Trait emotional intelligence: Evidence from italian adolescents and adults

Emotional intelligence (EI) represents an attribute of contemporary attractiveness for the scientific psychology community. Of particular interest for the present thesis are the conundrum related to the representation of this construct conceptualized as a trait (i.e., trait EI), which are in turn reflected in the current lack of agreement upon its constituent elements, posing significant challenges to research and clinical progress. Trait EI is defined as an umbrella personality-alike construct reflecting emotion-related dispositions and self-perceptions. The Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue) was chosen as main measure, given its strong theoretical and psychometrical basis, including superior predictive validity when compared to other trait EI measures. Studies 1 and 2 aimed at validating the Italian 153-items forms of the TEIQue devoted to adolescents and adults. Analyses were done to investigate the structure of the questionnaire, its internal consistencies and gender differences at the facets, factor, and global level of both versions. Despite some low reliabilities, results from Studies 1 and 2 confirm the four-factor structure of the TEIQue. Study 3 investigated the utility of trait EI in a sample of adolescents over internalizing conditions (i.e., symptoms of anxiety and depression) and academic performance (grades at math and Italian language/literacy). Beyond trait EI, concurrent effects of demographic variables, higher order personality dimensions and non-verbal cognitive ability were controlled for. Study 4a and Study 4b addressed analogue research questions, through a meta-analysis and new data in on adults. In the latter case, effects of demographics, emotion regulation strategies, and the Big Five were controlled. Overall, these studies showed the incremental utility of the TEIQue in different domains beyond relevant predictors. Analyses performed at the level of the four-TEIQue factors consistently indicated that its predictive effects were mainly due to the factor Well-Being. Findings are discussed with reference to potential implication for theory and practice.

Developing a large scale FrameNet for Italian - The IFrameNet experience

In this thesis we present the development and the current status of the IFrameNet project, aimed at the construction of a large-scale lexical semantic resource for the Italian language based on Frame Semantics theories. We will begin by contextualizing our work in the wider context of Frame Semantics and of the FrameNet project, which, since 1997, has attempted to apply these theories to lexicography. We will then analyse and discuss the applicability of the structure of the American resource to Italian and more specifically we will focus on the domain of fear, worry, and anxiety. We will finally propose some modifications aimed at improving this domain of the resource in relation to its coherence, its ability to accurately represent the linguistic reality and in particular in order to make it possible to apply it to Italian.

Dark humour as a culture specific phenomenon: a study in screen translation

The present study aims at analyzing how dark humour as a cinematic genre travels cross-culturally through a specific mode of audiovisual translation, i.e. dubbing. In particular, it takes into consideration the processes involved in dubbing humour from English into Italian as observed in the English- and Italian-language versions of ten British and American dark comedies from the 1940s to the 2000s. In an attempt to identify some of the main mechanisms of the dark humour genre, the humorous content of the films was analyzed in terms of the elements on which specific scenes are based, mainly the non-verbal and verbal components. In the cases in which verbal elements were involved, i.e. the examples of verbally expressed humour, the analysis was concerned with whether they were adapted into Italian and to what effect. Quantification of the different kinds of dark humour revealed that in the sample of dark comedies verbal dark humour had a higher frequency (85.3%) than non-verbal dark humour (14.7%), which partially disconfirmed the first part of the research hypothesis. However, the significance of contextual elements in the conveying of dark humour, both in the form of Nsp VEH (54.31%) and V-V (V+VE) (21.68%), provided support for the hypothesis that, even when expressed verbally, dark humour is more closely linked to context-based rather than purely linguistic humour (4.9%). The second part of the analysis was concerned with an investigation of the strategies adopted for the translation of verbal dark humour elements from the SL (English) into the TL (Italian) through the filter of dubbing. Four translational strategies were identified as far as the rendering of verbal dark humour is concerned: i) complete omission; ii) weakening; iii) close rendering; and iv) increased effect. Complete omission was found to be the most common among these strategies, with 80.9% of dark humour examples being transposed in a way that kept the ST’s function substantially intact. Weakening of darkly humorous lines was applied in 12% of cases, whereas increased effect accounted for 4.6% and complete omission for 2.5%. The fact that for most examples of Nsp VEH (84.9%) and V-AC (V+VE) (91.4%) a close rendering effect was observed and that 12 out of 21 examples of V-AC (PL) (a combined 57%) were either omitted or weakened seemed to confirm, on the one hand, the complexity of the translation process required by cases of V-AC (PL) and V-AC (CS). On the other hand, as suggested in the second part of the research hypothesis, the data might be interpreted as indicating that lesser effort on the translator/adaptor’s part is involved in the adaptation of V-AC (Nsp VEH) and V-V (V+VE). The issue of the possible censorial intervention undergone by examples of verbal dark humour in the sample still remains unclear.

