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This article explores the intersection between cognition theories and urban planning, conceptualizing the city as a distributed socio-cognitive architecture. It traces the evolution of these theories through three waves—functionalism, social externalism, and radical enactivism —. Correspondingly, the article suggests implications for reorienting urban planning approaches, highlighting participatory design, collaborative placemaking, and the nurturing of place-based affordances. Drawing examples from existing planning literature, it demonstrates resonances with Extended Mind-informed orientations. The conclusion synthesizes these insights, proposing a potentially transformative framework by rethinking planning as more participatory, pluralistic, and cognitively integrative, challenging internalist and technocratic assumptions.

The foundation for the EIT-KIC Culture and Creativity was laid in many steps, through a series of EU policy developments. Moving from the seminal report on The Economy of Culture promoted by the acting European Commissioner for Culture Jan Figel in 2006, we have witnessed a gradual development of the idea that cultural and creative sectors are a main driver of socio-economic development in Europe. This trajectory can be reconstructed in the sequence of the Work Plans for Culture that have spanned the last decade and in a few milestones such as the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 and its major legacies, the European Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage and the New European Agenda for Culture. Let’s briefly consider how all such components have been instrumental to the birth of the EIT-KIC Culture and Creativity, and how an understanding of such process is still fundamental today to fully appreciate the potential and criticalities of this new, ambitious endeavor.

This paper examines the relationship between societal structures shaped by traditions, norms, laws, and customs, and creative expressions in arts and media through the lens of the predictive coding framework in cognitive science. The article proposes that both dimensions of culture can be viewed as adaptations designed to enhance and train the brain’s predictive abilities in the social domain. Traditions, norms, laws, and customs foster shared predictions and expectations among individuals, thereby reducing uncertainty in social environments. On the other hand, arts and media expose us to simulated experiences that explore alternative social realities, allowing the predictive machinery of the brain to hone its skills through exposure to a wider array of potentially relevant social circumstances and scenarios. We first review key principles of predictive coding and active inference, and then explore the rationale of cultural traditions and artistic culture in this perspective. Finally, we draw parallels between institutionalized normative habits that stabilize social worlds and creative and imaginative acts that temporarily subvert established conventions to inject variability.

The significance of meaningful and productive work, and the search for profound meaning within it, is akin to the air we breathe. Its importance is often realized only when it becomes contaminated or depleted. In contemporary societies, there is a growing awareness of the significance of the meaning of work, while simultaneously witnessing mounting mistrust and disillusionment as to the significance and social value of numerous jobs. There is paradoxically an increasing demand for meaningful work, while the supply of such work appears to be gradually decreasing. At present, we are recognizing the importance of this vital component that sustains our well-being as it begins to dwindle. The absence of meaningful work may stem from the nature of the work itself, the organizational environment in which it takes place, the prevailing corporate culture, or even the way in which tasks are defined and managed, which makes it challenging to find a sense of purpose and meaning in what we do. While progress can be made on both fronts, addressing cultural and organizational aspects is a more expedient means of intervention without the need of waiting for structural changes in the global economic and social systems.

IntroductionThis study examines prospective associations within a 6-year perspective between three mind-stimulating leisure activities (relaxed and solitary: reading; serious and solitary: doing number and word games; serious and social: playing cards and games) and 21 outcomes in (1) physical health, (2) wellbeing, (3) daily life functioning, (4) cognitive impairment, and (5) longevity domains.MethodsData were obtained from 19,821 middle-aged and older adults from 15 countries participating in the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Temporal associations were obtained using generalized estimating equations. All models were controlled for prior sociodemographic, personality, lifestyle factors, health behaviors, and pre-baseline leisure activity values and all outcome variables. The Bonferroni correction was used to correct for multiple testing. E-values were calculated to examine the sensitivity of the associations to unmeasured confounding. Secondary analyses (1) under the complete case scenario, (2) after excluding respondents with health conditions, and (3) using a limited set of covariates were conducted to provide evidence for the robustness of the results.ResultsThe relaxed solitary activity of reading almost daily was prospectively associated with a lower risk of depression, experiencing pain, daily functioning limitations, cognitive impairment, lower loneliness scores, and more favorable wellbeing outcomes. Engaging in serious solitary leisure activities almost daily was prospectively associated with a lower risk of depression, feeling full of energy, and a lower risk of death by any cause. Occasionally engaging in these activities was prospectively associated with greater optimism and a lower risk of cognitive impairment. Engaging in serious social activities was prospectively associated with greater happiness, lower scores on the loneliness scale, a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease, and an increased risk of cancer. Additionally, occasionally engaging in serious social activities was associated with greater optimism and lower risk of depression, pain, and mobility limitations. These associations were independent of demographics, socioeconomic status, personality, history of diseases, and prior lifestyle. The sensitivity analyses provided substantial evidence for the robustness of these associations.DiscussionMind-engaging leisure activities can be considered a health and wellbeing resource. Practitioners may consider them tools that help middle-aged and older adults maintain their health and quality of life.

