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Introduction: Parents vary in their gradual adaptation to the demands of caring for an autistic child. Their experiences can be positive, negative, or a combination of both, depending on the severity of the cases and various personal and social factors. Cross-cultural comparisons can aid in understanding how contextual factors, such as the availability of social and health services, and cultural factors, such as family relationships and the distribution of care burden, may influence the caregiving experience. However, there is a limited amount of cross-cultural research on this topic, which is almost exclusively quantitative. Aims and methods: From an ecocultural perspective, our interview-based study aimed to explore the experiences of Australian (15) and Italian (11) parents of autistic children living in their respective countries. Results: The analysis identified three main themes. Life through autism, autism through life: coexisting with an unexpected life partner, Parenting autistic children: reorganization of parents’ subjectivity and familiar dynamics, and The unseen side of disability: autism communities between inclusion and segregation. Discussion: Our comparative approach reveals both commonalities and differences between the two groups of participants. The similarities support features previously identified in the literature: the emotional and physical burden on parents and the positive impact on parental identity. The differences relate to the diagnostic process, interactions with health professionals, the impact of autism on family dynamics and parental perspectives, and the role assigned to siblings. Despite facing similar challenges, these differences reveal how Italian and Australian parents articulate different understandings linked to social and cultural differences.

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.

Breast cancer patients are primary users of Internet Health Forums, virtual self-help communities where they find and share information, preoccupations, and support. Previous literature has mainly focused on analysing the contents and the outcomes of breast cancer forums' participation. In light of the Community of Practice theoretical model, our research investigated the psychosocial processes that build and shape patients' experience and participation in the forum. We conducted 16 semi-structured email interviews with breast cancer patients recruited within a well-established online community. Thematic analysis identified five processes—mirroring, monitoring, modelling, belonging, and distancing—that marked three phases of users' experience: initiation, participation, detachment. An interactive dynamic characterised the identified processes: the disease's experience was shaped by and, in turn, it crafted this virtual community. These community processes contributed to participants' empowerment at practical, informative, and emotional levels through the development of a shared repertoire of resources, stories, and ways of dealing with patients' recurring problems.

Objective: Research showed that ovarian cancer poses unique challenges to patients’ care experiences and that patients’ social networks could affect their care path significantly. The present study aimed to analyse the metaphors that patients used to signify the impact of the illness on their social relationships and the role of relationships in dealing with cancer. Design: Following a qualitative description approach we conducted 38 semi-structured interviews with Australian (14) and Italian (24) women diagnosed at different stages of ovarian cancer. Results: The analysis identified four themes bringing together the meanings expressed by participants’ metaphors: Lack of comprehension and communication; Isolation, marginalisation, and self-isolation; Discrepancy between the private and public self; and Social relationships as empowerment resources. Conclusion: The polysemic nature of patients’ metaphors captures both the empowering and especially disempowering role of social relationships in dealing with ovarian cancer. Results also show that metaphors are used to make sense of the impact of ovarian cancer on social relationships and to express different strategies for managing patients’ networks.

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.

Introduction: Given its profound and transversal impact, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 marked a deep point of division in how people make sense of the world and their lives. The consequences of this event were remarkable, especially for populations already facing vulnerability, exclusion, and discrimination. In Italy, over 3 million people (5.2% of the entire population) have a disability due to health issues or severe limitations that prevent them from performing daily activities. Although the COVID-19 health emergency aggravated and amplified these problems, research and studies investigating the incidence of psychological distress and the role of psychological resources for people with disabilities in the aftermath of the pandemic are still to be implemented. For these reasons, the Department of Psychology conducted a study on behalf of the Italian Government to assess the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the social, psychological, and economic wellbeing of Italians with disabilities. Methods: The aim was to assess the consequences of the pandemic on this population, especially the impacts related to the lockdowns and preventive measures, and to evaluate the protective role that could be played by psychological resources such as resilience, future orientation, and career adaptability in a Life Design perspective. With the collaboration of local, regional, and national associations for people with disability, an anonymous, online self-report questionnaire was distributed to 403 persons with disabilities in Italy. Results: Results showed a strong relationship between the levels of psychological resources and life satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussion: In line with studies in international literature regarding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on people with disabilities, this research highlights the extension of this period’s impacts on this population’s psychological wellbeing. Moreover, this study amplifies the urgent call for action and res