Una e plurima: riflessioni intorno alle nuove espressioni delle donne nella letteratura italiana

Tale lavoro di ricerca ha indagato l’opera di sette scrittrici immigrate in Italia o nate da genitori immigrati che hanno composto in lingua italiana. Esse sono: Christiana de Caldas Brito, Cristina Ubax Ali Farah, Gabriella Kuruvilla, Ingy Mubiayi, Ornela Vorpsi, Laila Wadia, Jarmila Očkayová. La tesi consta di una premessa, un primo capitolo in cui sono riportate le interviste fatte alle scrittrici, un secondo capitolo di analisi dei loro testi, un terzo di riflessioni di teoria letteraria ed un quarto conclusivo. In appendice sono riportate integralmente le interviste.

L'attrazione sessuale: processi psichici e strumenti di indagine. L'adattamento italiano del Cuestionario de Atraccion sexual

The sexual attraction is a complex emotional event, with somatic modifications, that like all the emotions, belongs to the psychic dimension and that, too much simply, can be led back, from a explicative point of view, to biological and psychical causes. The sexual attraction represents a personal experience, that is difficult to record, but of which every adult is able to delineate a correspondence with own “lived”. In the within of biological sciences, many experimental studies were been conducted with the aim to know which chemistries substances and cerebral zones are involved in front of a stimulus assessed like sexually attractive. Contrarily, there are little researches conducted in psychological field, aimed to the understanding the psychical factors, often unconscious, tinged to the subjective processes of sexual attraction: the sexual attraction remains an unexplored psychological event and unprovided of adapted instruments of assessment. The present thesis is oriented in primis to examine the existing scientific literature, in order to provide an exhaustive picture of the sexual attraction and to analyze the instruments of survey available for the empirical assessment of it. Secondly, the thesis is oriented to introduce two studies: the first study is aimed to adapt the Cuestionario de Atracción Sexual - CAS (Fernández ET to, 2006a; 2006b; 2006c) to the Italian language; the second study is aimed to assess the attitudes towards the sexual attraction in a sample of university students, in order to establish if some differences or association with some psychological dimensions (attachment stiles and alexithymia) exist.

Métamorphoses de l'Image des Tartares dans la littérature européenne du XXème siècle

Ce travail doctoral analyse le changement de l’image des Tartares dans la littérature européenne en langue allemande, anglaise, française et italienne du XXe siècle par l’étude de trois figures : la horde mongole, Gengis-khan et Khoubilaï-khan. Il soutient la thèse que, grâce à quelques facteurs historico-culturels comme la remise en question du concept de barbarie, l’essor des totalitarismes, l’ouverture de la Mongolie vers l’Occident, la redécouverte de l’Histoire secrète des Mongols et la fortune de Le divisament dou monde, au cours du XXe siècle, l’image littéraire des gengiskhanides de négative devient positive. Cette étude se compose d’une introduction, de trois chapitres et d’une conclusion. Dans l’introduction, on analyse la formation de l’image des Tartares et son évolution jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle, on retrace les facteurs historico-culturels qui la remettent au goût du jour et en provoquent le changement au XXe siècle et on présente le travail. Dans le premier chapitre, on se penche sur la prosopographie des Tartares dans les textes littéraires du XXe siècle, en la confrontant avec leur représentation dans l’art contemporain. Dans le deuxième chapitre, on étudie la façon des Tartares de se rapporter aux autres au sein de la société dans les textes littéraires du XXe siècle. Dans le troisième chapitre, on examine les lieux des gengiskhanides dans les textes littéraires du XXe siècle. Enfin, dans la conclusion, les données acquises au moyen de l’analyse conduite sont confrontées et interprétées. Le changement de l’image des Tartares va de pair avec une Europe qui, après avoir fait l’expérience de deux guerres mondiales, avoir assisté aux revendications de la décolonisation et avoir introjecté la thèse freudienne du « malaise dans la civilisation », remet en discussion sa façon de concevoir la barbarie et l’Altérité.

