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This paper presents a novel psychological model of the socio-cognitive management of uncertainty, the semiotic dimensional model (SDM). The SDM claims that uncertainty increases the momentum of affect-laden meanings in meaning-making. This is so because affective meanings provide a simplified interpretation of the world that restores the experience of being able to make sense of the reality destabilized by uncertainty. Moreover, the SDM models the affective meanings in terms of low-dimensional mental phase space (MPS). Each dimension of the MPS detects a facet of the context. The lower the MPS dimensionality, the lower the number of facets of the context processed, therefore, the more simplified the meaning-making is. We attained the first empirical validation of the SDM in a sample of 120 Italian people. First, the SDM assumption that the low-dimensional MPS is the computational descriptor of affective meaning was tested. Second, an experimental study was designed in which uncertainty was manipulated so as to assess its effects on the dimensionality of participants’ MPS. It was hypothesized that uncertainty induces a decrease in the MPS dimensionality. Results were consistent with both hypotheses. Theoretical implications of the SDM and its relationship with other theories are discussed and future research direction outlined.

The paper presents the results of an analysis aimed at mapping the themes through which covid-19 is represented in some Italian newspapers and the semantic structure that grounds and shapes the content of those themes. For this purpose, the ACASM (Automated Co-occurrence Analysis for Semantic Mapping) procedure was used and applied to a text corpus consisting of a set of national newspaper articles balanced by source, political orientation and publication period. The results show that Italian newspapers represented the pandemic according to four specific themes based on two semantic structures. The implications of these results are discussed.