In this brief report we followed the evolution of the COVID-19 Infodemic Risk Index during 2020 and clarified its connection with the epidemic waves, focusing specifically on their co-evolution in Europe, South America, and South-eastern Asia. Using 640 million tweets collected by the Infodemic Observatory and the open access dataset published by Our World in Data regarding COVID-19 worldwide reported cases, we analyze the COVID-19 infodemic vs. pandemic co-evolution from January 2020 to December 2020. We find that a characteristic pattern emerges at the global scale: a decrease in misinformation on Twitter as the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases increases. Similar local variations highlight how this pattern could be influenced both by the strong content moderation policy enforced by Twitter after the first pandemic wave and by the phenomenon of selective exposure that drives users to pick the most visible and reliable news sources available.

People sometimes behave dishonestly to collect undeserved monetary rewards. Prior research has shown that people put more effort into avoiding monetary losses than into making gains, and accordingly they cheat more to avoid losses than to acquire the equivalent amount (loss aversion). However, there has been a lack of research about how reward size and money exposure affect levels of cheating. Using a real effort task, we implemented a between-subjects experimental design to test the effects of framing (loss vs gain), reward size (small vs large) and money exposure (money vs no money) on individual real performance and cheating levels. The results revealed no significant differences in real performance. However, for cheating levels, all two-way interaction effects turned out to be significant (i.e., frame by size – frame by exposure – size by exposure). To disentangle the effects of the loss frame on cheating levels, a double moderated model was tested with reward size and money exposure as moderators. The model was significant with conditional effects revealing that the loss frame generally causes increased cheating level unless (i) participants were informed about a possible large reward they had not been exposed to, and (ii) participants were informed about, and exposed to, a small reward. Our results offer a partial replication of the finding that the level of cheating is higher within the loss frame than in the gain framing, which suggests that the relationship between framing and cheating behaviour can be moderated by other variables such as reward size and exposure to a reward. They also pose new questions for future research about complex joint effects on cheating behaviour, such as the combined influence of framing and default choices.

The infection caused by SARS-CoV-2, responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is characterized by an infectious period with either asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic phases, leading to a rapid surge of mild and severe cases putting national health systems under serious stress. To avoid their collapse, and in the absence of pharmacological treatments, during the early pandemic phase countries worldwide were forced to adopt strategies, from elimination to mitigation, based on non-pharmacological interventions which, in turn, overloaded social, educational and economic systems. To date, the heterogeneity and incompleteness of data sources does not allow to quantify the multifaceted impact of the pandemic at country level and, consequently, to compare the effectiveness of country responses. Here, we tackle this challenge from a complex systems perspective, proposing a model to evaluate the impact of systemic failures in response to the pandemic shock. We use health, behavioral and economic indicators for 44 countries to build a shock index quantifying responses in terms of robustness and resilience, highlighting the crucial advantage of proactive policy and decision making styles over reactive ones, which can be game-changing during the emerging of a new variant of concern.

The governance of the political and economic world order builds on a complex architecture of international treaties at various geographical scales. In a historical phase of high institutional turbulence, assessing the stability of such architecture with respect to the unilateral defection of single countries and the breakdown of single treaties is important. We carry out this analysis on the whole global architecture and find that the countries with the highest disruption potential are mostly medium-small and micro countries. Political stability is highly dependent on many former colonial overseas territories that are today part of the global network of fiscal havens, as well as on emerging economies, mostly from South-East Asia. Economic stability depends on medium-sized European and African countries. Single global treaties have surprisingly less disruptive potential, with the major exception of the WTO. Our results suggest that the potential fragility of the world order seems to be more directly related to global inequality and fiscal injustice than commonly believed and that the legacy of the colonial world order is still strong in the current international relations scenario. In particular, vested interests related to tax avoidance seem to have a structural role in the political architecture of global governance.