Lingua, identità e migrazione: pratiche di translanguaging nella comunità migrante di Cesena

L’aumento dei flussi migratori in diversi paesi europei e la diffusione della globalizzazione su scala mondiale hanno determinato lo sviluppo di società multilingue e multiculturali tra cui quella italiana, che negli ultimi decenni si è rapidamente trasformata in una società “super-diversa”. Questi cambiamenti sociali hanno determinato una svolta anche nella ricerca in ambito sociolinguistico, che descrive e analizza la flessibilità delle pratiche comunicative determinate dalla mobilità e che ha adottato il termine translanguaging per riferirsi all’uso flessibile e dinamico dell’intero repertorio linguistico di un parlante, che include sia elementi verbali che non verbali. Questo progetto di ricerca si propone di esplorare le pratiche di translanguaging della comunità migrante di Cesena (Italia) e di indagare le percezioni dei parlanti in relazione alle loro pratiche e identità multilingue. Attraverso l’analisi qualitativa di interazioni spontanee tra i parlanti ed interviste semi-strutturate, i risultati dell’analisi da un lato evidenziano la flessibilità delle pratiche comunicative dei parlanti multilingue e la spontaneità con cui queste avvengono nella loro quotidianità, dall’altro mettono in luce la connotazione negativa che i parlanti attribuiscono alle proprie pratiche di translanguaging, rivelando l’influenza dell’ideologia del monolinguismo.

Ritradurre il fantastico femminile: scelte e pratiche nel panorama editoriale italiano, con uno sguardo alle opere di Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson e Angela Carter

La presente tesi si concentra sulla tendenza, riscontrata nel panorama editoriale italiano, al repêchage e ritraduzione di letteratura fantastica angloamericana femminile. Il corpus di case studies individuati a tale scopo è costituito da una selezione di testi delle autrici Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson e Angela Carter. Di ogni autrice si sono analizzati il romanzo e il racconto con più pubblicazioni editoriali fra lingua inglese e italiana. Di questi testi si sono esaminate le ritraduzioni italiane, che vanno dal 1958 al 2017, con particolare attenzione alle ritraduzioni degli anni Novanta e Duemila pubblicate dagli editori di cultura. Lo studio prende avvio da un apparato teorico sul problema della ritraduzione e sulle teorie formulate in merito alla letteratura fantastica femminile, coadiuvato da una ricerca all’interno dei cataloghi delle case editrici di cultura che hanno pubblicato le ritraduzioni in esame, confrontati con quelli di tre case editrici di riferimento per quanto riguarda il settore fantastico-gotico. Una seconda parte della ricerca è inoltre dedicata agli studi sulla ricezione e sul paratesto, come ulteriore strumento d’analisi del processo di repêchage editoriale quando coadiuvato dalla pratica ritraduttiva. L’apparato teorico è supportato da una ricerca qualitativa in merito all’evoluzione paratestuale dei testi selezionati e della ricezione degli stessi nel loro contesto originario e d’arrivo. La terza e ultima sezione della ricerca è dedicata all’analisi letteraria dei testi in esame. In questo contesto ha infine un suo spazio lo studio traduttologico contrastivo di una casistica di esempi linguistici tratti dai testi. A partire dall’osservazione delle parabole editoriali delle tre autrici, la presente ricerca si propone dunque di fornire uno sguardo d’insieme sul recente fenomeno del repêchage letterario di opere fantastiche femminili nel panorama editoriale italiano, e di investigare il ruolo e la portata socioculturale che la ritraduzione occupa all’interno di questo processo.

