Covid-19 pandemics has fostered a pervasive use of facemasks all around the world. While they help in preventing infection, there are concerns related to the possible impact of facemasks on social communication. The present study investigates how emotion recognition, trust attribution and re-identification of faces differ when faces are seen without mask, with a standard medical facemask, and with a transparent facemask restoring visual access to the mouth region. Our results show that, in contrast to standard medical facemasks, transparent masks significantly spare the capability to recognize emotional expressions. Moreover, transparent masks spare the capability to infer trustworthiness from faces with respect to standard medical facemasks which, in turn, dampen the perceived untrustworthiness of faces. Remarkably, while transparent masks (unlike standard masks) do not impair emotion recognition and trust attribution, they seemingly do impair the subsequent re-identification of the same, unmasked, face (like standard masks). Taken together, this evidence supports a dissociation between mechanisms sustaining emotion and identity processing. This study represents a pivotal step in the much-needed analysis of face reading when the lower portion of the face is occluded by a facemask.

This article presents two studies that deepen the theme of how soundtracks shape our interpretation of audiovisuals. Embracing a multivariate perspective, Study 1 (N = 118) demonstrated, through an online between-subjects experiment, that two different music scores (melancholic vs. anxious) deeply affected the interpretations of an unknown movie scene in terms of empathy felt toward the main character, impressions of his personality, plot anticipations, and perception of the environment of the scene. With the melancholic music, participants felt empathy toward the character, viewing him as more agreeable and introverted, more oriented to memories than to decisions, while perceiving the environment as cozier. An almost opposite pattern emerged with the anxious music. In Study 2 (N = 92), we replicated the experiment in our lab but with the addition of eye-tracking and pupillometric measurements. Results of Study 1 were largely replicated; moreover, we proved that the anxious score, by increasing the participants’ vigilance and state of alert (wider pupil dilation), favored greater attention to minor details, as in the case of another character who was very hard to be noticed (more time spent on his figure). Results highlight the pervasive nature of the influence of music within the process of interpretation of visual scenes.

The impression of trustworthiness based on someone’s facial appearance biases our subsequent behavior toward that subject in a variety of contexts. In this study, we investigated whether facial trustworthiness also biases the credibility of utterances associated with that face (H1). We explored whether this bias is mitigated by utterances eliciting reasoning, i.e. explanations (as opposed to factual statements; H2). Moreover, we hypothesized that overimposing facemasks on those faces could enhance/reduce utterance credibility due to social value of mask-wearing (H3), and that facemasks could counter the putative credibility bias introduced by facial trustworthiness (H4). If so, this may be either because facemasks remove the visual information necessary for trustworthiness impression (H4a), or because information is less salient, although it can be retrieved under different circumstances (H4b). An online study (N = 159) was conducted to test these hypotheses. In the first task, subjects saw 48 facial pictures coupled with one utterance and judged the truthfulness/falsity of this utterance. In the second task, they saw again 16 of the faces from the previous tasks and were asked to recall whether the associated utterance was true or false. Findings from the first task support H1 and H4, but not H2 and H3. However, in the second task, where the face is the only available cue, the credibility-mitigation bias exerted by facemask disappears, supporting H4b over H4a. Our results confirm the pervasivity of facial trustworthiness impressions in social cognition, and suggest that facemask can mitigate them, or at least their salience.

The paper provides novel theoretical and experimental perspectives on the functioning of linguistic vagueness as an implicit persuasive strategy. It presents an operative definition of pragmatically marked vagueness, referring to vague expressions whose interpretation is not retrievable by recipients. The phenomenon is illustrated via numerous examples of its use in predominantly persuasive texts (i.e., advertising and political propaganda) in different languages. The psycholinguistic functioning of vague expressions is then illustrated by the results of a self-paced reading task experiment. Data showing shorter reading times associated with markedly vague expressions as compared to expressions that are either (a) lexically more precise or (b) made precise by the context suggest that the former are interpreted in a shallow way, without searching for and/or retrieving exact referents. These results support the validity of a differentiation between context-supported vs. non-supported vague expressions. Furthermore, validation of using marked vagueness as a persuasive implicit strategy which reduces epistemic vigilance is provided.

Over recent decades, studies investigating cross-modal correspondences have documented the existence of a wide range of consistent cross-modal associations between simple auditory and visual stimuli or dimensions (e.g., pitch-lightness). Far fewer studies have investigated the association between complex and realistic auditory stimuli and visually presented concepts (e.g., musical excerpts-animals). Surprisingly, however, there is little evidence concerning the extent to which these associations are shared across cultures. To address this gap in the literature, two experiments using a set of stimuli based on Prokofiev’s symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf are reported. In Experiment 1, 293 participants from several countries and with very different language backgrounds rated the association between the musical excerpts, images and words representing the story’s characters (namely, bird, duck, wolf, cat, and grandfather). The results revealed that participants tended to consistently associate the wolf and the bird with the corresponding musical excerpt, while the stimuli of other characters were not consistently matched across participants. Remarkably, neither the participants’ cultural background, nor their musical expertise affected the ratings. In Experiment 2, 104 participants were invited to rate each stimulus on eight emotional features. The results revealed that the emotional profiles associated with the music and with the concept of the wolf and the bird were perceived as more consistent between observers than the emotional profiles associated with the music and the concept of the duck, the cat, and the grandpa. Taken together, these findings therefore suggest that certain auditory-conceptual associations are perceived consistently across cultures and may be mediated by emotional associations.

The attraction effect emerges when adding a seemingly irrelevant option (decoy) to a binary choice shifts preference towards a target option. This suggests that choice behaviour is dynamic, i.e., choice values are developed during deliberation, rather than manifesting some pre-existing preference set. Whereas several models of multialternative and multiattribute decision making consider dynamic choice processes as crucial to explain the attraction effect, empirically investigating the exact nature of such processes requires complementing choice output with other data. In this study, we focused on asymmetrically dominated decoys (i.e., decoys that are clearly dominated only by the target option) to examine the attentional and comparative processes responsible for the attraction effect. Through an eye-tracker paradigm, we showed that the decoy option can affect subjects’ preferences in two different and not mutually exclusive ways: by focusing the attention on the salient option and the dominance attribute, and by increasing comparisons with the choice dominant pattern. Although conceptually and procedurally distinct, both pathways for decoy effects produce an increase in preferences for the target option, in line with attentional and dynamic models of decision making. Eye-tracking data provide further details to the verification of such models, by highlighting the context-dependent nature of attention and the development of similarity-driven competitive decisional processes.