Emotional design e genetica dello stile in campo automotive: studio qualitativo e quantitativo delle linee di carattere

La figura del designer detiene un ruolo chiave nella progettazione di un nuovo prodotto: a lui spetta l'importante compromesso fra scelte ingegneristiche, di mercato e di stile. Lo studio qui condotto analizza da un punto di vista qualitativo e quantitativo le linee di carattere che delineano il profilo base di un'autovettura, in riferimento al particolare segmento automobilistico ed al suo stile. In tal modo si vuole porre una base alla "genetica dello stile", ovvero la caratterizzazione matematica dello stile.

Emotional contagion in consecutive interpreting: An empirical study with novice interpreters

It has recently been noticed that interpreters tend to converge with their speakers’ emotions under a process known as emotional contagion. Emotional contagion still represents an underinvestigated aspect of interpreting and the few studies on this topic have tended to focus more on simultaneous interpreting rather than consecutive interpreting. Korpal & Jasielska (2019) compared the emotional effects of one emotional and one neutral text on interpreters in simultaneous interpreting and found that interpreters tended to converge emotionally with the speaker more when interpreting the emotional text. This exploratory study follows their procedures to study the emotional contagion potentially caused by two texts among interpreters in consecutive interpreting: one emotionally neutral text and one negatively-valenced text, this last containing 44 negative words as triggers. Several measures were triangulated to determine whether the triggers in the negatively-valenced text could prompt a stronger emotional contagion in the consecutive interpreting of that text as compared to the consecutive interpreting of the emotionally neutral text, which contained no triggers—namely, the quality of the interpreters’ delivery; their heart rate variability values as collected with EMPATICA E4 wristbands; the analysis of their acoustic variations (i.e., disfluencies and rhetorical strategies); their linguistic and emotional management of the triggers; and their answers to the Italian version of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) self-report questionnaire. Results showed no statistically significant evidence of an emotional contagion evoked by the triggers in the consecutive interpreting of the negative text as opposed to the consecutive interpreting of the neutral text. On the contrary, interpreters seemed to be more at ease while interpreting the negative text. This surprising result, together with other results of this project, suggests venues for further research.