Clinical Psychology

Introduction. In the introductory part of the course, we will discuss how body and culture influence cognitive activity. Embodied, grounded, and situated theories of cognition will be exposed, together with recent theories and evidence that highlight the influence of cultures and languages on cognition, casting doubts on the universality of cognitive processes. Cognitive processes. After the introduction, we will discuss different cognitive and social processes, showing how they are influenced by our body and by culture/language. 1) Perception We will start with perception, showing how culture (e.g. Western vs. Eastern culture) influences our way of seeing the world. 2) Perception and action, sense of body. We will focus on affordances (the invitations to action that objects transmit to us), as well as how body and culture influence our aesthetic experience. We will then illustrate studies on how we per-ceive our body (sense of body) and of interoception. Then we will concentrate on the attention, showing in light of recent evidence that attentional processes are influenced and modulated by the kind of culture and religion. 3) Categorization. We will overview the main theories of concepts, highlighting that they are often influenced by the as-sumption that universal categories exist. In this framework, we will discuss how categories vary depending on the cul-ture, handling the literature on the categorical deficit and on nativist proposals. 4) Imitation, motor resonance, joint action. We will illustrate the embodied theories on imitation, on social affordances, motor resonance, and joint attention and joint action. We will also talk of the tendency to defer knowledge to others in our societies (knowledge outsourcing) 5) Moral and social norms. We will focus on how our body influences our moral processes, focusing on the Macbeth effect, and on how body and culture influence our notions on possession, ownership, equity. 6) Language and languages. We will illustrate embodied and grounded (EG) theories on language and the problems and challenges that these theories need to address. We will also discuss the recent importance of language studies, also referring to recent developments in artificial intelligence. 7) Concepts and languages. We will focus on the problem of the explanation of abstract concepts (e.g., time) representation, and will contend that these concepts are more influenced than concrete ones by cultures and languages. We will describe the recent spread of neo-whorfian views, according to which the language we speak influences our way of perceiving and organizing the world, and we will examine how different concepts are represented (time, space, odors, colors, numbers) in light of this perspective. We will also discuss studies on recently introduced concepts, such as those related to climate change. 7) Communication, body, and cultures. We will deal with the influence of cultures on verbal and nonverbal communication. We will focus on conversation as a form of joint action, and we’ll address studies that use interactive methods to study dialogue. We will also deal with the difficulties in intercultural exchanges.

Prerequisite for the course is the ability to understand and analyze texts. A good level of critical ability and creativity, the ability to read articles in English as well as the willingness to actively intervene during the lessons will be useful for the course. Indispensable for those attending is the willingness to work in a group, as well as a good level of motivation, curiosity and interest both for the theoretical aspects addressed during the course and for the experimental studies.

