Differences and similarities in the conceptualization of COVID-19 and other diseases in the first Italian lockdown

The geo domain: a review on the conceptualization of geographical and geopolitical entities

Investigating how people represent the natural environment and abstract it into geographical (e.g., mountain) and geopolitical (e.g., city) categories is pivotal to comprehending how they move and interact with the places they inhabit. Yet, the conceptualization of geographical and geopolitical domains has received scant attention so far. To deal with that, we reviewed 50 articles tackling this topic. Most studies have focused on assessing the universality of these concepts-especially geographical ones-mainly using free-listing and ethnophysiographic methods. Current perspectives tend to favor a non-universalistic characterization of these kinds of concepts, emphasizing their high cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variability, especially when compared to other semantic domains. Since geographical and geopolitical features are not pre-segmented by nature, the role of categories imposed by humans is crucial for these concepts. Significantly, their variability does not only depend on "cross" differences: evidence suggests that the cognitive demand requested by the task, idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals such as expertise level, and the typology of inhabited environments are further factors impacting the conceptual flexibility of these domains. Exploring the factors influencing our understanding of geographical and geopolitical categories can provide valuable insights for instructing effective communication policies to enhance sustainable development and address ecological emergencies, taking into consideration diverse cultural backgrounds within different populations.

"I don´t put people into boxes, but…" A free-listing exercise exploring social categorisation of asylum seekers by professionals in two German reception centres

Newly arriving asylum seekers in Germany mostly live in large reception centres, depending on professionals in most aspects of their daily lives. The legal basis for the provision of goods and services allows for discretionary decisions. Given the potential impact of social categorisation on professionals' decisions, and ultimately access to health and social services, we explore the categories used by professionals. We ask of what nature these categorisations are, and weather they align with the public discourse on forced migration. Within an ethnographic study in outpatient clinics of two refugee accommodation centres in Germany, we conducted a modified free-listing with 40 professionals (physicians, nurses, security-personnel, social workers, translators) to explore their categorisation of asylum seekers. Data were qualitatively analysed, and categories were quantitatively mapped using Excel and the Macro "Flame" to show frequencies, ranks, and salience. The four most relevant social categorisations of asylum seekers referred to "demanding and expectant," "polite and friendly" behaviour, "economic refugees," and "integration efforts". In general, sociodemographic variables like gender, age, family status, including countries and regions of origin, were the most significant basis for categorisations (31%), those were often presented combined with other categories. Observations of behaviour and attitudes also influenced categorisations (24%). Professional considerations, e.g., on health, education, adaption or status ranked third (20%). Social categorisation was influenced by public discourses, with evaluations of flight motives, prospects of staying in Germany, and integration potential being thematised in 12% of the categorisations. Professionals therefore might be in danger of being instrumentalised for internal border work. Identifying social categories is important since they structure perception, along their lines deservingness is negotiated, so they potentially influence interaction and decision-making, can trigger empathy and support as well as rejection and discrimination. Larger studies should investigate this further. Free-listing provides a suitable tool for such investigations.

Consensus Paper: Current Perspectives on Abstract Concepts and Future Research Directions

concepts are relevant to a wide range of disciplines, including cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, cognitive, social, and affective neuroscience, and philosophy. This consensus paper synthesizes the work and views of researchers in the field, discussing current perspectives on theoretical and methodological issues, and recommendations for future research. In this paper, we urge researchers to go beyond the traditional abstract-concrete dichotomy and consider the multiple dimensions that characterize concepts (e.g., sensorimotor experience, social interaction, conceptual metaphor), as well as the mediating influence of linguistic and cultural context on conceptual representations. We also promote the use of interactive methods to investigate both the comprehension and production of abstract concepts, while also focusing on individual differences in conceptual representations. Overall, we argue that abstract concepts should be studied in a more nuanced way that takes into account their complexity and diversity, which should permit us a fuller, more holistic understanding of abstract cognition.

Emergence of Covid-19 as a Novel Concept Shifts Existing Semantic Spaces

Conceptual knowledge is dynamic, fluid, and flexible, changing as a function of contextual factors at multiple scales. The Covid-19 pandemic can be considered a large-scale, global context that has fundamentally altered most people's experiences with the world. It has also introduced a new concept, COVID (or COVID-19), into our collective knowledgebase. What are the implications of this introduction for how existing conceptual knowledge is structured? Our collective emotional and social experiences with the world have been profoundly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and experience-based perspectives on concept representation suggest that emotional and social experiences are critical components of conceptual knowledge. Such changes in collective experience should, then, have downstream consequences on knowledge of emotion- and social-related concepts. Using a naturally occurring dataset derived from the social media platform Twitter, we show that semantic spaces for concepts related to our emotional experiences with Covid-19 (i.e., emotional concepts like FEAR)-but not for unrelated concepts (i.e., animals like CAT)-show quantifiable shifts as a function of the emergence of COVID-19 as a concept and its associated emotional and social experiences, shifts which persist 6 months after the onset of the pandemic. The findings support a dynamic view of conceptual knowledge wherein shared experiences affect conceptual structure.

