Papers by Raffaella Ida Rumiati
Face proprioception, visual awareness of emotional faces, CFS paradigm
Social odors modulate neural activity during the processing of moral dilemmas Social odors in... more Social odors modulate neural activity during the processing of moral dilemmas Social odors increase the recruitment of emotional areas during accidental dilemmas Social odors do not affect the processing of congruent and instrumental dilemmas Social odors mediate high-level decision-making by increasing emotional experience
The Development of the Internal Body Representation
PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2004
Neural Mechanisms of Imitating Meaningful and Meaningless Actions
Establishing links between abnormal eating behaviours and semantic deficits in dementia
Appetite, Nov 1, 2018
Food Perception and Categorization
Elsevier eBooks, 2017
Abstract The ability to categorize food and nonfood correctly and to distinguish between differen... more Abstract The ability to categorize food and nonfood correctly and to distinguish between different foods is essential for our survival. Because of our omnivore nature and because of the food-rich environment in which we live, categorization processes involving food are particularly complex. The extent of the literature on this subject is an indication of our limited understanding of the mental processes underlying food perception, categorization, and choice. The ability to categorize food requires integration of multisensory information and semantic memory with varying contextual information and is modulated by numerous factors. On the one hand, food features (e.g., energy content, level of transformation) modulate our perceptual and categorization processes; on the other hand, categorization processes are also modulated by the perceiver’s temporary states (e.g., internal states such as hunger) and more lasting characteristics (e.g., body mass index, gender). Thus, food categorization provides a very rich test-case for any model of categorization.
Social Neuroscience, Feb 9, 2017
The role of emotional processes in driving moral choices remains debated. In particular, diminish... more The role of emotional processes in driving moral choices remains debated. In particular, diminished emotional processing and reduced empathy have been associated with unusual high rates of utilitarian responses in moral judgments while, to date, the effects of diminished emotional processing and empathy on moral decision-making have been only partially considered. In this study, we investigated the influence of empathy and alexithymia on behaviour and emotional responses while participants performed a moral decision task. Self-report (valence and arousal ratings) and physiological (skin conductance and heart rate) measures were collected during the task. Results showed that empathy and alexithymia shaped emotional reactions to moral decisions, but did not bias moral choices. The more empathic the participants, the more dilemmas were perceived as unpleasant and arousing, and the greater the increase in skin conductance. Conversely, alexithymia was characterized by a reduced physiological activation during moral decisions, but normal self-report ratings. Heart rate was not modulated by empathy or alexithymia. These results add new evidence to the field of moral decision showing that empathy and alexithymia modulate emotional reactions to moral decision.
The role of the parietal opercula in coding the anatomical component of imitation: a transcranial magnetic stimulation study
Aphasia and limb apraxia are not due to a damage to a unique mechanism: Evidence from a study with left-brain damaged patients
The assessment of utilization apraxia
European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, 1999
Research on food cognition has overlooked that our modern food environment strongly differs from ... more Research on food cognition has overlooked that our modern food environment strongly differs from the environment in which our ancestors lived. In fact, in most cultures today, many decisions about food are made during a trip to the grocery store, where we might ask ourselves: Are these canned tomatoes healthy? but certainly not: Are they edible or toxic? In contrast, our ancestors had to navigate their natural environment to Find and Evaluate the beneficial foods in that environment, while Excluding the costs of consuming something harmful, and finally Decide which entities to eat. We call this the FEED problem and present an innovative perspective on food cognition. We argue that a focus on FEED can bridge the gap between different findings in the field of food cognition and shed a new light on the cognitive and brain mechanisms that drive our food behaviors. It has the potential to promote novel intervention strategies, at a time when the rise of food-related health and environmen...
Impaired processing of conspecifics in Parkinson’s disease
Applied Neuropsychology: Adult, Jun 10, 2022
What's cooking in your mind? Implicit and explicit safety evaluations of unprocessed and processed foods
Appetite, 2021
Food olfactory cues reactivity in individuals with obesity and the contribution of alexithymia
Appetite, 2021
Obesity has been associated with increased reward sensitivity to food stimuli, but a few studies ... more Obesity has been associated with increased reward sensitivity to food stimuli, but a few studies have addressed this issue by using odors. This study investigated whether obesity is associated with increased liking and wanting of food odors and whether alexithymia, a psychological construct characterized by diminished affective abilities, contributes to altered responsiveness to food. Liking and wanting for food and pleasant non-food odors were measured through explicit (self-report ratings) and implicit measures (heart rate and skin conductance) in 23 women with healthy weight (HW) and 20 women with overweight/obesity (OW/OB). Differently from the HW group, the OW/OB group explicitly liked food odors less than non-food odors; but, at the implicit level, there were no differences in heart rate response for both types of odors, indicating that they were equally liked. Moreover, at variance with the HW group, the OW/OB group did not exhibit increased skin conductance response for food compared to nonfood odors. Alexithymia was associated with increased implicit liking and explicit wanting of food odors, in particular in the HW group. These findings show that obesity is characterized by high levels of implicit food liking and low levels of implicit food wanting. Moreover, both affective and motivational responses to food reward seem to be affected by alexithymia, which should be taken into account by studies evaluating the effect of cue exposure intervention for obesity treatment.
