Giovanna Egidi

 

    

  Research Associate

  Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience

  Department of Psychology

  The University of Chicago

  Chicago, IL 606137

  egidi@uchicago.edu

 

 

  2001 – 2006           Ph.D.                Psychology, Stony Brook University

  1998 – 2001           M.A.                 Comparative Literature, Purdue University

  1990 – 1996           Laurea             Philosophy, Cum Laude (Highest Achievement)

                                 (B.A. & M.A.)    Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

 

 

 

  Research Interests

The influence of affect on cognition and decision-making

A primary focus of my research is the relation between affect and cognitive processes. I have examined how and when negative and positive moods give rise to mood congruency during language comprehension, and whether these moods promote different processing strategies during discourse comprehension. I am also interested in understanding what contextual and affective factors lead people to choose rational courses of action, and how neural systems are involved in such choice behavior. In my current studies, I manipulate the affective value of certain rewards, participants' affective state, and situational circumstances in which options are given. When these choices are made in an fMRI scanner, it is possible to assess both the behavioral choice and the corresponding patterns of brain activity.

 

Representative work:

Egidi, G., Nusbaum, H. C., & Cacioppo, J. T. (in press). Neuroeconomics: Foundational issues and consumer relevance. In C. Haugtvedt, F. Kardes, & P. Herr. (Eds.), Handbook of Consumer Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Goals and actions

The second focus of my research is on how people evaluate actions with respect to the goals that these actions aim to fulfill. The most representative of these studies has examined how participants understand others' actions in situations of goal conflict, where two candidate goals can be accomplished, but one is more important than the other. Participants read narratives that depicted the situation. The results show that during online comprehension, people find it easier to process actions that are consistent with the most recent goal they encountered, even if this goal is the less important one. In contrast, when people are asked to judge what action a person will choose given the conflicting goal situation, they opt for the one that satisfies the more important goal.

 

Representative work:

Egidi, G., & Gerrig, R. J. (2006). Readers’ experiences of characters’ goals and actions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 1322-1329.

Judgment heuristics

Finally, I am also interested in the processes underlying judgment heuristics and the influence of context on these heuristics. I have examined how people’s numerical estimates (e.g., Gandhi’s age at the time of his death) are influenced by given numerical values, even when those values are known to be irrelevant to the judgment (anchoring). I have found that anchoring is modulated by the context of the sentence in which the numerical value is given and by people’s knowledge of the item or the domain in question (e.g., Gandhi’s age in particular and people’s age in general). Specifically, my research has used implausible numerical values as a way to test under which conditions people anchor to a category maximum (e.g., the maximum age a person can live).

 

Representative work:

Egidi, G., & Hasson, U. (2005). Logical effects on anchoring. Poster presented at the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Stresa, Italy.