Search

Nowadays, society is characterized by enormous and rapid changes, erratic careers, gender discrimination, injustices, and inequities. Discrimination includes professional and educational segregation, the gender pay gap, stereotypical gender roles, and social expectations. In this context, phenomena called low fertility and fertility gap are increasing. Indeed, the birth rate necessary to ensure the replacement of the population is not reached, with severe repercussions at a social, environmental, and economic level. This study aimed to investigate 835 women’s perceptions of the desire for motherhood and the associated difficulties. Hierarchical multiple regression and thematic decomposition analyses first highlight a significant difference between the number of children women realistically plan and the ideal number of children they would like. Secondly, the results showed how the parenthood choice is connected to the perception of social and gender inequity. Finally, in a Life Design perspective, preventive actions will be described to support women to get back to the center of life choices, building dignified fair paths and family projects.

Hospital discharge can potentially represent an issue. Therefore, it is important to early identify patients at higher risk. A valid tool in this field is the Blaylock Risk Assessment Screening Score (BRASS).The study aims to elaborate a simplified score system, throughout the contribution of healthcare professionals considering the single items of the original score.The study included a qualitative analysis, conducted in order to draft the synthetic tool. Alongside, a statistical analysis was carried out. The findings of these two works were compared and joined in the realization of the proposed evaluation tool.The synthetic tool, developed by the working team, is composed by 20 items. The qualitative analysis agrees with the statistical approach. Moreover, the qualitative analysis consented to redefine some items, especially considering social support, and to include some additional information e.g. clinical problems.The analysis considered only General Medicine wards, all located in the same Hospital. Therefore, generalisation to other settings or patients should be further tested.The synthetic tool, realized during the study, aims to improve the individuation of at-risk inpatients. The agreement between statistical and qualitative analysis can be considered a point of strength of our work. Our analysis consented to include some new items, improving overall organization. In conclusion, the working group aims to conduct further study in order to individuate the more appropriate cut-off of the new scoring method.

The pandemic increased world’s uncertainty, and led to deep change in daily habits, generating disorientation, and inevitably affecting people life and professional plans. Young adults and students’ future perspective and satisfaction with life were widely affected, especially for those facing school/ work transitions. Nevertheless, it was of primary importance for career guidance psychologists to intervene to support students despite having to navigate “on sight” and with little literature available. This paper will thus describe how the Life Design Psy-Lab, a career guidance service from Bicocca University (Milan, Italy) implemented a thematic online group intervention with 103 students enrolled. The intervention was based on the theoretical model of Life Design and was performed by career counselling psychologists. The intervention’s goal was to foster students’ development of skills and mindset to face complexity and unpredictability, shifting their time perception from an uncertain present to a more optimistic future scenario. The intervention’s impact was assessed using pre and post online questionnaires. Results show how students increased their precepted level in a set of skills to face change and complexity after participating to the intervention. In more detail, students’ precepted levels of career adaptability, courage, time perspective and resilience rose. Also, data show how the intervention strengthened students’ life satisfaction. This paper will thus contribute to expand the growing yet still newborn set of knowledge about career guidance interventions in times of COVID-19 emergency, specifically addressing the issue of design interventions that can improve young adults’ skills to visualize and project present and future for themselves, especially during uncertain times.

This prepost test experimental study examined the effectiveness of an intervention providing information about peers with sensory disability, intellectual disability, and behavioral difficulties (cognitive intervention), an intervention using imagined contact with peers with these disabilities (behavioral intervention), and an intervention combining information with imagined contact, against a no-intervention control condition. One hundred and forty-two typically developing children were randomly assigned to 1 of the 4 conditions. Measures of attitudes, stereotypes, and feelings toward and intentions to engage in contact with peers with sensory disability, intellectual disability, and behavioral difficulties were administered. Results revealed that the combined cognitive and behavioral intervention improved all outcome variables considered. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) Educational Impact and Implications Statement—This study focused on the improvement of elementary school students’ attitudes toward peers with disabilities. Its results suggest that it is important to provide positive information about the disabilities and strategies to encourage their participation in educational and extracurricular activities. Imaging interacting with peers with disabilities is also crucial. The combination of the 2 interventions (information about disability and imagination) allows to get stronger effects. These results can help to reduce negative attitudes toward students with disabilities and contribute to the construction of more inclusive school and social contexts.

This project developed and examined the psychometric properties of an Italian version of the Courage Measure, the reduced version composed of six items as suggested by Howard and Alipour (J Posit Psychol 9:449–459, 2014). Two studies were conducted with independent samples of Italian adults, providing psychometric support for the Italian adaptation of the inventory. This short scale is proposed as a useful tool in the fields of mental health and career counselling for assessing the propensity of individuals to behave courageously and to persist despite perceived risks. Scores may indicate potential to overcome personal challenges related to everyday life as well as career-related problems.

