John Cabot University ScholarShip
Not a member yet
907 research outputs found
Sort by
A Larger Look at a Miniature Painter: Exploring the Career of Eighteenth-Century Miniaturist, Maria Felice Tibaldi
No full textMaster of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Fall 2023.Active in Rome during the first half of the eighteenth century, Maria Felice Tibaldi Subleyras was a well-known miniature painter and portraitist. While she enjoyed considerable fame and academic recognition in her own time, today she is mostly forgotten with little scholarship available regarding her work and career. Her most famous work, Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee, is located in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, and remains the only work by the artists on public display in Rome today. Using this work and its unique signature as a point of departure this thesis utilizes a largely contextual approach to analyze and expand upon the existing scholarship, and further explore the contours of Maria Felice Tibaldi’s career. The goal of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of her personal practice, her business relationships, and her skills, while examining the intentional obstacles in her path as a woman artist not only during her lifetime, but also the historiographical problems that have today left her largely as a footnote
The effects of combining front-of-pack nutritional labels on consumers' subjective understanding, trust, and preferences
No full textThe decision to adopt a unique mandatory front-of-pack nutritional label (FOPL) has currently been delayed by the European Union (EU) as contrasting evidence exists on which one might consistently better encourage customers toward healthier diets. In this context, little attention has been dedicated to investigating the potential effects of having more than one front-of-pack nutritional label on food products. This study aims to verify if a combination of front-of-pack nutritional labels (i.e., a “bundle”) performs better for consumer understanding, trust, and preferences (such as liking) toward the label by helping consumers make healthier and more informed food choices. With this in mind, the study focused on three front-of-pack nutritional labels developed by public institutions that are central to the research and the recent EU policy-making debate. In three controlled experiments, building upon the “directiveness” front-of-pack nutritional label schemes, we find that the combination of a nondirective (i.e., NutrInform Battery) and a directive (i.e., Keyhole) label outperforms both the combination of two directive labels (i.e., Nutri-Score and Keyhole) and a single-directive front-of-pack nutritional label (i.e., Keyhole) on subjective understanding, trust in the label and liking. Results cast light on the bundling of front-of-pack nutritional labels as a potentially different approach that might be further analyzed by researchers and provide a substantive contribution to managers and policy-makers in their decision toward a unified front-of-pack nutritional label within the European Community
Not Getting Vaccinated? It Is a Matter of Problem-Solving Abilities and Socio-Cognitive Polarization
No full textThe anti-COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the United States provided a significant contribution to the control of the virus spread. Despite the recommendations by public health institutions, vaccine skepticism and hesitancy contributed to low vaccine uptake, thus possibly disrupting the management of preventable diseases associated with the COVID-19 infection. The process that led individuals to accept COVID-19 vaccines required the ability to gather, synthesize, and weigh-up information within a novel, dynamically changing, complex, and ambiguous context. To deal with such complexity, we hypothesized that both the ability of reflection and flexible adaptation played a fundamental role. Based on previous research on cognitive predictors of vaccine refusal, we decided to investigate the combined role of two constructs, namely, problem-solving skills and socio-cognitive polarization (SCP), on vaccine acceptance and uptake. Two-hundred-seventy-seven US participants completed an online survey aimed to measure problem-solving ability, through a rebus puzzles task, and SCP, through a composite measure of absolutist thinking, political conservatism, and xenophobia. Mediation analyses indicated that SCP mediated the association between problem-solving ability and vaccine acceptance, so lower problem-solving abilities associated with higher polarization predicted vaccine rejection. Thus, our findings suggested that low problem-solving skills may represent a risk factor for COVID-19 vaccine refusal, with cognitive and social rigidity playing a crucial role in undermining the anti-COVID-19 vaccine uptake
Physiological Response to Self-Compassion versus Relaxation in a Clinical Population
No full textBackground
Compassion-focused imagery (CFI) can be an effective emotion-regulation technique but can create threat-focused responses in some individuals. However, these findings have been based on tasks involving receiving compassion from others.
Aims
This study sought to compare responses CFI involving self-compassion to relaxation and a control task, and to see whether any threat-responses to self-compassion and relaxation decrease with practice.
