Art, Cognition/Creativity and Emotion Research Group (ACErg)

• Research Group Head: Dr Fatima M Felisberti
• Dr Simona Cantarella
• Dr Leonardo Weiss-Cohen
• Dr Giulia Galli
• Dr Chris Hewer
• Dr Sabira Mannan
• Dr Maria Mencia (KSA)
• Dr Cristina Martinelli
• Dr Amanda Rotella
• Professor Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau
• Dr Nora Shaileshkumar Vyas
• Dr Mircea Zloteanu

• Beren Barklam
• Susan Cooper
• Lara Quartel
• Edward White
• Sarah Geisemeyer (completed)
• Angela Medvedeva (completed)
• Wendy Ross (completed)
• Jane Trueman (completed)
• Rose Turner (completed)
• Francesca Zaninotto (completed)
• Zoë McHayle

For details of each of the topics currently being investigated in our laboratories, check the individual pages of our members.

• Art and empirical aesthetics (e.g. visual art, music, literature)
• Behavioural finance (e.g. financial decisions, investments and trading
• Cognition (e.g. memory, vision, perception)
• Creativity, curiosity and serendipity
• Decision making and thinking (e.g. decisions-from-experience, learning, description-experience gap).
• Emotions, empathy and mindreading (e.g. attachment, pet ownership, Theory of Mind in adults)
• Empathy and Theory of Mind
• Face recognition (collaboration, trust, cheating and deception)
• Neurocognition (e.g. hemineglect, dementia, schizophrenia)
• Warning labels and disclaimers

• Senior Research Advancement Fund, £5,000 (SRAF 2021): Enhancing learning with educational audiobooks. Fatima M Felisberti
• Covid-19 Research 2020 – "Recall of handwashing behaviour in hazardous scenarios", £5,000. Fatima M Felisberti
• CResCID 2021 grant – "Individual differences affecting dynamic emotion authenticity perception". Mircea Zloteanu & Fatima M Felisberti
• Marie Skodowska-Curie Horizon 2020 grant, £22,000 – "Quality of experience management in emerging multimedia services". Fatima M Felisberti
• British Academy Small Research Grant. Giulia Galli
• CResCID 2021 grant – "Individual differences affecting dynamic emotion authenticity perception". Mircea Zloteanu
• CResCID grant, Kingston University, £2,785 - project title: 'The effects of social rejection on sense of agency and cognitive control dysregulation in clinical and subclinical anorexia nervosa'. Cristina Martinelli
• Kingston University 1st Grant Scheme, £9,961- project title: 'Sensing your body when overating: interoception and disordered eating in the general population'. Cristina Martinelli
• SPSP Small Research Grant 2021, US$1,500. "Status competition in the workplace: Investigating the relationship between organizational inequality and women's self-sexualization". Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Amanda Rotella
• Early Career Researcher Grant, £4,000."The role of reputation in sequential moral decisions: A meta-analysis of the moral cleaning, moral licensing, foot-in-the-door, and door-in-the-face effects"; Kingston University School of Law, Social & Behavioural Sciences. Amanda Rotella
• Senior Research Advancement Grant, £10,000). "Promoting COVID-19 vaccination among hesitant demographic groups: Moral obligation, threats to autonomy, and perceived legitimacy of public health recommendations". [co-PI] Amanda Rotella
• NCH-NU Research and Learning Development Initiative Grant, US$10,000: Effects of trading frequency and patterns using a simulated realistic stock market trading engine. Leonardo Weiss-Cohen
• BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, £9,500: Researching a gambling warning label's effect on betting behaviour. Manuscript under review at Lancet Public Health. Leonardo Weiss-Cohen
• ING ThinkForward Initiative, €9,100: How to empower people to make better financial decisions. Published in JEP:A. Leonardo Weiss-Cohen

• Kostopoulou, O., Nurek, M., Cantarella, S., Okoli, G., Fiorentino, F., & Delaney, B.C. (2019). Referral decision making of general practitioners: A Signal Detection study. Medical Decision Making, 39 (1).
• Bago et al. [...] Felisberti, F (2022). Situational factors shape moral judgments in the trolley dilemma in Eastern, Southern, and Western countries in a culturally diverse sample. Nature Human Behaviour, 2397-3374
• Felisberti, F (2021). Hedonic preferences to audio and visual stimulation in seniors with cognitive impairments. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 83(3), 1353-1366. 
• Felisberti, F M (2021). Experiences of ugliness in nature and urban environments. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 1–17. 
• Medvedeva, A, Saw, R, Silvestri, C, Sirota, M, Fuggetta, G and Galli, G (2021). Offset-related brain activity in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex promotes long-term memory formation of verbal events. Brain Stimulation, 14(3), 564-570.
• Galli, G, Angelucci, D, Bode, S, De Giorgi, C, De Sio, , Paparo, A, Di Lorenzo, G and Betti, V (2021). Early EEG responses to pre-electoral survey items reflect political attitudes and predict voting behavior. Scientific Reports, 11, 18692.
• Rigoli, F, Martinelli, C and Pezzulo, G (2021). The half-empty/full glass in mental health : a reference-dependent computational model of evaluation in psychopathology. Clinical Psychological Science, 2167-7026.
• Rigoli, F and Martinelli, C (2021). A reference-dependent computational model of anorexia nervosa. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 21, 269-277.
• Rotella, A., Sparks, A. M., Mishra, S., & Barclay, P. (2021). No effect of ‘watching eyes': An attempted replication and extension investigating individual differences. Plos one, 16(10), e0255531.
• Rotella, A. M., & Mishra, S. (2020). Personal relative deprivation negatively predicts engagement in group decision-making.
• Weiss-Cohen, L., Newall, P.W.S., & Ayton, P. (2021). Persistence is futile: Chasing of past performance in repeated investment choices. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
• Weiss-Cohen, L., Konstantinidis, E., & Harvey, N. (2021). Timing of descriptions shapes experience-based risky choice. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 34(1), 66-84.
• Zloteanu, M., & Krumhuber, E. G. (2021). Expression authenticity: The role of genuine and deliberate displays in emotion perception. Frontiers in Psychology, 4001. 
  
• Zloteanu, M., Krumhuber, E. G., & Richardson, D. C. (2018). Detecting genuine and deliberate displays of surprise in static and dynamic faces. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1184.

Research Group open forum (online)

• Wednesdays, 4 to 4.30pm (fortnightly/monthly): talks, presentations and discussions on diverse topics, from experimental findings to drafts of grant proposals and experimental designs. Please contact f.felisberti@kingston.ac.uk for a link.

Faculty talks

• 03/2021. Talk by E Beren Barklam: FARO Series - "Pet Ownership and Well-being during the COVID-19 Pandemic"
• 01/2020. Talk by Dr Beatriz Calvo-Merino (City University): "Embodied perception: the influence of sensorimotor expertise in action, emotion and aesthetic processing".
• 02/2020. Talk by Dr Fatima M Felisberti: "Emotions, mental imagery and aesthetic experiences with music and visual art".