2.1. Sample

Twenty-four adult individuals (13/11 M/F; M_age = 35.3, SD_age = 11.7) without any specific area of professional specialization gave their written informed consent to participate in the pilot explorative study. Recruitment was managed via consecutive sampling. No compensation was provided for study participation. The exclusion criteria were a history of psychiatric or neurological disease, ongoing therapy with psychoactive drugs, clinically relevant distress level, altered global cognitive functioning, and occurrence of major stressful life events in the past six months. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and a minimum schooling level of eighteen years, as all participants had master’s degrees. Some of the professionals also had higher qualifications, such as a doctoral title. Post hoc power analysis was run to compute the achieved power and further test the robustness of the reported findings. The analysis—based on an average obtained effect size of 0.56, α = 0.05, and N = 24—estimated an average achieved power equal to 0.84 (GPower version 3.1.9.7; [42]).

The experimental study was conducted in compliance with the Helsinki Declaration (2013), and the entire protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Department of Psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.