Language and Embodiment: sensory-motor and linguistic-social experience. Evidence on sentence comprehension

In this work I address the study of language comprehension in an “embodied” framework. Firstly I show behavioral evidence supporting the idea that language modulates the motor system in a specific way, both at a proximal level (sensibility to the effectors) and at the distal level (sensibility to the goal of the action in which the single motor acts are inserted). I will present two studies in which the method is basically the same: we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: hand action vs. foot action vs. mouth action) and the effector by which participants had to respond (hand vs. foot vs. mouth; dominant hand vs. non-dominant hand). Response times analyses showed a specific modulation depending on the kind of sentence: participants were facilitated in the task execution (sentence sensibility judgment) when the effector they had to use to respond was the same to which the sentences referred. Namely, during language comprehension a pre-activation of the motor system seems to take place. This activation is analogous (even if less intense) to the one detectable when we practically execute the action described by the sentence. Beyond this effector specific modulation, we also found an effect of the goal suggested by the sentence. That is, the hand effector was pre-activated not only by hand-action-related sentences, but also by sentences describing mouth actions, consistently with the fact that to execute an action on an object with the mouth we firstly have to bring it to the mouth with the hand. After reviewing the evidence on simulation specificity directly referring to the body (for instance, the kind of the effector activated by the language), I focus on the specific properties of the object to which the words refer, particularly on the weight. In this case the hypothesis to test was if both lifting movement perception and lifting movement execution are modulated by language comprehension. We used behavioral and kinematics methods, and we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: the lifting of heavy objects vs. the lifting of light objects). To study the movement perception we measured the correlations between the weight of the objects lifted by an actor (heavy objects vs. light objects) and the esteems provided by the participants. To study the movement execution we measured kinematics parameters variance (velocity, acceleration, time to the first peak of velocity) during the actual lifting of objects (heavy objects vs. light objects). Both kinds of measures revealed that language had a specific effect on the motor system, both at a perceptive and at a motoric level. Finally, I address the issue of the abstract words. Different studies in the “embodied” framework tried to explain the meaning of abstract words The limit of these works is that they account only for subsets of phenomena, so results are difficult to generalize. We tried to circumvent this problem by contrasting transitive verbs (abstract and concrete) and nouns (abstract and concrete) in different combinations. The behavioral study was conducted both with German and Italian participants, as the two languages are syntactically different. We found that response times were faster for both the compatible pairs (concrete verb + concrete noun; abstract verb + abstract noun) than for the mixed ones. Interestingly, for the mixed combinations analyses showed a modulation due to the specific language (German vs. Italian): when the concrete word precedes the abstract one responses were faster, regardless of the word grammatical class. Results are discussed in the framework of current views on abstract words. They highlight the important role of developmental and social aspects of language use, and confirm theories assigning a crucial role to both sensorimotor and linguistic experience for abstract words.

Affordances and Language: How the Level of Object Familiarity modulates the Manipulation and Categorization of Objects across Development

According to much evidence, observing objects activates two types of information: structural properties, i.e., the visual information about the structural features of objects, and function knowledge, i.e., the conceptual information about their skilful use. Many studies so far have focused on the role played by these two kinds of information during object recognition and on their neural underpinnings. However, to the best of our knowledge no study so far has focused on the different activation of this information (structural vs. function) during object manipulation and conceptualization, depending on the age of participants and on the level of object familiarity (familiar vs. non-familiar). Therefore, the main aim of this dissertation was to investigate how actions and concepts related to familiar and non-familiar objects may vary across development. To pursue this aim, four studies were carried out. A first study led to the creation of the Familiar and Non-Familiar Stimuli Database, a set of everyday objects classified by Italian pre-schoolers, schoolers, and adults, useful to verify how object knowledge is modulated by age and frequency of use. A parallel study demonstrated that factors such as sociocultural dynamics may affect the perception of objects. Specifically, data for familiarity, naming, function, using and frequency of use of the objects used to create the Familiar And Non-Familiar Stimuli Database were collected with Dutch and Croatian children and adults. The last two studies on object interaction and language provide further evidence in support of the literature on affordances and on the link between affordances and the cognitive process of language from a developmental point of view, supporting the perspective of a situated cognition and emphasizing the crucial role of human experience.

