In higher education, the emotional intelligence (EI) of university professors, defined as the ability to perceive, understand, manage and utilize emotions effectively, is increasingly recognized as a pivotal factor in enhancing students’ academic achievement and psychological well-being. However, the scarcity of studies directly linking professors’ EI to students’ well-being highlights a critical research gap. This systematic review investigates how professors’ emotional competencies influence student outcomes—such as academic performance, engagement, motivation, and mental health—and identifies the factors that mediate or moderate these effects. Findings indicate that professors’ EI, particularly empathy, emotional regulation, and interpersonal skills, significantly enhances student engagement, motivation, and academic satisfaction, with indirect effects on psychological well-being. Cultural context, teaching modality (e.g., online vs. in-person), and professors’ age and experience moderate these effects and influence effect sizes. Qualitative synthesis further highlighted contextual gaps in the literature. The limited focus on well-being and outcomes and reliance on self-report measures underscore the need for longitudinal, culturally diverse studies and performance-based EI assessments. The value of this research lies in its potential to inform evidence-based educational practices and institutional policies. By elucidating the role of professors’ EI, the review lays the groundwork for developing faculty training programs aimed at strengthening emotional competencies and fostering inclusive, supportive learning environments that promote student growth and resilience. This is especially relevant given the growing prevalence of stress, anxiety, and disengagement among university students, exacerbated by post-pandemic challenges and academic pressures. Understanding the impact of EI can inform culturally responsive interventions, improve student retention, and enhance institutional effectiveness, thereby addressing a pressing need in contemporary higher education. In today’s rapidly evolving technological, social, and cultural landscape, universities have both the opportunity and the responsibility to act as catalysts for the creation of an educational culture that promotes social well-being. This requires adopting educational and organizational models that prioritize human care and the quality of interpersonal relationships. To be effective, these priorities must be integrated into all university operations, from governance to student support and talent development.

The COVID-19 pandemic launched a challenge on the education system and required schools to make organizational changes in order to continue serving the local community. Essential to this process are support teachers who play a key role as agents of change. Despite their role, the perspectives, desires, and needs of these teachers have since been neglected, despite their centrality in contemporary Italy. Accordingly, the specific aim of this study revolves around supporting teachers’ experiences with digital technologies (i.e., learning applications, telecommunication media, and interactive devices) within a pandemic context, especially technologies used to maintain the educational bond with students with disabilities. Attuned to an interpretative paradigm, this qualitative research has an ethnographic design, which was implemented in a secondary school in a Northern Italian city. Throughout the article, we discuss the three main drawbacks found in fieldwork: (i) the prevailing change in bureaucratic management; (ii) the pervading mind–body binarism in teaching; and (iii) a long-term vision for inclusion being subject to a passive logic of adaptation. Finally, we reflect on some emerging implications. The first points to a necessary move from a rationalistic school management to an alternative model focused more on guaranteeing social justice among educational stakeholders. The second is that the very introduction of a new technology should be aimed at engaging actors whose work has been invisible to date in a school setting to empower them as key agents for change. The third suggests that, to overcome community disaggregation and mind-body binarism, a teacher-researcher figure is needed, a figure with holistic skills in addition to those of a technical nature delivered by institutional training programs.

Insects as food is a recommended cultural shift by the FAO, especially among Western consumers. The objective of this study is to understand those elements, which can most contribute to explaining the desire to eat insects as food. There-fore, we evaluated people's knowledge and beliefs about the benefits deriving from the farming and consumption of insects, for the health of man and the plan-et. Furthermore, we investigated people's perceived credibility towards the main sources of communication that can convey information on insects as food. Final-ly, some suggestions for possible future communication campaigns are presented.

It was 1937 when Alan Turing published his most famous article in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. In this work, for the first time, he presented an idealized description of the mathematical inner workings of such universal machines as would eventually become instantiated in what we now call computers. This extraordinary step in the history of ideas provided a theoretical boon that later on would prove important for the development of the computational theory of mind. According to this theory, the cognitive processes of human beings could be likened to the algorithms that apply to the representations of the external world. Based on this hypothesis, since the middle of the last century, attempts have been made to replicate the functioning of the human mind using a computer. The aim of this article is to present the differences that still exist between humans and intelligent machines. From ELIZA onwards, we have seen several developments including ALICE, up to XiaoIce. Despite the evolution of intelligent machines and the creation of social chatbots in particular, artificial intelligence still has shortcomings that set it apart from man: the way it knows, the lack of consciousness and of agency.

The introduction of new technologies has reshaped both workplaces and learning environments, requiring the development of transversal competences such as adaptability, reflection, and perseverance. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, playful approaches have been increasingly adopted in educational settings to enhance engagement, attention, and motivation, as well as to foster awareness of specific topics. In collaboration with the Cologne GameLab, a game prototype entitled Intergalactic Growth was developed to improve understanding of the growth mindset and to promote perseverance, self-awareness, and critical behavior in the use of ChatGPT. This study has two main objectives: to address the growth mindset from an educational and neuroscientific perspective, and to collect qualitative insights on the prototype’s usability and pedagogical potential. Data were gathered through a focus group and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) with NVivo 14. The findings suggest that Intergalactic Growth effectively stimulates emotional engagement and reflection but requires refinement to enhance its pedagogical impact, particularly concerning feedback authenticity and the integration of ChatGPT.

Widespread use of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated interest in their effect on interpersonal communication. We asked whether face masks modulate posing during selfie-taking and whether they affect the attractiveness of the poser. We collected a dataset of selfie pairs (one with and one without the mask) from a population of university community members. Results replicated well-known posing biases in selfies, including a preference for displaying the left cheek and a sex-related difference in facial prominence. However, these biases were modulated by face masks, which caused a marked increase of frontal poses in comparison to three-quarter poses (for both left- and right-cheek face rotations), and a weaker but still significant increase in facial prominence of both male and female takers. In contrast, beauty ratings did not differ between mask and no-mask selfies by the same individuals. These results support models of selfies as means of non-verbal communication, whereas do not support recent reports that face masks enhance facial beauty. (word count = 170)