Carol Coricelli, Ulrike Toepel, Marie-Laure Bielser, Micah M. Murray, Raffaella I. Rumiati 1 Neur... more Carol Coricelli, Ulrike Toepel, Marie-Laure Bielser, Micah M. Murray, Raffaella I. Rumiati 1 Neuroscience and Society Laboratory, SISSA, Italy; 2 The Laboratory for Investigative Neurophysiology (The LINE), Department of Radiology and Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University Hospital Center and University of Lausanne, Switzerland; 3 Electroencephalography Brain Mapping Core, Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM) of Lausanne and Geneva, Switzerland; 4 Department of Ophthalmology, Jules Gonin Eye Hospital and University of Lausanne, Switzerland; 5 Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University, USA
What makes a food healthy? Sex differences in what is associated to healthiness evaluations
Food Quality and Preference, 2021
Abstract Food healthiness evaluations are important precursors of food choices as health beliefs ... more Abstract Food healthiness evaluations are important precursors of food choices as health beliefs guide a large portion of our food intake. In the present study we investigated the healthiness evaluations of males and females and the extent to which valence, arousal, familiarity, hedonic value, and perceived calorie are associated to the healthiness attributed to different food. Ninety-two healthy normal-weight adults evaluated Low-Calorie foods (e.g., salad) and high-calorie foods (e.g., chips) on valence, arousal, familiarity, hedonic value, perceived calorie content, and healthiness. For both females and males, valence and perceived calorie content are associated with healthiness ratings of low-calorie food as well as with high-calorie food. The more positive and less caloric is considered a food, the more is considered healthy. These are the only dimensions linked to healthiness ratings of low-calorie foods. Instead, high-calorie food healthiness is also associated to its arousal and hedonic value for females while to its familiarity for males. These results highlight key dimensions related to how healthy a food is considered by lay persons. Moreover, they show that different dimensions are associated to healthiness of a food for females and males. Even though there are dimensions associated to healthiness evaluation irrespective of the sex and of the type of food (i.e., valence, perceived calorie content), other dimensions relate only to high-calorie food and are relevant either for females (arousal, hedonic value) or for males (familiarity). Thus, different dimensions could be leveraged to develop sex-targeted interventions depending on the type of food.
Identifying beneficial foods in the environment, while avoiding ingesting something toxic is a cr... more Identifying beneficial foods in the environment, while avoiding ingesting something toxic is a crucial task humans face on a daily basis. Here we directly examined adults’ implicit and explicit safety evaluations of the same foods presented with different degrees of processing, ranging from unprocessed (raw) to processed (cut or cooked). Moreover, we investigated whether individual characteristics (e.g., Body Mass Index, food neophobia and hunger) modulated their evaluations. We hypothesized that adults would associate the processed form of a food with safety more than its unprocessed form since processing techniques, which are ubiquitously applied in different cultures, often reduce the toxicity of foods, and signal previous human intervention and intended consumption. Adults (N = 109, 43 females) performed an implicit Go/No-Go association task (GNAT) online, assessing the association between safety attributes and food images differing on their degree of processing; both unfamiliar...
Individuals in industrialized societies frequently include processed foods in their diet. However... more Individuals in industrialized societies frequently include processed foods in their diet. However, overconsumption of heavily-processed foods leads to imbalanced calorie intakes as well as negative health consequences and environmental impacts. In the present study, normal-weight healthy individuals were recruited in order to test whether associative learning (Evaluative Conditioning, EC) could strengthen the association between food-types (minimally-processed and heavily-processed foods) and concepts (e.g., healthiness), and whether these changes would be reflected at the implicit associations, at the explicit ratings and in behavioral choices. A semantic congruency task with Electroencephalography recordings was used to examine the neural signature of newly acquired food. The accuracy after EC towards minimally-processed food (MP-food) in the SC task significantly increased, indicating strengthened associations between MP-food and the concept of healthiness through EC. At neural l...
Decoding representations of food images within the ventral visual stream
Journal of Vision, 2020
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Papers by Raffaella Ida Rumiati