1945-1973. Il museo monumento dei BBPR a carpi. Il campo politico e culturale di una architettura in memoria della deportazione politica e razziale

Il Museo Monumento al Deportato politico e razziale nel Castello dei Pio a Carpi (MO), a pochi passi dal Campo nazionale della deportazione razziale e politica di Fossoli, è il risultato di un concorso pubblico nazionale bandito nel 1963, frutto dell’impegno civile tra istituzioni, associazioni e intellettuali. Tra questi il gruppo BBPR il quale, in collaborazione con l’artista Renato Guttuso, si aggiudicheranno la vittoria del concorso. Il progetto vincitore, pur apportando alcune modifiche in fase di realizzazione, manterrà la sua impostazione antiretorica, utilizzando un linguaggio rigoroso e astratto. Partendo dalle caratteristiche che rendono quest’opera una struttura unica nel suo genere, obiettivo principale di questa ricerca di Dottorato è quello di restituire una genealogia del Museo Monumento al Deportato politico e razziale dei BBPR, ricostruendo il quadro culturale e politico italiano nel lasso di tempo che intercorre dalla fine della Seconda Guerra Mondiale (1945) e l’anno della sua inaugurazione (1973). Tale approccio metodologico scelto costituisce l’aspetto di novità della ricerca: un punto di vista ancora inedito con cui guardare il Museo-Monumento, differenziandosi, così, dalle più recenti pubblicazioni sullo stesso, le quali si concentrano soprattutto sulle logiche progettuali del Museo. In conclusione, lo scopo di questa tesi è quella di dare una nuova chiave interpretativa al Museo, che sia non solo un arricchimento alla sua conoscenza ma che, altresì, attesti l’esistenza di un’identità, altrettanto unica e irripetibile, della memoria della deportazione nella cultura architettonica italiana presa in esame, frutto di una “cultura condivisa” tra architetti, artisti, scrittori, politici e intellettuali, accumunati dalle tragiche vicende che in quest’opera si vogliono narrare.

Italian higher education students’ perspectives on internationalization at home and their identity as English as lingua franca users

This study aims to explore the Italian students’ perspectives on using English in English-medium instruction (EMI) programs in light of the practices of internationalization at home (IaH) at the University of Bologna (UNIBO) in Italy and further investigates whether these attitudes affect their language identity as English as lingua franca (ELF) users. To serve this aim, a mixed-method approach was adopted to collect quantitative and in-depth qualitative data in two phases through an online survey and a semi-structured interview. A total number of 78 Italian students participated in the survey, out of which 14 participants were interviewed. The findings of the online survey indicated that most participants (92%) held a positive perspective toward the use of English in EMI programs and the findings from the interviews were in line with the results of the survey. However, the purpose of the interviews was to explore the participants’ views on their language identity as ELF users. Thematic analysis of the interviews revealed that students experience emotional, cognitive, and social transitions in EMI programs in response to their shift from a non-EMI to an EMI academic setting. Overall, all the above-mentioned transitions were positive and could lead to personal development. However, it can be concluded that the EMI context provides few opportunities for the emergence of significant new subject positions mediated by English in this study. The focus on students’ perspectives on the use of English in EMI programs can contribute to the improvement in language policy planning and internationalized curriculum design by policymakers and alleviate tensions over the controversial issue of the Englishization of higher education by considering how EMI students perceive their use of English as ELF users not superior standard English users.