Over the last decades, the social context has been characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and inequalities, with significant impacts on people, groups, and communities. Covid-19 Pandemic has accentuated social discriminations, as inequalities affecting women (World Health Organization, 2018), with repercussions on general income, health, education (Office for National Statistics, 2021) that have been exhausting people, the economic system, and the welfare state (Antonicelli et al., 2020). To cope with these difficulties, on april 10, 2020 the Italian Prime Minister appointed a Task Force of 17 experts with scientific and applicative skills in social and economic fields. Within a short time, the Task Force aimed at identifying practical solutions priming the relaunch of the country. Given the women’s central role in the country’s social and economic development, in the final version of the Task Force plan, Gender Equality was indicated as the third—strategic and innovative—axis, together with Digitization and Green Economy. Its rationale was to promote gender equality in every action, with an allocation of dedicated economic resources. Specifically, the Task Force’s Working Group named “Individuals, Families, and Society” proposed specific initiatives aimed at recognizing and bridging the gender gaps in the various areas, and measures to support vulnerable people. This contribution will focus on the central role that the Task Force has played in encouraging systematic attention to women, considering their needs and the social-economic impacts on their choices and well-being. It will illustrate the Task Force’s internal dynamics (there were four women out of 17 people, then increased), the process of inclusion of different perspectives, both gender and multidisciplinary, and the practices suggested for the post-pandemic rebuilding. The final goal will be to show the inability to promote innovation, resilience and sustainability, without working with and for the com

The study is aimed at exploring, through lexical analysis, the courageous actions performed by elementary school students. Five hundred ninety-two Italian children were interviewed about the most courageous action that they had ever performed during their life. Exploratory cluster analysis with Iramuteq was run to analyse the children’s answers and four clusters were found. The first cluster referred to actions performed with physical risks (physical courage). The second cluster referred to actions to protect or defend others, especially peers, in difficult and unpleasant social situations (moral courage). The third cluster referred to courageous actions in dealing with threats concerning personal well-being (psychological courage) and the fourth cluster referred to physically and psychologically courageous actions. Gender differences were found for the first and third cluster with girls reporting more physical courage and boys more psychological courage. The study has important implications for research and practice.

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.

Academic self-efficacy beliefs influence students’ academic and career choices, as well as motivational factors and learning strategies promoting effective academic success. Nevertheless, few studies have focused on the academic self-efficacy of university students in comparison to students at other levels. Furthermore, extant measures present several limitations. The first aim of this study was to develop a reliable and valid scale assessing university students’ self-efficacy beliefs in managing academic tasks. The second aim was to investigate differences in academic self-efficacy due to gender, years of enrollment, and student status. The study involved 831 students (age M = 21.09 years; SD = 1.34 years; 66.3% women) enrolled in undergraduate programs. Indicators of academic experiences and performance (i.e., number of exams passed and average exam rating) were collected. A new scale measuring students’ academic self-efficacy beliefs was administered. Results from a preliminary Exploratory Factor Analysis were consistently supported by findings from a Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Multigroup CFA supported the presence of measurement invariance. Analyses revealed that the new scale has eight factors: “Planning Academic Activities,” “Learning Strategies,” “Information Retrieval,” “Working in Groups,” “Management of Relationships with Teachers,” “Managing Lessons,” “Stress Management,” and “Thesis Work.” Self-efficacy dimensions showed significant relations with academic experiences and students’ performance indicators, as well as differences due to gender, years of enrollment, and student status. Findings are discussed in terms of practical implications for the implementation of intervention programs aimed at fostering self-efficacy beliefs and academic success.

