COVID-19 vaccines are the most promising means of limiting the pandemic. The present study aims at determining the roles of several psychological variables in predicting vaccination intention in Italy. An online questionnaire was disseminated between 9 March and 9 May 2021. The sample included 971 participants. Results showed that most of the participants were willing to vaccinate. Acceptance rates were correlated with age, marital status, and area of residence. Intention to be vaccinated was positively correlated with perceived risk, pro-sociality, fear of COVID-19, use of preventive behaviors, and trust in government, in science, and in medical professionals. Intention to be vaccinated was negatively associated with belief in misinformation. The degree of acceptance is likely to be a result of the campaign tailored to address people’s negative attitudes towards vaccines. Trust in government and trust in science were among the strongest psychological predictors of vaccination intention. Fear of COVID-19, but not perceived risk, was associated with increased vaccine uptake, suggesting that the affective component of risk perception was more important than the cognitive component in predicting participants’ behaviors. Belief in misinformation was associated with reduced vaccination intention. Future studies will take into consideration these variables, to better understand the multifaceted process underlying vaccination intention.

Intrusive memories are a common feature of many psychopathologies, and suppression-induced forgetting of unwanted memories appears as a critical ability to preserve mental health. In recent years, biological and cognitive studies converged in revealing that forgetting is due to active processes. Recent neurobiological studies provide evidence on the active role of main neurotransmitter systems in forgetting, suggesting that the brain actively works to suppress retrieval of unwanted memories. On the cognitive side, there is evidence that voluntary and involuntary processes (here termed “intentional” and “incidental” forgetting, respectively) contribute to active forgetting. In intentional forgetting, an inhibitory control mechanism suppresses awareness of unwanted memories at encoding or retrieval. In incidental forgetting, retrieval practice of some memories involuntarily suppresses the retrieval of other related memories. In this review we describe recent findings on deficits in active forgetting observed in psychopathologies, like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Moreover, we report studies in which the role of neurotransmitter systems, known to be involved in the pathogenesis of mental disorders, has been investigated in active forgetting paradigms. The possibility that biological and cognitive mechanisms of active forgetting could be considered as hallmarks of the early onset of psychopathologies is also discussed.

In the Attentional Boost Effect (ABE), words or images encoded with to-be-detected target squares are later recognized better than words or images encoded with to-be-ignored distractor squares. The present study sought to determine whether the ABE enhanced the encoding of the item-specific and relational properties of the studied words by using the multiple recall paradigm. Previous evidence indicates that manipulations fostering item-specific encoding increased the number of item gains, whereas manipulations fostering relational encoding decreased item losses. Across three experiments, participants were presented with lists of semantically related or unrelated words paired with target (red) or distractor (green) squares, under the instructions to remember all the words and press the spacebar when the square was red. Immediately after the study phase, they were involved in four consecutive recall attempts. In all cases, the classical ABE was replicated, in that participants recalled more target-than distractor-paired words. Most importantly, the analyses converged in showing that item gains were significantly greater for target-than for distractor-paired words when participants studied lists of related words (but not when they studied unrelated lists); in contrast, item losses did not differ between the two types of words, irrespective of the nature of the studied list. Taken together, these data suggest that the ABE enhanced the encoding of item-specific information but had no effect on the encoding of relational information.

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