Psychological Well‐Being and Career Indecision in Emerging Adulthood: The Moderating Role of Hardiness

This study investigated the moderating role of hardiness in the relationship between psychological well‐being (PWB) and career indecision in 131 never‐employed Italian emerging adults. Cluster analytic methods produced high and low hardiness profiles. A structural equation modeling analysis underscored the importance of hardiness for moderating the negative association between PWB and career indecision. Specifically, findings revealed that being hardy is a crucial relevant personal resource in the presence of lower levels of PWB. The authors discuss the importance of analyzing simultaneously the role of PWB and hardiness in promoting engagement in the career decision‐making process and provide implications for setting up appropriate career counseling interventions with emerging adults. Suggestions for future research are presented, such as the use of longitudinal designs and qualitative methods.     

Not Your Average Teen Horror: Blood and Female Adolescence in Richard Bates’s Excision (2012)

ABSTRACT

Richard Bates’s film Excision (2012) uses blood as a metaphor to interrogate how cultural constructions of femininity affect the development of adolescent girls. Contrary to other horror films, which frequently depict adolescent girls as examples of the ‘monstrous-feminine’, this film about a girl who decides to perform a lung transplant on her sister explores the horrors caused by restricting conceptualisations of feminine bodies and identities. The film’s focus on blood interrogates problematic ideological connotations between menstruation and sexual promiscuity, and questions the veracity of supposedly realistic representations of the female body in contemporary advertising. Its protagonist’s adaptation of the ‘mad scientist’ persona gradually turns her into a character resembling Frankenstein, whose monstrosity highlights her inability to either conform to or escape from femininity as a cultural construct. Teen horror, the film suggests, is not caused by blood and bodily matter, but by extra-textual stereotypes and gender inequality.     

Diseased, maimed, mutilated: categorizations of disability and an ugly law in late nineteenth-century Chicago

The article places Chicago's "ugly" law—an 1881 municipal ordinance that fined "any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object" for appearing in public—within the context of late nineteenth-century imaginings of disability. Drawing on the framework of disability studies, this paper demonstrates that nineteenth-century understandings of disability had little to do with the impairments of individuals but instead were tied to the status of the person with the disability. Examining the role of disabled people as workers, as bodies and as charity recipients reveals the hierarchies of disability in late nineteenth-century Chicago and demonstrates who the ugly law intended to restrict and, just as importantly, who it did not. While the law appears to be a blanket indictment of all physically disabled people, multiple sources indicate that the public expected disabled veterans, workers, and freak show performers to occupy the public realm; they therefore cannot be the intended objects of the ordinance. Instead, Chicago's ugly law was one of many pieces of legislation enacted in the wake of the panic of 1873 that attempted to eradicate street begging in general by specifically targeting beggars with disabilities.     

The Assessment of Susceptibility to Emotional Contagion: A Contribution to the Italian Adaptation of the Emotional Contagion Scale

The Emotional Contagion Scale (ECS; Doherty in J Nonverbal Behav 21(2):131–154, 1997) is a self-report instrument assessing susceptibility to emotional contagion. The study was aimed at examining its dimensionality, reliability, and validity in the Italian context. It was completed by 541 young adults (45 % men) in Study 1 and 649 young adults (40 % men) in Study 2. The results of a series of confirmatory factor analyses showed that a bi-factor model, with one general factor and four specific factors was supported. The general and specific factors were differentially related to self-other differentiation, empathy, emotional fragility, masculinity, and femininity. Notwithstanding, the results posited some questions about the ECS reliability and convergent validity. Implications for scoring of the ECS and the need to revise it are discussed.     

PAGANS ONLINE AND OFFLINE: LOCATING COMMUNITY IN POSTMODERN TIMES

This article examines the ways Australian Pagans use e-mail discussion lists as a means of fostering community among dispersed offline practitioners. Sociologists struggle with ways of characterizing the Pagan movement. It appears to lack the necessary set of uniform beliefs and organizational features that reference community relations in other religions. However, new information and communication technologies (ICTs) accompanying globalization are changing the forms of human association and have stimulated speculation regarding the extent to which they foster community. Existing conceptualizations of community suffer from the historical emergence of the “virtual”/“real” distinction and are inadequate to characterizing sociability in the networked society. Wenger's theory of a “community of practice” (1998 Wenger , Etienne . 1998 . Communities of Practice . Cambridge , UK : Cambridge University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) is suggested as a way through this dilemma. The “community of practice” model is used to examine how Pagans integrate online and offline communications. Pagan social practices illustrate the ways in which individuals negotiate personal meanings and a sense of community in postmodern times.