Assessing Interpersonal Proximity Evaluation in the COVID-19 Era: Evidence From the Affective Priming Task

Social proximity has since ever been evaluated as positive. However, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically reduced our social relations to avoid spreading the contagion. The present study aims to investigate people's current assessment of social proximity by using an affective priming paradigm (APP). We hypothesized that if our evaluation of social proximity is positive, then words with positive valence (e.g., relaxed) should be processed faster when preceded by images of social proximity than social distancing. On the contrary, if our evaluation of social proximity is turning negative, then words with a negative valence (e.g., sad) should be processed faster when preceded by images of social proximity than social distancing. To this end, we presented participants with prime images showing line drawings representing humans in situations of proximity or distancing and asked them to evaluate the valence (i.e., positive or negative) of a subsequent target word. In a follow-up session, the same participants evaluated the prime images as being positively or negatively valenced. Results showed that a large subset of participants who rated the prime images of social proximity as positive also processed positive words faster when these were preceded by images of social proximity than social distancing. Conversely, a smaller subset of participants who rated the prime images of social proximity as less positive processed negative words faster when these were preceded by images of social proximity than social distancing. These results suggest individual differences in the assessment of social proximity likely driven by the pandemic.

Cognitive Networks Extract Insights on COVID-19 Vaccines from English and Italian Popular Tweets: Anticipation, Logistics, Conspiracy and Loss of Trust

Monitoring social discourse about COVID-19 vaccines is key to understanding how large populations perceive vaccination campaigns. This work reconstructs how popular and trending posts framed semantically and emotionally COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter. We achieve this by merging natural language processing, cognitive network science and AI-based image analysis. We focus on 4765 unique popular tweets in English or Italian about COVID-19 vaccines between December 2020 and March 2021. One popular English tweet contained in our data set was liked around 495,000 times, highlighting how popular tweets could cognitively affect large parts of the population. We investigate both text and multimedia content in tweets and build a cognitive network of syntactic/semantic associations in messages, including emotional cues and pictures. This network representation indicates how online users linked ideas in social discourse and framed vaccines along specific semantic/emotional content. The English semantic frame of “vaccine” was highly polarised between trust/anticipation (towards the vaccine as a scientific asset saving lives) and anger/sadness (mentioning critical issues with dose administering). Semantic associations with “vaccine,” “hoax” and conspiratorial jargon indicated the persistence of conspiracy theories and vaccines in extremely popular English posts. Interestingly, these were absent in Italian messages. Popular tweets with images of people wearing face masks used language that lacked the trust and joy found in tweets showing people with no masks. This difference indicates a negative effect attributed to face-covering in social discourse. Behavioural analysis revealed a tendency for users to share content eliciting joy, sadness and disgust and to like sad messages less. Both patterns indicate an interplay between emotions and content diffusion beyond sentiment. After its suspension in mid-March 2021, “AstraZeneca” was associated with trustful language driven by experts. After the deaths of a small number of vaccinated people in mid-March, popular Italian tweets framed “vaccine” by crucially replacing earlier levels of trust with deep sadness. Our results stress how cognitive networks and innovative multimedia processing open new ways for reconstructing online perceptions about vaccines and trust.

From Affordances to Abstract Words: The Flexibility of Sensorimotor Grounding

The sensorimotor system plays a critical role in several cognitive processes. Here, we review recent studies documenting this interplay at different levels. First, we concentrate on studies that have shown how the sensorimotor system is flexibly involved in interactions with objects. We report evidence demonstrating how social context and situations influence affordance activation, and then focus on tactile and kinesthetic components in body-object interactions. Then, we turn to word use, and review studies that have shown that not only concrete words, but also abstract words are grounded in the sensorimotor system. We report evidence that abstract concepts activate the mouth effector more than concrete concepts, and discuss this effect in light of studies on adults, children, and infants. Finally, we pinpoint possible sensorimotor mechanisms at play in the acquisition and use of abstract concepts. Overall, we show that the involvement of the sensorimotor system is flexibly modulated by context, and that its role can be integrated and flanked by that of other systems such as the linguistic system. We suggest that to unravel the role of the sensorimotor system in cognition, future research should fully explore the complexity of this intricate, and sometimes slippery, relation.