This special theme issue of Big Data & Society presents leading-edge, interdisciplinary research that focuses on examining how health-related (mis-)information is circulating on social media. In particular, we are focusing on how computational and Big Data approaches can help to provide a better understanding of the ongoing COVID-19 infodemic (overexposure to both accurate and misleading information on a health topic) and to develop effective strategies to combat it.

Nowadays, the use of social networks (SNs) is pervasive and ubiquitous. Among other things, SNs have become a key resource for establishing and maintaining personal relationships, as further demonstrated by the emergence of the pandemic. However, easy access to SNs may be a source of addictive behaviour, especially among the younger population. The literature highlights various psychological and physiological factors as possible predictors of vulnerability to SN addiction. This paper explores the joint effects of stress level and cognitive absorption, in the form of temporal dissociation while on SNs, on the addiction of university students to SNs. Here, 312 participants were involved in an online survey. About 14% of the sample presented a risk for SN addiction. Moreover, it was found that stress level predicted SN addiction both directly and indirectly through the effect of individual temporal dissociation, as experienced during SN usage. These results suggest a significant role of perceived stress level on addiction risk, while also pointing out additional vulnerability to SN addiction for cognitive profiles that are relatively more prone to temporal dissociation while online.

Understanding reciprocal relationships between specific arenas in life and at work is critical for designing interventions to improve workplace health and safety. Most studies about the links between dimensions of well-being in life and at work have been cross-sectional and usually narrowly focused on one of the dimensions of the work-life well-being link. The issues of causality and feedback between life and work well-being have often not been addressed. We overcome these issues by measuring six aspects of well-being for both the work arena and life in general, using longitudinal data with a clear temporal sequence of cause and effect, and by explicitly accounting for feedback with potential effects in both directions. Nine hundred and fifty-four Mexican apparel factory workers at a major global brand participated in two waves of the Worker Well-Being Survey. Data on life satisfaction and job satisfaction, happiness and positive affect, meaning and purpose, health, and social relationships in life and at work were used. Lagged regression controlling for confounders and prior outcomes was employed. Sensitivity analysis was used to assess the robustness of the results to potential unmeasured confounding. For the relationships between life satisfaction and job satisfaction and between happiness in life and happiness at work effects in both directions were found. Nevertheless, indication of a larger effect of life satisfaction on job satisfaction than the reverse was obtained. For depression and meaning in life, there was evidence for an effect of life well-being on work-related well-being, but not for the reverse. For social relationships and purpose, there was evidence for an effect of work-related well-being on life well-being, but not the reverse. Relationships based on the longitudinal data were considerably weaker than their respective cross-sectional associations. This study contributes to our understanding of the nature of the relationship between aspects of well-being in the arenas of life and work. Findings from this study may facilitate the development of novel workplace programs promoting working conditions that enable lifelong flourishing in life and at work.

Fictional narratives cannot be considered as mere escapist entertainment, and have a significant social cognition potential. Their study is also important in understanding the mechanisms of behavioral change, as many fictions focus on processes of personal transformation of the main characters. Romantic fictions are of special interest in this regard, as the formation of a new couple entails negotiation and mutual adaptation between partners, with possible transformation of personal attitudes, value orientations, and behaviors: ‘marrying’ a new idea or cause is, tellingly, the strongest possible metaphorical statement of adoption. Korean TV series (K-dramas) are a particularly interesting source of case studies in this regard due to the specific characteristics of their production system. We analyze a K-drama, My Ajussi, where the lead characters go through a complex process of personal change, through the lens of the so-called Tie-Up Theory, which has proven useful in the analysis and interpretation of fictional representations of human mating processes, and show how the context provided by the potential formation of the couple between the two main characters provides us with valuable insights about human behavioral change and for policy design strategies to tackle societal challenges.

In this paper, we analyze a K-drama aired by the Korean TV network SBS in 2016, Jealousy Incarnate, as a case study of the application of the Tie-Up Theory to a romantic narrative as a form of simulation of human mating processes with social cognition valence. We find that this case provides us with an example of a mating process where the choice of the male partner by the female lead character does not privilege the one that should be preferable on the basis of the standard prediction of the experimental research on human mating. This discrepancy is a signal of a basic limitation of experimental research, that highlights the subjects’ preferences for abstract potential partners but is not able to fully account for the mechanisms that lead to the choice of a specific partner in a specific mating interaction. We argue that the narrative simulation viewpoint provides insights that are complementary to those of experimental research, and that a more comprehensive theoretical approach, such as the one offered by the Tie-Up Theory, may be helpful to account for both perspectives.

