The social representation and social action effect of critical issues: autonomic system and self-report measures

By combining words and images that impact emotions and generate empathetic storytelling, advertising (ADV) has evolved into a form of communication for promoting consumer awareness, positive social change, and ADV-related decisional processes, even on topics of high-social relevance such as crisis communication. This study explored consumers' emotional and cognitive responses to crisis-related ADVs using implicit (autonomic) and explicit (self-report) measurements. Nineteen participants watched twelve high-impact social communications about Covid-19, personal health, safety, and prosociality, while autonomic and self-report data were collected. Personal health, safety, and prosociality had higher skin conductance than Covid-19 stimuli, indicating higher arousal and engagement. Personal health reported lower heart rate variability values than Covid-19, suggesting greater emotional reactions for personal health topics, but also lesser mental load for Covid-19 stimuli. Self-report results confirmed autonomic findings. In conclusion, communications about personal health, safety, and prosociality generate higher emotional impact and allow for effective storytelling that facilitates viewer identification, developing a high level of empathy.

Impact of COVID-19 pandemics on advanced neuroscientific R&D activities: a focus on job age

Notwithstanding the implementation of strategic responses to recover habitual levels of performance and productivity, global data points out that the outbreak and diffusion of COVID-19 have imposed a high cost on research activities. Starting from a national survey investigating the impact of pandemics on Italian research in neuroscience, we here specifically aims at exploring its effects on scientific productivity across junior-to-senior professionals. Data highlighted that, given a generalized decrease of objective markers of scientific productivity (i.e. submitted projects or papers), the extent of such decrease was most notable in junior, mid-level and early senior researchers. Also, subjective measures of impact of the pandemics on professional life and work efficiency revealed a coherent profile, with junior and mid-level research professionals referring the highest perceived impact, while the impact of pandemics at psychological and socio-relational levels was rated almost similarly by researchers with different levels of seniority.