Method
25 participants with depression/anxiety symptoms and high self-criticism and/or low self-compassion engaged in three tasks (control task, relaxation imagery, and CFI) at three or four separate testing sessions, every three days. Heart-rate variability (HRV) was used to explore group-level differences between tasks. Additionally, we identified how many individuals showed a clinically significant change in HRV in response to compassion (compared to baseline) and how many showed such a change during relaxation (compared to baseline).
Results
During session 1, more individuals had a clinically significant increase in HRV in response to CFI (56%) than in response to relaxation (44%), and fewer had a clinically significant decrease in HRV during CFI (16%) than during relaxation (28%). Comparing the group as a whole, no significant differences between tasks were seen. Repeated sessions led to fewer positive responses to CFI, perhaps reflecting habituation/boredom.
Conclusions
These preliminary findings suggest that in high self-critics (those most likely to find self-compassion difficult), self-compassionate imagery is no more challenging than standard relaxation tasks. For both compassion and relaxation, some individuals respond positively and others negatively. For those who are not benefiting, practice alone is not sufficient to improve response. Effects may differ for other compassion tasks
Intra and Extra Hospitalization Monitoring of Vital Signs. Two Sides of the Same Coin: Perspectives from LIMS and Greenline-HT Study Operators
No full textBackground: In recent years, due to the epidemiological transition, the burden of very complex patients in hospital wards has increased. Telemedicine usage appears to be a potential high-impact factor in helping with patient management, allowing hospital personnel to assess conditions in out-of-hospital scenarios.
Methods: To investigate the management of chronic patients during both hospitalization for disease and discharge, randomized studies (LIMS and Greenline-HT) are ongoing in the Internal Medicine Unit at ASL Roma 6 Castelli Hospital. The study endpoints are clinical outcomes (from a patient’s perspective). In this perspective paper, the main findings of these studies, from the operators’ point of view, are reported. Operator opinions were collected from structured and unstructured surveys conducted among the staff involved, and their main themes are reported in a narrative manner.
Results: Telemonitoring appears to be linked to a reduction in side-events and side-effects, which represent some of most commons risk factors for re-hospitalization and for delayed discharge during hospitalization. The main perceived advantages are increased patient safety and the quick response in case of emergency. The main disadvantages are believed to be related to low patient compliance and an infrastructural lack of optimization.
Conclusions: The evidence of wireless monitoring studies, combined with the analysis of activity data, suggests the need for a model of patient management that envisages an increase in the territory of structures capable of offering patients subacute care (the possibility of antibiotic treatments, blood transfusions, infusion support, and pain therapy) for the timely management of chronic patients in the terminal phase, for which treatment in acute wards must be guaranteed only for a limited time for the management of the acute phase of their diseases
Representations of indigenous people from South America: the undermining of indigeneity and colonial complexity in 16th and 17th centuries written accounts
No full textThesis (B.A. in Communications)--John Cabot University, Spring 2023.This thesis discusses the depictions of indigenous people from South America in 16th and 17th centuries written accounts. Indigenous communities were forced to assimilate into the newly colonial structures and hierarchies brought by Spanish conquistadors. This created a restructuring of government and society where natives became subject of the Spanish crown and followers of Christian faith. Written accounts began to appear in the Spanish literary scene, becoming popular in the middle stages of the conquest. These created a biased and wrong historical narrative where indigenous communities were secondary actors in their own stories. Focusing on Natural and Moral History of the Indies by José de Acosta and Royal Commentaries of the Yncas by El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, this thesis suggests that historical representations where indigeneity is given a place to interact are more accurate than those written from a European observational perspective. The complexity of colonialism in South America and the representations that follow should be looked at with a critical lens to understand the presence and/or lack of agency of indigenous people
Marco d’Agrate’s St. Bartholomew Flayed: Material History and Reception