Attending A) 2 volumes among the following six ones (many adopt a grounded perspective; the first three books focus on cultures, the fourth and the fifth on concept, language, and interaction during dialogue, and the last two focus on embodied cognition: 1) Prinz, J. (2011). Beyond human nature. How culture and experience shape the human mind. London, New York: Penguin. 2) Kemmerer, D. (2019). Concepts in the brain: The view from crosslinguistic diversity. Oxford University Press. 3) Henrich, Joseph. The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Penguin. 4) Borghi, A.M. The freedom of words: On abstractness and the power of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5) Martin Pickering, Simon Garrod (2021). Understanding dialogue. Language use and social interaction. Cambridge University Press 6) Ellis, R. (2018). Bodies and other objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 7) Caruana, F., Borghi, A.M. (2016) Il cervello in azione. Bologna: Il Mulino B) Article: Apicella, C., Norenzayan, A., & Henrich, J. (2020). Beyond WEIRD: A review of the last decade and a look ahead to the global laboratory of the future. Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(5), 319-329. C) Slides: one week after the presentation in the class the pdf of the slides will will available. Non-attending students D) In addition to the material for attending students, non attending ones will have to read two articles/chapters chosen among the following ones (E = experiment, T = theory): E Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Shariff, A., Rahwan, I., & Bonnefon, J. F. (2020). Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(5), 2332-2337. E Athanasopoulos, P., Bylund, E., Montero-Melis, G., Damjanovic, L., Schartner, A., Kibbe, A., ... & Thierry, G. (2015). Two languages, two minds: Flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation. Psychological Science, 26(4), 518-526 E Barrett, H. C., Bolyanatz, A., Crittenden, A. N., Fessler, D. M., Fitzpatrick, S., Gurven, M., ... & Scelza, B. A. (2016). Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment. Proceedings of the Na-tional Academy of Sciences, 113(17), 4688-4693. T Borghi, A.M., Mazzuca, C., Tummolini, L. (2025). The role of social interaction in the formation and use of abstract concepts. Nature Reviews Psychology. T Borghi, A.M. (2018). Affordances, context and sociality. Synthese. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-018-02044-1. T Borghi, A.M. (2022). Concepts for which we need the others more: The case of abstract concepts. Current directions in psychological Science. T Borghi, Binkofski, Castelfranchi, Cimatti, Scorolli, Tummolini (2017). The challenge of abstract words. Psychological Bulletin, 143(3):263-292. doi: 10.1037/bul0000089. T Borghi, A. M., Barca, L., Binkofski, F., & Tummolini, L. (2018). Abstract concepts, language and sociality: from acqui-sition to inner speech. Phil Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. T Borghi, A. M., De Livio, C., Gervasi, A. M., Mannella, F., Nolfi, S., & Tummolini, L. (2024). Language as a cognitive and social tool at the Time of LLMs. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science. T Boroditsky, L. (2011). How Languages Construct Time. In Dehaene and Brannon (Eds.,) Space, time and number in the brain: Searching for the foundations of mathematical thought. Elsevier. ISBN: 978-0-12-385948-8 E Carstensen, A., Zhang, J., Heyman, G. D., Fu, G., Lee, K., & Walker, C. M. (2019). Context shapes early diversity in ab-stract thought. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(28), 13891-13896. E Constable MD, Bayliss AP, Tipper SP, Spaniol AP, Pratt J, Welsh TN. (2016). Ownership Status Influences the Degree of Joint Facilitatory Behavior. Psychol Sci. 2016 Oct;27(10):1371-1378. E Chrysikou, E. G., Casasanto, D., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2017). Motor experience influences object knowledge. Jour-nal of Experimental Psychology: General. 146(3), 395-408. E D’Ausilio, F. Pulvermüller, P. Salmas, I. Bufalari, C. Begliomini, L. Fadiga (2009) The motor somatotopy of speech perception. Current Biology, 19 (5) (2009), pp. 381–385 E Eskine, K. J., Kacinik, N. A., & Prinz, J. J. (2011). A bad taste in the mouth gustatory disgust influences moral judg-ment. Psychological Science, 22(3), 295-299. E Falcinelli, I., Fini, C., Mazzuca, C., Borghi, A.M. (2024). The TECo Database: Technological and Ecological Concepts at the Interface Between Abstractness and Concreteness. Collabra Psychology, 10 (1): 120327. T Fernyhough, C., Borghi, A.M. (2023). Inner speech as language process and cognitive tool. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 27, 12, 1180-1193. T Fischer, M. H., & Shaki, S. (2018). Number concepts: abstract and embodied. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1752), 20170125. T Gallese V. (2008). Mirror neurons and the social nature of language: The neural exploitation hypothesis. Social Neu-roscience, 2008, 3: 317-333. T Glenberg, A. M., & Gallese, V. (2012). Action-based language: A theory of language acquisition, comprehension, and production. cortex, 48(7), 905-922. T Göbel, S. M., Shaki, S., & Fischer, M. H. (2011). The cultural number line: a review of cultural and linguistic influences on the development of number processing. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42(4), 543-565. T Hommel B. (2015), The theory of event coding (TEC) as embodied-cognition framework, Frontiers in psychology 6: e1318. T Lupyan, G., Dale, R.A.C. (2016). Why are there different languages? The role of adaptation in linguistic diversity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 20(9), 649–660. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.005 T Lupyan, G. & Clark, A. (2015). Words and the World: Predictive Coding and the Language-Perception-Cognition In-terface. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 24, 4, p. 279-284 T Malt, B. C., & Majid, A. (2013). How thought is mapped into words. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Sci-ence, 4(6), 583-597. E Majid, A., & Kruspe, N. (2018). Hunter-Gatherer Olfaction Is Special. Current Biology. E Majid, A., Roberts, S. G., Cilissen, L., Emmorey, K., Nicodemus, B., O’grady, L., ... & Shayan, S. (2018). Differential cod-ing of perception in the world’s languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(45), 11369-11376. E Mazzuca, C., Villani, C., Lamarra, T. Bolognesi, M., Borghi, A.M. (2025, in press). Abstractness impacts conversational dynamics. Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106084. E Paglieri F., Borghi, A.M., Colzato L.S., Hommel B., Scorolli C. (2013). Heaven can wait: How religion modulates tem-poral discounting. Psychological Research. T Rabb, N., Fernbach, P. M., & Sloman, S. A. (2019). Individual Representation in a Community of Knowledge. Trends in cognitive sciences. T Redcay, E., & Schilbach, L. (2019). Using second-person neuroscience to elucidate the mechanisms of social interac-tion. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 20(8), 495-505. E Regier, T., & Kay, P. (2009). Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right. Trends in cognitive sciences, 13(10), 439-446. E Schnall, S., Benton, J., & Harvey, S. (2008). With a clean conscience cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judg-ments. Psychological science, 19(12), 1219-1222. E Siev, J., Zuckerman, S. E., & Siev, J. J. (2018). The Relationship Between Immorality and Cleansing. Social Psychology. E Soliman, T., Gibson, A., & Glenberg, A. M. (2013). Sensory motor mechanisms unify psychology: the embodiment of culture. Frontiers in psychology, 4, 885. E Sulik, J., Rim, N., Pontikes, E., Evans, J., & Lupyan, G. (2025). Differences in psychologists’ cognitive traits are associated with scientific divides. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-15. E Tincher, M. M., Lebois, L. A., & Barsalou, L. W. (2016). Mindful attention reduces linguistic intergroup bias. Mindful-ness, 7(2), 349-360. E B Thompson, SG Roberts, G Lupyan (2020) Cultural influences on word meaning revealed through large-scale se-mantic alignment. Nature Human Behaviour 4 (10), 1029-1038 E Yamaguchi, M., Wall, H. J., & Hommel, B. (2018). Sharing tasks or sharing actions? Evidence from the joint Simon task. Psychological research, 82(2), 385-394. E. B Winter, M Perlman, A Majid (2018). Vision dominates in perceptual language: English sensory vocabulary is op-timized for usage. Cognition 179, 213-220 T Witt, J. K., & Riley, M. (2014). Discovering your inner Gibson: Reconciling action-specific and ecological approaches Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 1353-1370