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Many museums and art spaces conduct programming intended to improve health outcomes, but arts professionals’ perceptions of these programs are not well known. This study describes arts professionals’ experiences with museum and art-space interventions intended to improve health. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: A 14-item digital Qualtrics survey was administered to museums and arts organizations selected using snowball sampling. The survey was sent to a range of arts and cultural organizations and professional membership bodies in the US and UK. Survey questions assessed the range of audiences involved in health programs, what types of activities museums and arts organizations are offering to support health outcomes, and how programs are evaluated. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: From 10/30/19-11/19/19, 151 surveys were completed; 66 respondents (44%) have a museum/arts in health program. Common target populations include individuals with mental health concerns (33, 22%) and older adults (26, 17%). Improving wellbeing (56, 37%) and social isolation (50, 33%) were the most common intended outcomes. Respondents reported using a variety of program evaluation methods including formal (23, 15%), informal (31, 21%), and anecdotal (37, 25%). Interviews are planned with a purposive sample of respondents conducting, or interested in conducting, a program for individuals with chronic pain and those formally evaluating their programs. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Interim survey responses indicate many cultural organizations engage in programming intended to improve health outcomes. Understanding the cultural sector’s current efforts to improve health represents an initial step in translating these efforts into effective intersectoral research partnerships.

This article explores the structure of the male–female interaction in the human mating process from the perspective of the so-called Tie-Up Theory, applying it to the analysis of a cinematic fictional narrative, namely the Shakespeare in love movie. We look at romantic fictional narratives as possible simulations with a social cognition valence, and show that, in the case study under exam, the actual structure of the interaction between the two main characters reflects the basic steps of a successful mating process. In view of this, the fact that the long-term couple is not formed at the end of the story neither jeopardizes its social cognition valence, nor the audience’s need and expectation of an emotional climax, as what makes the difference in terms of social cognition is not the story outcome, but the process that leads to it. Our research makes a case for a renewed interest toward romantic fictional comedies as an interesting source of insight into real mating-related interactions, provided that such narratives are socially validated in terms of audience response and intergenerational transmission.

We introduce a typological characterization of possible human heterosexual couples in terms of the concordance-opposition of the orientations of their active and receptive areas as defined by the tie-up theory. We show that human mating incentives, as characterized by widely adopted approaches, such as Becker’s marriage market approach, only capture very specific instances of actual couples thus characterized. Our approach allows us to instead explore how super-cooperation among partners vs. convenience vs. constriction may be regarded as alternatives modes of couple formation and cohesion, leading to very different types of couples with different implications in terms of stability and resilience. Our results may have interesting implications for future experimental research and for individual and family counseling.

In this paper, we apply the so-called Tie-Up Theory to the analysis of the social cognition of mating processes in fairy tales. Our analysis considers the four classical fairy tales that are more relevant to this topic, and proves how their structure systematically reflects the logic of the male–female interaction anticipated by the theory, and in addition allows to formulate an interesting typology of strategic approaches by the male partner. Unlike preexisting interpretations, where fairy tale characters tend to be presented as stereotypes, our analysis shows how, in their most sophisticated and interesting variants, the said fairy tales place an emphasis on the unique individual traits that make the potential partners reciprocally fit to form the couple. This change of perspective is conducive to interesting applications both from the viewpoint of the analysis of fairy tales and in terms of the implications of the related form of social cognition for the study and the understanding of human behavior.

In this paper, we study the cultural geography of the Veneto Region on the basis of a pseudo-diffusion approach to the analysis of the inherent semantic spatial data. We find somewhat surprising results, and, in particular, that Venice, indisputably the Region’s cultural hub in terms of concentration of activities and facilities, global visibility and attraction of resources, plays a marginal role in determining the momentum of cultural initiative at the regional level as of 2007 data. The areas with the greater momentum are relatively marginal ones but characterized by a strong presence of design-oriented companies that are actively engaging in culture-driven innovation in a context of gradually horizontally-integrated clusters. Our findings call for a revision of the traditional policy approaches that identify centralities in terms of concentration of activities and facilities based on past dynamics, and to design policies accordingly. We argue in favour of a more forward-looking, evidence-based approach.