The call for further research on service sustainability at all levels has been increasingly stated within the past years. However, limited research has been conducted with regard to the macro level, in which services are inevitably influenced by social, cultural, economic and technological factors. This paper develops an ecosystem approach within the service context to design a service not only from a micro level (e.g., service experience, service encounters), but also from a social level in order to help businesses and public sectors to transform the relationship among individual, collective, social, and environmental systems and increase service sustainability. Then, it applies the developed Service Ecosystem Design (SED) model in a Career Counselling Service (CCS) in the University of Milano-Bicocca (Unimib) in order to demonstrate the usefulness of this model. The empirical data were collected from service providers to illustrate the current service system maps and from first-year undergraduates to understand their perceptions and expectations on campus CCS. The results show that the Unimib CCS is a research-oriented career service and the fundamental service improvements should focus on designing the peer counselling, follow-up, pre-service, a holistic online platform, law education, technology education, optional course, hands-on experiences and student activities.

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

The paper describes an innovative methodological approach to Public Engagement already tested by the Authors in the healthcare context. We propose to apply our methodology to social innovation projects, focusing on gender perspective when promoting enhancements in health-community. Methodology mixes Psychosocial Participatory Research, Service-Design and “Human-Centered” approach, promoting an interdisciplinary, technological, and sustainable process. The final aim is to find viable solutions to real problems through the engagement of a community of experts and citizens in a three-step process. Awareness-raising actions: to increase people’s knowledge—group understanding of the subject and to stimulate reflection. Activities: Gender-Cafés, Ethnographic-Observations and Narrative-Interviews. Activation actions: group interventions in which initial stimuli are collected and processed into proposals for services and tools aimed at targeted groups. Activities: Barcamps, Generative Labs. Participation actions: multidisciplinary teams realize prototypes and elaborate concrete solutions (tools, services) addressing crucial gender issues. Activities: Hackathon, Service-Design-Labs.

L’azione di orientamento delle università negli anni si è molto trasformata. Da un ruolo informativo svolto nelle giornate di apertura, fino a una dimensione che si articola in un processo temporale di lunga durata: in ingresso, durante il percorso universitario e in uscita. Molti sono gli interventi progettati dalla commissione orientamento dell’Università di Milano-Bicocca nel suo complesso; quello su cui questo contributo vuole soffermarsi è il tutoring per gli studenti del primo anno. Un’azione estremamente articolata che iniziata nel 2013, è arrivata a coinvolgere ben sedici Corsi di laurea. Nello scritto si analizzeranno i passaggi che hanno portato all’attuale realizzazione accostati a una prima analisi riflessiva della documentazione redatta., University orientation programs have evolved significantly in recent years, going from mere induction days to long-term processes spanning students’ entire course of studies from entrance through exit. The orientation committee at Milano-Bicocca University leads a wide range of orientation projects; in the current paper, we focus on the university’s tutoring program for first-year students. This highly complex scheme was first launched in 2013, and is currently offered on 16 different degree courses. We analyze the steps that led to the development of the present format, while reflectively evaluating the documentation produced on its implementation.

The present study aimed to extend understanding about the relationship between career adaptability, courage, and life satisfaction in a sample of Italian adolescents. It was hypothesized that courage partially mediated the relationship between career adaptability and life satisfaction. Specifically, 1202 Italian high school students with an age from 14 to 20 years (M = 16.87; SD = 1.47), of which 600 (49.9%) boys and 602 (50.1%) girls, were involved. Using a multigroup approach across gender, it was found that courage partially mediated the relationship between career adaptability and life satisfaction in boys and girls. Results suggested the relevance of career interventions to promote career adaptability and courage for strengthening life satisfaction in adolescence

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

Significant social changes and affirmative action policies that have occurred in the last three decades in the Western world have still not reduced status differences and inequalities between men and women in the job landscape. These disparities may be due to occupational gender stereotypes – i.e., beliefs regarding occupational roles and the types of training men and women should take on. The present chapter examines the effect of gender stereotypes on occupational choices and discusses intervention strategies that counselors could use to address such stereotypes. Beyond career interventions on gender stereotypes operating individually or on small groups, a new methodological and conceptual approach to overcoming gender stereotypes in a wider process of public engagement is presented. This interdisciplinary approach, using tools and methods from other research areas such as World Cafè, Service Design Thinking, and Hackathons aims to promote social behavioral changes regarding gender issues in large numbers of people at affordable costs.