The following is an excerpt of the intervention methodology. For more information, please see the full text of the article on the publisher's website or through your institution's library.

Participants and procedure Participants were 34 Italian fourth-graders (15 females; mean age= 9 years 5 months), randomly allocated to the experimental (n= 17) or the control (n= 17) condition. Children in the experimental condition took part in three intervention sessions, each lasting about 30 min. The interventions [...] were implemented once a week for three consecutive weeks by a research assistant. Participants were asked to imagine having a pleasant interaction with an unknown immigrant child who just arrived from a foreign country. [...] To reinforce the effects of imagined contact, in each session participants were given 15 min to write down a description of the imagined encounter. [...] Children also engaged in a 10-minute discussion with the research assistant, centered on what they just imagined. One week after the last session, participants were administered a questionnaire containing the dependent measures. [...]

Measures For all measures, a 5-step scale was used, ranging from 1 (definitely not) to 5 (definitely).

Outgroup trust Two items were used [...].

Humanness attributions We used two positive (hope, pride) and two negative (remorse, shame) uniquely human emotions, and two positive (pleasure, excitement) and two negative (anger, fear) non-uniquely human emotions. [...] Participants indicated how much outgroup members are likely to feel each of the emotions presented. [...]

Behavioral intentions toward the outgroup [...] Participants were asked to think whether they would be happy to meet an unknown immigrant child, would like to play with him/her, would invite him/her to go and have an ice-cream together. [...]