No full textMaster of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2023.This research examines the under-studied sculpture of St. Bartholomew Flayed, by Marco d’Agrate (c.1500 - 1572), a focus on twenty-first century, interdisciplinary methodology to analyze this art object through a layered lens of materiality and forensics in the context of the era of artist-anatomists in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Where past scholarship has been quick to employ this sculpture as an eye-catching case study to support larger ideas, a more in-depth understanding of the artwork is long overdue, in order for it to better serve in support in art historical discourse on a larger scale. As part of this process, this paper compiles a history of the known works of Marco d’Agrate, and of the working environment of sixteenth-century Milan. This St. Bartholomew is unlike most depictions that came both before and after d’Agrate’s. Other depictions of St. Bartholomew in Italian art are compared against d’Agrate’s, followed by an analysis of the similarities and differences between St. Bartholomew and Ovid’s Marsyas, who are often linked by the shared nature of their deaths. It has been said that this sculpture resembles the early anatomical models ( écorché ) made from the collaboration of artists and anatomists. In this paper, I include a direct “reading” of the body of Marco d’Agrate’s St. Bartholomew Flayed and its structures to discern that Marco d’Agrate must have practiced human anatomy through dissection in order to produce it. This paper concludes with a discussion on its infamous Latin inscription and the relocation of the sculpture from the exterior of the Cathedral of Milan to the south transept, where it can be found today as one of the most highly viewed works in one of the largest churches in all of Italy
Western Feminism: The Lovechild of Gender and Orientalism
No full textThesis (B.A. in Humanistic Studies)--John Cabot University, Spring 2023.This thesis confronts the lack of universality in mainstream feminism given its dedication to gender and as its unit of analysis. This Western social, arguably cultural, construct has been enforced onto non-western cultures as a form of epistemic colonialism. As a result, I endorse the establishment of alternative feminist movements and examine the African rebuttal to feminism, Africana Womanism. I use philosophical, sociological, psychological, and historical approaches to investigate the aspects of gender and the “west” to see the interplay of these two constructs in the form of feminism. I assert that the fluid, dominant identities formed in the name of gender and the west (men and western society) are dependent on otherization to define themselves to form institutions of power, echoing Edward Said’s postcolonial theory of Orientalism. My goal in the research is to encourage universal awareness of one’s social position to potentially make schools of thought like feminism more inclusive, if possible
Reexamining Immortality in the Works of the Romantics
No full textThesis (B.A. in English Literature, Minor in Art History)--John Cabot University, Spring 2023.In an era characterized by change and upheaval, the Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century embraced the revolutionary impetus of the moment and reconsidered traditional ideologies while investing a new faith in the powers of the imagination. One such concept that is subject to Romantic reevaluation is immortality. Thus, this thesis examines the recurring but mutable concept of immortality in select works of Romantic poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Through a historical analysis, this thesis navigates the various forms and poetic manifestations that the concept of immortality takes from experiential and spiritual to reputational and artistic. Though these Romantic writers differ in their interrogation of the concept of immortality, it becomes evident that they all share a desire to radically examine immortality through their privileging of the subjectivity of experience and their embrace of ambiguity and mystery, which they find central to their philosophies and to the act of poetic creation
Exploring Negative Representations of Female Friendship across Cultural and Social Backgrounds: A Comparative Analysis of Emma, L’amica geniale and NANA
No full textThesis (B.A. in English Literature, Minor in Italian Studies)--John Cabot University, Spring 2023.Some second-wave feminists thought that women’s friendship is the deepest and most important bond that humans can create. Since women were speculated to have inherent nurturing qualities, they were regarded as the only ones capable to fulfill emotional needs. Women can gain a deeper understanding of themselves and their friends through dialogue, mutual recognition, and interpretation, leading to more meaningful relationships and a heightened sense of identity. However, recent feminists look on these beliefs with skepticism, as they point out a reality in which women friendship is complex and ambivalent. Indeed, the literature in question, which represents various cultures, languages, and time periods, portrays friendships marked by negative qualities such as competitiveness, possessiveness, jealousy, and other similar traits. This analysis of Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy L’amica geniale, Jane Austen’s novel Emma, and Ai Yazawa’s manga NANA ultimately concludes that the concept of sisterhood, as conceived by some second-wave feminists, remains an unfulfilled ideal