Women and American history

Psychoanalysis and Feminism, by Juliet Mitchell. New York : Pantheon Books. 435 pp. $8.95.     

Applicability of Greulich and Pyle and Demirijan aging methods to a sample of Italian population

Age estimation in forensics is essential in cases involving both living and dead subjects. For living subjects, age estimation may be used to establish an individual's status as a minor in cases involving adoption, criminal responsibility, child pornography, and those seeking asylum. Criteria for age estimation in the living have recently been put forth by The Study Group on Forensic Age Diagnostics. The group has proposed guidelines with a three-step procedure: a physical examination and anthropometrical analysis; dental analysis by orthopantomogram (OPG); and X-ray study of the left hand and wrist. The board of FASE highlighted advantages and limits of each method, and suggested practical solutions concerning the age estimation process for adults and subadults. The aim of this study was to verify the applicability of the Greulich and Pyle, and Demirjian techniques on a sample group of Italians, whose ages were known, in determining the skeletal and dental age, in addition to evaluating the reliability of these techniques. 535 subjects between the ages of 7 and 15years were examined, each one undergoing both an orthopantomography (OPG) and radiography of the left wrist and hand. The data obtained underwent statistical analysis. The analyses have shown that a correlation exists between skeletal and dental age, and real age. Age estimation carried out using the Greulich and Pyle method has shown itself to be especially accurate on the Italian sample, particularly in the age ranges of 7-9years and 10.4-11.5years. The Greulich and Pyle method has shown itself to be reliable for the sample analyzed notwithstanding the ethnic differences between the original sample of reference and those analyzed in this study. Application of the Demirjian technique resulted in an overestimation of dental age. This difference is shown to be more highly significant in the higher age ranges. The combination of the Greulich and Pyle, and Demirjian methods have revealed a difference regarding real age, which turns out to be more modest in the younger age ranges and more significant in older subjects.     

Self-Esteem Enhancing Reasons for Having Sex and The Sexual Behaviors of African American Adolescents

A sample of 146 African American adolescents living in impoverished neighborhoods with high HIV rates participated in the Chicago HIV Prevention and Adolescent Mental Health Project (CHAMP), a longitudinal study of adolescent HIV risk exposure. The current study examined self-reported reasons why African American adolescents may participate in risky sexual behavior. Adolescents completed a questionnaire regarding their sexual behaviors and reasons for having sex at Wave 3 of data collection. Findings from the study revealed that females used condoms less consistently while males had more sexual partners and sexually debuted earlier. Regression analyses also indicated that males were more likely to endorse self-esteem enhancing reasons for having sex and those who did also reported a higher number of sexual partners. Males were more likely to endorse power-related reasons for having sex and those who did tended to sexually debut earlier. Across both genders, results suggested that those adolescents who endorsed more self-esteem enhancing reasons for having sex were less likely to use condoms consistently. Implications for prevention programs and future research are discussed. Doctoral candidate in the Clinical Psychology Program at Loyola University Chicago. She received her Master of Arts from Loyola University Chicago in Clinical Psychology. Her research interests are in HIV/AIDS prevention in African American communities, particularly amongst adolescent girls. Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of Clinical Training at Loyola University. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University. His interests lie in family relations during early and late adolescence, developmental psychopathology, the interface between developmental psychology and clinical child psychology, pediatric psychology (e.g., adolescents with physical disabilities), statistical applications in psychology, and research design. Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in Child Psychology from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis Her research interests lie in normative developmental processes during the transition to adolescence.     

Physical attractiveness as a mediator of the impact of early pubertal changes for girls

The present study examined the effects of early pubertal development and physical attractiveness on the popularity, body image, and self-esteem of over 200 sixth-grade girls. Two rival hypotheses were explored. The first suggests that physically attractive girls, because of their more favorable social environment, will exhibit fewer psychosocial difficulties than unattractive girls during pubertal development. The second hypothesis argues that attractive girls will exhibit greater difficulty during pubertal transition because their self-image is more intimately connected with their physical appearance. Although there were no significant interactions between attractiveness and pubertal development for either popularity or body image, the second hypothesis was supported with respect to self-esteem. Specifically, developing attractive girls exhibited lower self-esteem than their unattractive counterparts. The results are discussed in terms of the relative vulnerability to bodily changes of girls differing in physical attractiveness.Support for this work was provided by NIMH Grant 2 R01 MH-30739 and the William T. Grant Foundation.Received his M.A. in clinical child psychology from the Ohio State University. Main interests are the psychological concomitants of physical appearance and developmental aspects of the body image.Received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Minnesota. Current interests include social relationships in adolescence, consequences and correlates of physical maturation, and effects of transitions in early adolescence.Received her Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University. Current interests include gender differences in adolescence, the impact of transitions throughout the life span, and the psychosocial impact of organ donation.     

The Australian Experience of Municipal Amalgamation: Asking the Citizenry and Exploring the Implications

Debate over municipal amalgamations in Australian continues to dominate local government reform agendas, with the putative need to achieve economies of scale and scope consistently set against anti‐amalgamation arguments designed to preserve extant communities. Following from an examination of recent episodes of consolidation in Australia, this paper reports on citizens' attitudes to amalgamation garnered from a national survey of 2,006 individuals. We found that generally, citizens are ambivalent toward amalgamation, although attitudes were influenced by particular demographic characteristics and attitudes to representation, belonging, service delivery requirements and the costs thereof. The results suggest that, away from the local government sector itself, structural reform may not be the vexatious issue it is often portrayed as. The implications of this are explored here.     

When cinema borrows from stage: theatrical artifice through indexical explicitness in The Cook,the Thief,His Wife and Her Lover and Dogville

ABSTRACT

Framed within the debate on the different nature of theatrical and filmic communication, the study considers two avant-garde films by Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and von Trier, Dogville, as examples of texts that travel from one medium to another and show closeness to the theatre. This is revealed not solely through the artificiality and the enclosure of the setting and the mise-en-scène, but also at the level of the discourse understood as the ensemble of images, music, gestures, and dialogue. The two films exhibit an unnaturalness unusual in cinema, a medium in which the editing realises a seemingly realistic representation of characters and events. The discussion focuses on how such a sensation of artificial non-realism is achieved in the films. It is argued that it derives from the marked explicit relation between the various levels of communication in the two films, the verbal and the visual, as well as between the dialogue contributions by the different participants in the narrative, characters, and narrator. The construct adopted for the analysis is indexicality, which is interpreted in a broad sense and that, as is discussed, contributes to the “monstrative” dimension of the films in terms of the explicitness of the communication.