This paper examines how the tutoring service for first year students offered by Milano-Bicocca University since 2013 has successfully continued to provide academic support during the health, economic, and social crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the early years of the service’s functioning – initially offered on four of the University’s degree courses – it was deemed necessary to develop a new, broader perspective on academic guidance that contemplated the involvement of “peer” as well as teacher tutors. This revolutionary and innovative change in the tutoring process meant that senior students were co-opted onto the guidance project to offer the benefit of their own experience in coping with the challenges of first year at university. The tutoring programme team provided participating senior students with ad hoc training and supervised them as they conducted individual and group activities with first year students. Thanks to this strategy, the service was eventually extended to the students of almost all the university’s degree programmes: in the 2019/2020 academic year, around 100 peer tutors worked with students on over 20 bachelor’s degree courses. The positive results obtained to date in terms of student involvement and investment in tutor education underpinned the university’s recent decision to make tutoring available to students on master’s degree courses also, beginning in 2020/2021. In the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the complexity and uncertainty it has generated, the tutoring service has been reorganized and largely redesigned; more specifically, given the suspension of on-campus teaching alongside other restrictive measures, tutoring activities are now delivered remotely, via a mixture of live and offline formats. This paper offers a detailed description of the various components of the tutoring service offered during the complex and challenging COVID-19 emergency. These components have been designed to: meet current societal requirements, foster reflection on the changes prompted by the public health emergency, and express developments in how the tutoring service has been delivered and interpreted since it was originally set up.

The authors examined the relationship between career adaptability, future orientation, and vocational interests. Specifically, they tested the role of career adaptability and future orientation in promoting a broader range of vocational interests, based on the principle that experiencing more interests can be useful in giving one's best in multiple occupations and in planning a broad range of career goals. A total of 762 Italian adolescents (383 males, 379 females) participated in the study. Results highlight the mediating role of future orientation in the relationship between 4 career adaptability resources and breadth of vocational interests. These results underscore that specific interventions in career adaptability and future orientation may foster a broader range of vocational interests, providing more opportunity for adolescents to respond to the demands of the current job market.

Background: Computerized speech analysis (CSA) is a powerful method that allows one to assess stress-induced mood disturbances and affective disorders through repeated measurements of speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics. Over the past decades CSA has been successfully used in the clinical context to monitor the transition from ‘affectively disturbed' to ‘normal' among psychiatric patients under treatment. This project, by contrast, aimed to extend the CSA method in such a way that the transition from ‘normal' to ‘affected' can be detected among subjects of the general population through 10-20 self-assessments. Methods: Central to the project was a normative speech study of 5 major languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). Each language comprised 120 subjects stratified according to gender, age, and education with repeated assessments at 14-day intervals (total n = 697). In a first step, we developed a multivariate model to assess affective state and stress-induced bodily reactions through speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics. Secondly, we determined language-, gender-, and age-specific thresholds that draw a line between ‘natural fluctuations' and ‘significant changes'. Thirdly, we implemented the model along with the underlying methods and normative data in a self-assessment ‘voice app' for laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Finally, a longitudinal self-assessment study of 36 subjects was carried out over 14 days to test the performance of the CSA method in home environments. Results: The data showed that speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics can be quantified in a reproducible and language-independent way. Gender and age explained 15-35% of the observed variance, whereas the educational level had a relatively small effect in the range of 1-3%. The self-assessment ‘voice app' was realized in modular form so that additional languages can simply be ‘plugged in' once the respective normative data become available. Results of the longitudinal self-assessment study in home environments demonstrated that CSA methods work well under most circumstances. Conclusions: We have successfully developed and tested a self-assessment CSA method that can monitor transitions from ‘normal' to ‘affected' in subjects of the general population in the broader context of mood disorders. Our easy-to-use ‘voice app' evaluates sequences of 10-20 repeated assessments and watches for affect- and stress-induced deviations from baseline that exceed language-, gender-, and age-specific thresholds. Specifically, the ‘voice app' provides users with stress-related ‘biofeedback' and can help to identify that 10-15% subgroup of the general population that exhibits insufficient coping skills under chronic stress and may benefit from early detection and intervention prior to developing clinically relevant symptoms.

EnglishThe article considers the normative dimension of female gender stereotypes, underscoring the prescriptive and self-prescriptive power they contain. Particularly highlighted, from the social psychological point of view, is the recurring reproduction (even by women) of expectations of an intra-gender homogeneity based on a traditional female role. Emphasis is put on how this tendency to refuse to recognize intra-gender differences - often evident in job contexts - may contribute to conserving the power imbalances existing between men and women, and to sustaining women's systematic relegation to 'second place' in the workplace. As an example, the article contains some free quotations relating to the qualitative analysis made of women's discursive productions collected in a wider research project on the relation between gender and science. These aspects of stereotypic self- and other-perception - and the social expectations deriving from them - are also discussed in the light of the sociological approach to gender identity, and in their relations to practices and to ongoing social changes.FrenchCette contribution reprend la dimension normative des stéréotypes de genre féminin en soulignant le pouvoir normatif et auto-normatif qu'ils contiennent. D'un point de vue psychosocial, la reproduction constante d'attentes, même féminines, vers une homogénéité au sein des femmes, déclinée sur un rôle féminin traditionnel, est particulièrement mise en évidence. Il est souligné que cette tendance à méconnaître les différences au sein des femmes, souvent criante dans le contexte professionnel, peut contribuer à la conservation des déséquilibres de pouvoir existant entre hommes et femmes au travail en favorisant le classement continu des femmes à la 'deuxième place' dans les organisations. Quelques extraits de l'analyse qualitative effectuée sur les discours féminins relevés dans un projet de recherche plus ample sur la relation entre genre et science sont cités à titre d'exemple. Ces aspects d'auto- et hétéro-perception stéréotypique - et les attentes sociales qui en dérivent - sont également discutés à la lumière de l'approche sociologique de l'identité de genre, dans leur relation avec les pratiques et face aux changements sociaux en cours.