RD - Reasoning and Decision making (Prof. Ferrante)

Research Strand:

Cognition and applied cognitive psychology (Psychology)

Associate professor in General psychology (M-PSI/01)

Phone: +39 040 558 8870
Email: ferrante@units.it

Biosketch

Donatella Ferrante is Associate Professor in General Psychology at the University of Trieste since 2004.

She has got her master degree in Philosophy in 1986, and her Ph.D in Experimental Psychology in 1993 from the University of Trieste. In 1988 she has been honoured with a fellowship from the CNR.

She was Vice-Head of the Department of Psychology of University of Trieste (2003-2006; 2009-201) and Coordinator of the Bachelor Degree in Psychological Sciences and Technologies (2016-2018) and of the Master Degree in Psychology (2019-2021). She has been a member of the Graduate School Committee in Neurosciences and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Trieste. Donatella Ferrante has been scientific coordinator of research units of national research projects (CNR 1995, CNR 1996, PRIN 2004, PRIN 2006, PRIN 2008) and Memoranda of Understanding signed by her Department and Local Goverments / Health Services.

She heads the Thinking & Decision Lab at the Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste. Her main areas of research include thinking and decision-making, counterfactual emotions, work-related stress, health promotion, risk perception and communication, group judgement and decision-making.

She has collaborated for years with colleagues from Italian and European universities and she is the author of several national and internationals papers on peer-reviewed journals (e.g. Psychological Science; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General; Cognition, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience; Safety Science), and of theoretical reviews in English and Italian books.

Info

Research

Thinking & Decision Lab current research interests include the following topics:

Counterfactual Thinking

Research investigates (i) what kinds of counterfactual thoughts were generally produced, (ii) what purposes they serve and (iii) how the thoughts of what might have been influence affect, motivation and social judgments. The results of the studies conducted, published in international journals, challenge the generality of the conclusions underlying the dominant theory on the function of counterfactual thinking (Girotto et al. 2007; Pighin et al. 2011; Ferrante et al. 2013; Mercier et al. 2017; Stragà et al. 2022).

Work-related stress

Research is aimed at (i) developing psychometric instruments for the assessment of job stress at the organizational level and (ii) exploring the relationship between work-related stress dimensions, psychological outcomes (e.g, perceived stress, job satisfaction and job motivation) and health problems. The main contributions concern the development and validation of an Italian-language adaptation of the HSE Management Standards Work-Related Stress Indicator Tool (Marcatto et al. 2011), the relationship between work-related stress risk factors and psychophysical disorders (Marcatto et al. 2016), and the development of a brief tool for the assessment of perceived work-related stress (Marcatto et al. 2022).

Health Promotion

Research in this field is aimed at developing and testing interactive on-line assessment and intervention for reducing risky lifestyles. In particular, the conducted researches have evaluated the effects of risk communication frame in a sample of physicians (Marcatto et al. 2013) and the ability of primary care physicians to diagnose the presence of alcohol abuse situations and what factors physicians typically base such diagnoses on (Marcatto et al. 2017).

Judgment and decision-making in groups

This recently developed line of research aims to test argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier, 2016) in everyday life contexts of judgment and decision making. In particular, we are applying the theory to the context of misinformation. The main results show how group argumentation (versus individual reflection), by stimulating analytical thinking, improves the ability to recognize fake news.

People

Current group members

Marta Stragà – postdoctoral Research Fellow
Diana Carbone – PhD student
Angela Faiella – PhD student
Francesco Marcatto – external collaborator

Prof. Ferrante Donatella (Research Group - Member)
ferrante@units.it

Marcatto Francesco (Research Group - Member)
fmarcatto@units.it

Struzzo Pierluigi (Research Group - Member)

Publications

Full list of the publications of the Principal Investigator

Scopus
ORCID

Highly cited DSV papers

2016

Selected publications

Stragà, M., Faiella, A., Santini, I., & Ferrante, D. (in press) “The game would have been better for me if…”: Children’s counterfactual thinking about their own performance in a game. Thinking & Reasoning.
Marcatto, F., Di Blas, L., Luis, O., Festa, S., & Ferrante, D. (2022). The Perceived Occupational Stress scale: A brief tool for measuring workers’ perception of stress at work. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 38, 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759/a000677
Federico, G., Ferrante, D., Marcatto, F., & Brandimonte, M.A. (2021). How the fear of COVID-19 changed the way we look at human faces. Peer J 2021, 9, e11380. https://10.7717/peerj.11380
Mercier, H., Rolison, J.J., Stragà, M., Ferrante, D., Walsh, C.R., & Girotto, V. (2017). Questioning the preparatory function of counterfactual thinking. Memory & Cognition 45, 261–269. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-016-0660-5
Marcatto, F., Colautti, L., Larese Filon, F., Di Blas, L., Cavallero, C., & Ferrante, D. (2016). Work-related stress risk factors and health outcomes in public sector employees. Safety Science, 89, 274–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2016.07.003
Brandimonte M.A., & Ferrante, D. (2015). Effects of material and non-material rewards on remembering to do things for others. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 647. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00647
Marcatto, F., Cosulich, A., & Ferrante, D. (2015). Once bitten, twice shy: Experienced regret and non-adaptive choice switching PeerJ, 3: e1035. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1035
Marcatto, F., Colautt,i L., Larese Filon, F., Luis, O., & Ferrante, D. (2014). The HSE management standards indicator tool: Concurrent and construct validity. Occupational Medicine, 64, 365–371. https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqu038
Marcatto, F., Rolison, J. J., & Ferrante, D. (2013). Communicating clinical trial outcomes: Effects of presentation method on physicians’ evaluations of new treatments. Judgment and Decision Making, 8, 29-33.
Ferrante, D., Girotto, V., Stragà, M., & Walsh, C. (2013). Improving the past and the future. A temporal asymmetry in Hypothetical Thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General., 142, (1), 23-27. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027947

Last update: 09-22-2025 - 23:30

Hide/Show

PhD PROGRAMS