There are several reasons why adolescence is interesting. It is in this phase that an individual finds herself fully facing the external world: basically equipped with the kind of social cognition that s/he has acquired at home, at school and through the media during childhood, s/he has now to meet a host of other, diverse views of what “reasonable,” “appropriate,” or “expected” courses of thought and emotions are, in the wild with friends and peers, romantic or sexual partners, teachers and employers, and the society at large. Furthermore, she is also expected, both at home and in the external world, to have a wholly new degree of control over such courses. While the idea that the development of social cognition still progresses after infancy (and possibly throughout the life span) is clearly gaining consensus in the field, the literature building on it is still scarce. One of the reasons for this probably is that most tests used to study it focus on its basic component, namely theory of mind, and have been mostly devised for us with children; therefore, they are not suitable to deal with the hugely increasing complexity of social and mental life during adolescence and adulthood. Starting from a review of the literature available, we will argue that the development of social cognition should be viewed as a largely yet-to-be-understood mix of biological and cultural factors. While it is widely agreed upon that the very initial manifestations of social life in the newborn are largely driven by an innate engine with which all humans are equally endowed, it is also evident that each culture, and each individual within it, develops specific adult versions of social cognition.

In this paper we present a new hypothesis on the evolution of autistic-like and schizotypal personality traits. We argue that autistic-like and schizotypal traits contribute in opposite ways to individual differences in reproductive and mating strategies, and have been maintained – at least in part – by sexual selection through mate choice. Whereas positive schizotypy can be seen as a psychological phenotype oriented to high-mating effort and good genes displays in both sexes, autistic-like traits in their non-pathological form contribute to a male-typical strategy geared toward high parental investment, low-mating effort, and long-term resource allocation. At the evolutionary-genetic level, this sexual selection hypothesis is consistent with Crespi and Badcock's “imprinted brain” theory of autism and psychosis; the effect of offspring mating behavior on resource flow within the family connects sexual selection with genomic imprinting in the context of human biparental care. We conclude by presenting the results of an empirical study testing one of the predictions derived from our hypothesis. In a sample of 199 college students, autistic-like traits predicted lower interest in short-term mating, higher partner-specific investment, and stronger commitment to long-term romantic relations, whereas positive schizotypy showed the opposite pattern of effects.

We will outline a theory of agency cast in theoretical psychology, viewed as a branch of a non-eliminativist biology. Our proposal will be based on an evolutionary view of the nature and functioning of the mind(s), reconsidered in a radically subjectivist, radically constructivist framework. We will argue that the activities of control systems should be studied in terms of interaction. Specifically, what an agent does belongs to the coupling of its internal dynamics with the dynamics of the external world. The internal dynamics, rooted in the species' phylogenetic history as well as in the individual's ontogenetic path, (a) determine which external dynamics are relevant to the organism, that is, they create the subjective ontology that the organism senses in the external world, and (b) determine what types of activities and actions the agent is able to conceive of and to adopt in the current situation. The external dynamics that the organism senses thus constitute its subjective environment. This notion of coupling is basically suitable for whichever organism one may want to consider. However, remarkable differences exist between the ways in which coupling may be realized, that is, between different natures and ways of functioning of control systems. We will describe agency at different phylogenetic levels: at the very least, it is necessary to discriminate between non-Intentional species, Intentional species, and a subtype of the latter called meta-Intentional. We will claim that agency can only be understood in a radically subjectivist perspective, which in turn is best grounded in a view of the mind as consciousness and experience. We will thus advance a radically constructivist view of agency and of several correlate notions (like meaning and ontology).

Socio-constructivist perspectives on adult education, as well as many practitioners in the field, assume that the teacher's interpersonal attitudes influence the process of knowledge construction on the part of the participants. The aim of this paper is to contribute to an empirical evaluation of this view, and in particular: (i) to understand whether the actions enacted by an educator toward learners may be taken as local cues of her underlying general interpersonal attitudes in and about the situation; (ii) to try to describe such behaviours and to gather them into meaningful clusters; (iii) to explore possible differences in the general interpersonal attitudes of novice vs. expert educators; (iv) to correlate such attitudes with the learners' behaviours. Fifteen training courses for adults, each involving different educators, participants and topics, were observed. All the courses took place in classrooms in the city of Torino, Italy. Each course was simultaneously observed by three independent judges. Factor analysis led to the identification of four main interpersonal attitudes of the educators, namely favouring cooperation, directivity, flexibility, and focusing on the group. These attitudes were then correlated to indexes of the participants' levels of attention, participation and understanding. The results corroborate the hypothesis that the interpersonal attitudes of the educators correlate with the mental attitudes of the learners. In particular, a cooperative orientation appears to foster the conditions for the construction of new knowledge. The two subgroups of expert and novice educators achieved different levels of effectiveness. Overall, our findings support the idea that learning is a process of knowledge transformation that takes place within an interpersonal context.

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The main objective of this study was to analyze, in a sample of female healthcare workers in Italy, the training needs to improve positive relationships in the healthcare organization. To better understand these needs, perceived workplace bullying and its consequences in terms of professional commitment and well-being were analyzed from a descriptive and quantitative perspective (or mixed-methods analysis). A questionnaire was completed online in a healthcare facility in northwestern Italy. The participants were 231 female employees. The quantitative data showed that, on average, the sampled population perceived a low burden of WPB. The majority of the sample expressed moderate engagement at work and moderate perception of psychological well-being. It is interesting to note that one element seemed to be overarching in the responses to the open-ended questions: communication, which emerged as a problematic element that affects the entire organization. The research data provide useful evidence for intervention in favor of an environment that helps to recognize the phenomenon and intervene in time, offering the possibility of accepting the discomfort and fatigue of healthcare workers and offering useful interventions to the individual and the team.

Questo articolo ha come oggetto l'esposizione dei risultati di una ricerca sulle caratteristiche personali e sul comportamento lavorativo degli innovatori in Italia. Lo studio è stato svolto in due fasi, attraverso l'uso integrato di tecniche quantitative e qualitative. I risultati hanno messo a fuoco le motivazioni, la personalità e le capacità distintive degli innovatori: dalla propensione al rischio, al rifiuto dell'autorità, fino all'autostima. Inoltre, la ricerca ha analizzato il comportamento lavorativo degli innovatori descrivendolo in tre principali pattern d'azione, dalla generazione dell'idea alla sua promozione e implementazione. Nel mettere in evidenza la presenza di alcune variabili contestuali, come l'appartenenza di genere e il settore economico, la ricerca mira a scardinare la rappresentazione sociale che descrive l'innovatore come "genio", in luogo di una visione in cui l'innovazione è una qualità diffusa dell'azione sociale.