahn’s model of successful aging highlights the interplay between social engagement with life, health, and functioning for a positive aging experience. Other systemic models of successful aging (Kahana et al., 1996; 2003; Stevernik et al., 2006) emphasize the role of internal and external resources for attaining positive aging. Among these, the proactive coping strategies are indicated as important active strategies for avoiding the depletion of resources, counterbalancing the declines and maintaining social and civic involvement. The study has analyzed the role of proactive coping strategies for two facets of positive aging, the experience of a high social well-being and the presence of personal projects in fundamental life domains. As expected, the proactive coping strategies, referred to as the active management of the environment, the accumulation of resources and the actualization of human potentials are confirmed as positive predictors of high level of social well-being and of many personal projects focused on family, culture, leisure time, civic and social participation. Perceived health status give a significant contribution only to the possession of many personal projects. Gender and level of school education give also a significant contribution to these two dimensions of positive aging, highlighting how positive aging is rooted not only in the possession of personal resources, but also in historical models of education and in positive longitudinal chains related to early development.

People tend to automatically mimic facial expressions of others. If clear evidence exists on the effect of non-verbal behavior (emotion faces) on automatic facial mimicry, little is known about the role of verbal behavior (emotion language) in triggering such effects. Whereas it is well-established that political affiliation modulates facial mimicry, no evidence exists on whether this modulation passes also through verbal means. This research addressed the role of verbal behavior in triggering automatic facial effects depending on whether verbal stimuli are attributed to leaders of different political parties. Study 1 investigated the role of interpersonal verbs, referring to positive and negative emotion expressions and encoding them at different levels of abstraction, in triggering corresponding facial muscle activation in a reader. Study 2 examined the role of verbs expressing positive and negative emotional behaviors of political leaders in modulating automatic facial effects depending on the matched or mismatched political affiliation of participants and politicians of left-and right-wing. Study 3 examined whether verbs expressing happiness displays of ingroup politicians induce a more sincere smile (Duchenne) pattern among readers of same political affiliation relative to happiness expressions of outgroup politicians. Results showed that verbs encoding facial actions at different levels of abstraction elicited differential facial muscle activity (Study 1). Furthermore, political affiliation significantly modulated facial activation triggered by emotion verbs as participants showed more congruent and enhanced facial activity towards ingroup politicians’ smiles and frowns compared to those of outgroup politicians (Study 2). Participants facially responded with a more sincere smile pattern towards verbs expressing smiles of ingroup compared to outgroup politicians (Study 3). Altogether, results showed that the role of political affiliation in modulating automatic facial effects passes also through verbal channels and is revealed at a fine-grained level by inducing quantitative and qualitative differences in automatic facial reactions of readers.

The theme “Belongingness” has a central role in the current debate on Community Psychology and in daily life. To try to understand the consequences of these changes, the research focuses on the concept of Sense of Community. In fact, Sense of Community has always been a central tool (Sarason, 1974; MacMillan & Chavis, 1986) to study communities (McMillan, 2011; Nowell & Boyd, 2011) and for a long time has represented positive values and something to aspire to. However, current debates indicate that Sense of Community is an outmoded concept and underline the problematic issue of “promotion of Sense of Community” in contexts of multi culture. The aim of the present research is to analyze Sense of Community in context of multi culture, as we consider that it can still be a fundamental tool to study and understand communities. In particular we are interested in understanding the role of Multiple Sense of Community (Brodsky, 2009) on Identity and Wellbeing (and its dimensions). We focused on a specific context, the Station Zone in Reggio Emilia, that is characterized by high levels of cultural diversity and different social problems (Giovannini & Vezzali, 2011). The research is developed and divided into two parts. The first part consists of an exploratory qualitative study that analyzes meanings of community among leaders of different ethnic groups living in the Station Zone. The second part consists of a “General Model” study and four parallel studies to analyze Multiple Sense of Community in different ethnic groups (Albanians, Moroccans, Chinese and Italians. The results indicate the different role of Multiple SOC in the relation between Identity and Wellbeing, in particular the relevance of Relational SOC and its different implications. Moreover, the factor “culture” represents an significant element in order to consider differences among ethnic groups.