Il dibattito tra sostenitori del finanziamento pubblico all’arte e alla cultura e suoi oppositori ha origini lontane, ma mai come in questi mesi ha assunto un interesse così profondo, in funzione di un fondamentale trade-off che si acuisce sempre più: la restrizione dei budget di spesa a disposizione degli Stati occidentali da un lato, e i benefici sempre più marcati, anche di natura economica, che nuovi studi sembrano attribuire agli investimenti in arte e cultura dall’altro. Tramite un’analisi effettuata sui principali teatri italiani in termini di ricavi generati, il paper comprova l’impossibilità per le istituzioni culturali di potere conciliare in modo autonomo la propria mission di fondo con principi di sostenibilità finanziaria. Gli autori sostengono che il supporto al settore cultura rappresenta attualmente un’attività imprescindibile per uno Stato, non solo in funzione del carattere di meritorietà del bene culturale, ma soprattutto alla luce anche dei vantaggi di tipo economico, fino a pochi anni fa trascurati o meglio, difficilmente quantificabili, che la cultura è in grado di apportare per l’economia del «Sistema Paese»; vantaggi la cui quantificazione sarà possibile grazie al rapido sviluppo di metodologie valutative di prossima utilizzabilità. Debates between advocates of public financing to arts and culture and its opponents have far-off roots, but they never gained such an importance like in these months, because of a crucial trade-off that has been exacerbating more and more: from the one hand, budget allowance restrictions available to Western States; on the other hand, the even more marked benefits – also in economic terms – that new studies attribute to investments in arts and culture. Through an analysis conducted on the main Italian theatres as for ticket sales, the paper proves the impossibility for the cultural institutions to mesh autonomously their main mission with financial sustainability principles. Authors claim that support to culture represents an inescapable activity for developed States today, not only because of the merit feature of cultural goods, but especially in the light of the benefits – also economic – neglected or hardly quantifiable till some years ago, that culture is able to bring for the wealth of a country. The measurement of these economic advantages will be possible thanks to the rapid improvement of valuation methodologies shortly available.

In the first part of this paper, we have introduced a novel theoretical approach to mating dynamics, known as Tie-Up Theory (TU). In this second part, in the context of the bio-cultural approach to literature, that assigns to fictional narratives an important valence of social cognition, we apply the conceptual tools presented in the first part to the analysis of mating-related interaction dynamics in some blockbuster Hollywood movies from WWII to today. The interaction dynamics envisioned by our theory accurately reflect, to a significant level of detail, the narrative development of the movies under exam from the viewpoint of the mating dynamics of the couple of main characters, accounting for the specific reasons that lead them to react to certain situations via certain behaviors, and for the reasons why such behaviors lead to certain outcomes. Our analysis seems thus to bring some further legitimacy to the bio-cultural foundation of the narrative structure of the movies that we analyze, and moreover to the idea that it is possible to ‘inquire’ characters about their choices according to the narratological-experimental lines suggested by some proponents of the bio-cultural approach.

In this paper, we propose a new approach to couple formation and dynamics that abridges findings from sexual strategies theory and attachment theory to develop a framework where the sexual and emotional aspects of mating are considered in their strategic interaction. Our approach presents several testable implications, some of which find interesting correspondences in the existing literature. Our main result is that, according to our approach, there are six typical dynamic interaction patterns that are more or less conducive to the formation of a stable couple, and that set out an interesting typology for the analysis of real (as well as fictional, as we will see in the second part of the paper) mating behaviors and dynamics.

The foundation for the EIT-KIC Culture and Creativity was laid in many steps, through a series of European Union (EU) policy developments. Moving from the seminal report on The Economy of Culture promoted by the acting European Commissioner for Culture Jan Figel in 2006, we have witnessed a gradual development of the idea that cultural and creative sectors are a main driver of socio-economic development in Europe. This trajectory can be reconstructed in the sequence of the Work Plans for Culture that have spanned the last decade and in a few milestones such as the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 and its major legacies, the European Framework for Action on Cultural Heritage and the New European Agenda for Culture. Let’s briefly consider how all such components have been instrumental to the birth of the EIT-KIC Culture and Creativity, and how an understanding of such a process is still fundamental today to fully appreciate the potential and criticalities of this new, ambitious endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]