Research into work stress in Italy: A review

This paper reviews the development of stress research in Italy from the late 1960s onwards. It focuses on 1975 as the year when the first real studies on work stress were published, and interest was kindled in the psychological factors which affect physical health and in the physiological correlates of work stress. Much important work in these aspects of occupational health was started at this time at the Clinic of Work in Milan and at the University of Perugia. By the 1980s, Italian psychologists were also showing considerable interest in work stress, and the more psychological literature had begun to exceed that of a medical and physiological orientation. Despite this progress, stress research in Italy is still in its infancy, and the recognition of stress as an issue for management and trade unions is weak.     

Devaluation expectations and the unit root hypothesis: The Italian Lira in the European monetary system

Summary In several studies the unit root hypothesis of EMS exchange rates is analysed within the context of devaluation expectations estimation. By means of bootstrap inference it is shown that these procedures are not compatible with standard Dickey-Fuller significance levels and may lead to a wrong rejection of the null hypothesis. In the case of the Italian Lira/Deutsche Mark exchange rate, the hypothesis of a unit root is not rejected and expectations can be modelled by means of a reflected Brownian motion. The estimated devaluation expectations are related with some macro variables which provide evidence for the structure of expectations. This research has been partially supported with 40% and 60% MURST grants. The author wishes to thank the Bank of Italy for the exchange rates and the interest rates data and Ulf S?derstr?m for providing macroeconomic indicators. Useful suggestions from Riccardo Cesari, Michele Costa and two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged.     

Exploring theoretical frameworks for the analysis of fertility fluctuations

Analysis of scientific debate on the determinants of procreational choice leads the author to identify four main decisional logics: primary adaptation, economic rationality, norm internalization and identity reinforcement. Revisiting the classics supports the hypothesis of a bipolarity of strategical principles governing fluctuating reproductive behaviour. In particular, dialectics between the two endogenous strategies — economic rationality and identity rationality — suggests the use of the Volterra-Kostitsin predator-prey model as a metaphor to account for fertility waves.     

“I Know That You Know How I Feel”: Behavioral and Physiological Signals Demonstrate Emotional Attunement While Interacting with a Computer Simulating Emotional Intelligence

Human–human communication studies have suggested that within communicative interactions, individuals acknowledge each other as intentional agents and adjust their emotion nonverbal behavior according to the other. This process has been defined as emotional attunement. In this study, we examine the emotional attunement process in the context of affective human–computer interactions. To this purpose, participants were exposed to one of two conditions. In one case, they played with a computer that simulated understanding of their emotional reactions while guiding them across four different game-like activities; in the other, the computer guided participants across the activities without mentioning any ability to understand emotional responses. Face movements, gaze direction, posture, vocal behavior, electrocardiogram and electrodermal activity were simultaneously recorded during the experimental sessions. Results showed that if participants were aware of interacting with an agent able to recognize their emotions, they reported that the computer was able to “understand” them and showed a higher number of nonverbal behaviors during the most interactive activity. The implications are discussed.     

Look What's Back! Institutional Complexity,Reversibility and the Knotting of Logics

Through a comparative historical study of community pharmacy in the UK, Italy, Sweden and the USA, the authors examine what happens to institutional arrangements designed to resolve ongoing conflicts between institutional logics over extended periods of time. It is found that institutional arrangements can reflect the heterogeneity of multiple logics without resulting in hybridization or dominance. Because logics remain active, similar conflicts can reappear multiple times. It is found that the durability of the configurations of competing logics reflects the characteristics of the polities in which fields are embedded. The dominance of any societal institutional order leads to more stable field‐level arrangements. The authors suggest that the metaphor of institutional knots and the related image of institutional knotting are useful to capture aspects of this dynamic and to foreground the discursive and material work that allows multiple logics to coexist in local arrangements with variable durability.     

Italy’s Non-Negligible Cohabitational Unions

Italy has long been regarded as the country with negligible non-marital cohabitation par excellence, but lately the pattern has begun to change and entry into consensual unions has increased strongly in younger Italian generations. This article is devoted to a study of such features between 1980 and 2003 based on the data from the Italian variant of the Gender and Generations Survey, Round 1. We consider entry into marriage and entry into cohabitation as competing risks and show how the incidence of cohabitation consistently much lower but has increased by some 70% over the 20-odd years of our study, while the marriage rate has dropped by almost as much. We find great variation across major regions of the country. The rise in cohabitation is confined to Northern and Central Italy, while the risk of marriage formation has declined strongly all over the country. Unlike previous investigations, our data suggest that non-marital cohabitation may be taking over whatever minor role civil marriage has had in Italian union formation.