Humans learn to trust new partners by evaluating the outcomes of repeated interpersonal interactions. However, available prior information concerning the reputation of these partners may alter the way in which outcomes affect learning. This thesis combines for the first time behavioral, computational, psychophysiological and neural models in a direct comparison of interaction-based and prior-based decision-to-trust mechanisms. Three studies are presented, in which participants played repeated and single trust games with anonymous counterparts. We manipulated several conditions: whether or not reputational priors were provided, the probability of reciprocation (trustworthiness) of each counterpart, and the time-horizon of the relationships. The thesis addresses several challenges involved in understanding the complex behavior of people in social contexts, by investigating whether and how they integrate reputation into decisions to trust unfamiliar others, by designing ways to combine reputation information and observed trustworthiness into unified models, and by providing insight into information on the brain processes underlying social cognition. Numerous models, algorithms, game theoretical and neuroscientific methods are used to examine these questions. The thesis presents several new reinforcement learning (RL) models and explores how well these models explain the behavioral and neural interactions between trust and reputation. The performance of the new models was tested using experiments of varying complexity. These experiments showed that model-based algorithms correlate better with behavioral and neural responses than model-free RL algorithms. More specifically, when no prior information was available our results were consistent with previous studies in reporting the neural detection of parametric estimates of RL models within the bilateral caudate nuclei. However, our work additionally showed that this correlation was modified when reputational priors on counterparts are provided. Indeed participants continued to rely on priors even when experience shed doubt on their accuracy. Notably, violations of trust from counterparts with high pro-social reputations elicited both stronger electrodermal responses and caudate deactivations when priors were available than when they were not. However, tolerance to such violations appeared to be mediated by priors-enhanced connectivity between the caudate nucleus and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which was anti-correlated with retaliation rates. Moreover, in addition to affecting learning mechanisms, violation of trust clearly influenced emotional arousal and increased subsequent recognition of partners who had betrayed trust.

In this thesis I will talk about social robots, their appearance, and people’s concerns about potential negative impacts that social robotics technology could have on humans and their identity. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of why people fear social robots, and what the role of humanlike appearance is within this process. Social robots represent a new, fascinating technology. Research in social robotics not only develops new and better social robots but also tries to understand and prevent eventual problems that could arise when people and robots coexist. Moreover, the relations and reactions to social robots, especially those who highly resemble humans, is also an interesting topic from a social psychology point of view. Taking up professor Ishiguro’s words, developing androids opens up the question of “what is human?”. The study of psychological processes related to machines that imitate real persons allows us to know more about ourselves as human beings.

Technology has a great impact on our everyday lives; computers, smart devices, sensors and digital technology in general, try to communicate with us to accomplish some task. Each step of the communication however, requires understanding of the future behavioral utterance, deciding on what is the circumstance and the social context, and finally predicting the individual’s needs. Even if computers are so deeply involved in our daily lives, they lack basic social skills that would allow for natural communication. We believe automatic personality recognition will provide computers with an essential social notion, improving the quality of services, such as in intelligent tutoring systems or information retrieval systems among many other uses. Over the past few years, researcher in social computing have shown that personality trait recognition from nonverbal behavior is feasible, yet, the accuracy rate never exceeds a certain level, due to a phenomenon called within-person variability. This means that individuals may vary their behavioral manifestation according to the situational context in which they are in. In this thesis, we propose a shift from the traditional personality trait theory, to an approach which incorporates the personality fluctuations. This new perspective defines personality as dynamic episodes, the so called personality states, which relate to situational factors. Based on this property, we define the notion of social situations and propose a fully data-driven approach based on the Topic Modeling theory. The active situational characteristics that emerge from the model are interpreted according to their interrelation to the personality states fluctuations. We also present an automatic framework based on topic modeling, which handles dynamic spatio-temporal patterns of behavior and aims to predict the semantic meaning of the situational patterns, in meaningful situations, without the need of expert annotators.

People commonly attribute more uniquely human characteristics to their in-group than to out-groups but do not differentially attribute the characteristics that we share with other animals. This process is called out-group de/infra-humanization. Up to now it has been conceptualized mainly as a motivated phenomenon serving many intergroup functions. Research so far has not investigated the possibility that animalistic de/infra-humanization might also have cognitive determinants. My research sought to fill this gap in the literature by suggesting that out-group infra-humanization can be conceived as an illusory correlation that people create between groups which represent (at least in one’s own experience) the majority and humanness, which is a quality unique to and shared by all human beings. Recent research on illusory correlation explains this phenomenon in terms of Kruschke’s (1996, 2001, 2003) Attention Theory of category learning (AT). AT proposes that, when learning about multiple groups, the features of the majority group are learned earlier than the features of the minority group. Once the features of the majority group are learned, attention is shifted to learn about the minority group. Impressions of the second-learned group form around those features that most clearly differentiate it from the first-learned group. Since the in-group often has a majority status and being uniquely human is a generally shared attribute, this model would suggest that we tend to associate humanness with the in-group. In turn, the association of humanness with the second-learned group (out-group) would be inhibited. Moreover, the out-group is more likely to be associated with the less common comparative attribute (i.e., non-uniquely human), strengthening out-group infra-humanization. Three experiments support this explanation of the infra-humanization effect as a result of associating humanity with the in-group. In Studies 1 and 2, we investigated whether out-group infra-humanization can result from the way people perceive and process information in case of illusory correlation where no real differences exist between the majority and minority groups. In Study 3, we investigated whether group identification modulates the basic illusory correlation effect. Implications for de/infra-humanization, illusory correlation, and stereotype formation are discussed.