Bicocca Open Archive

A Historical Casebook of Wage Formation. Wage Determination and Wage Bargains, 1500–1950

Exploring Body-Specific Associations in Swipe Gestures: A Study on Hand Dominance and Emotional Valence

The Body-Specificity Hypothesis suggests that the area around the dominant hand is perceived positively, contrasting with a negative perception around the non-dominant hand. Given the pervasive use of interactive technologies, our study aimed to investigate body-specific associations in real-world settings, examining whether these are modulated by mainstream digital gestures like swiping. N = 30 right-handed participants (Experiment 1) and N = 30 left-handed participants (Experiment 2) were a...

How are you feeling? Design and testing emotional dictionary for NAO robot to be used with children

This paper presents the development and preliminary evaluation of an emotional dictionary for the NAO humanoid robot, to be used in games activities with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The emotional dictionary integrates multimodal elements, such as gestures, LED eye colours, and speech, to enable the robot to convey positive and negative emotional states during interactive game scenarios. These scenarios are designed to support the development of social and cognitive skills in...

Modulation of autonomic responses to cognitive tasks under acute mental stress

Acute mental stress activates the autonomic nervous system (ANS), modulating physiological parameters. To assess the ANS response, we collected multimodal physiological signals, including electrocardiogram (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and respiratory activity from healthy participants. The experimental protocol was designed to induce a high stress level in one group (STRESS) and low stress in the other (CONTROL), undergoing the same cognitive tasks. Heart rate variability (HRV) indice...