Non mandatory

Attending The written exam will include open questions on the recommended texts and on the topics covered in class (online slides). The duration of the written test will last two hours and will include 4 open questions, two in which the acquired knowledge will be tested, one in which students will be asked to design an experiment and one in which they will be asked to apply the notions acquired for solving new problems. Non-attending students: written exam and oral exam Immediately after the written exam, carried out together with the attending students, an oral exam is scheduled for non-attending students, aimed at evaluating the knowledge of the additional material. The oral mark will average with the mark of the written exam. In case the teaching takes place remotely, the oral exam will be replaced by a further question of the written exam. Final evaluation Score: To pass the exam, a grade of not less than 18/30 must be obtained. To achieve a score of 30 e honors, the student must demonstrate excellent knowledge of the required topics (maximum 20 points; 2 questions, 10 points each), must demonstrate that they can plan an experiment (maximum 5 points; 1 question) and to apply the acquired knowledge to solve new problems (maximum 5 points; 1 question).

Different teaching modalities will be combined. During the first part of every lesson the teacher will introduce a topic, stimulating the debate (course); in the second part, the students will work on a project in small groups (laboratory). During the first week of the laboratory, the students will receive topics on which to plan short experiments, in line with what was explained during the lecture. From the third week, the students will start to prepare “their own” experiment. They will be divided into small groups and will have to plan and execute the experiment, which will be reported to the class at the end of the course. In order to prepare them for the written exam, there will occasionally be group exercises in which the students will be required to apply the acquired knowledge to new situations (e.g., they will apply their knowledge on motor resonance to plan a clinical intervention) and/or to plan an experiment on a topic selected by the teacher.