Southern Italians Research Articles

The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic in the United States: Lessons Learned and Challenges Exposed

The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic in the United States: Lessons Learned and Challenges Exposed

Pockets of resistance to globalization: the case of the Lega Nord

ABSTRACT From its inception, the Lega Nord has been a populist social and political movement obsessed with the Other. In the world-view of the Lega Nord, the Other is anything that threatens the cultural and regional identity of Italians in the northern part of the country, particularly the Northeast. In the early 1990s the Other was constituted by corrupt politicians in Rome, Italian economic monopolies and southern Italians. By the late 1990s the Other had increasingly become the forces of globalization that, according to the Lega leadership's shrill arguments, threatened the economic and social fabric of what the party now refers to as ‘Padania’. Woods explores the manner in which anti-globalization became the dominant ideological Other in the rhetoric of the Lega Nord.

High Incidence of Factor V Leiden and Prothrombin G20210A in Healthy Southern Italians

Factor V Leiden (FVL) and G20210 prothrombin (FII G20210A) mutations are risk factors for thromboembolism. In Europe, FVL is more prevalent in the north (7%) than in the south (3%), whereas FII G20210A is more common in the south (3% to 7%) than in the north (2% to 5%). In Italy, the prevalence is 2% to 3% for both. The aim of this study was to assess if these polymorphisms could be more frequent in the south than in the rest of Italy. In 105 blood donors in southern Italy, the prevalence of FVL and FIIG20210A was 9.5% and 5.7%, respectively. These prevalence data are higher when compared with published data. The results of this study are as high as those observed in Greece and the Middle East. The diffusion of FVL and FII G20210A in the Mediterranean, consequent to Phoenician and Greek colonization, could be a reason for the high prevalence observed.

Real Presence: The <i>Numina</i> in Italian American Poetry

In an influential essay, Dana Gioia asserts: full range and quality of Italian-American poetry ... remains inadequately understood in any critical environment (n. pag.). With few exceptions, environmental literary criticism has remained indifferent to ethnic literature, in part, I suspect, because nature writing and the literature of environmental crisis is thoroughly Anglo-American; thus, when ecocritics enter multicultural discourse, tends to mean Anglo. Italian American poetry has been lost at the margins of whiteness. This is not surprising because, as scholarship in Whiteness Studies has shown, many of the peoples now considered ethnics--Ashkenazi Jews, southern Italians, the Irish--were not entirely when they arrived in the United States during the great migrations that ended in 1924. (1) The assimilation of these groups into middle-class whiteness after World War If--the creation of dark white ethnicities--has occluded the difference between immigrants and groups present during the continental phase of nation-building. (2) For American Indians, African Americans, Chicanos, and Anglo-Americans, the creation of the American was a shared, if agonistic, experience. The dramas of Emancipation, the Indian Wars, and the annexation of the Southwest coincide with the creation of nature's nation in the narrative of Manifest Destiny, the new multicultural history, and the environmentalist narratives of industrial devastation and conservationist repentance? For immigrants whose influx peaked in the early-twentieth century, however, the question of participation in these racialized histories of nature remains open. Can the narratives, plots, tropes, and aesthetic principles that drive the literature of these earlier groups account for the post-immigrant relationship to American environments? What new forms of cultural poiesis have been fashioned by the environment of diaspora, by the interchange between old and new immigrant worlds? In this essay, I will begin to answer these questions relative to Italian American poetry by considering the work of John Ciardi and Diane di Prima. If, as Josephine Gattuso Hendin asserts, [e]thnic heritage is history in action and subjects the fact of immigration to a scrutiny of its ongoing (13), it makes sense to ask what difference that heritage has made to poets who encountered the United States as a diasporic environment. To put it another way, we can scrutinize the ongoing effects of Italian heritage on American poets in their encounter with the presence, or presences, of the nonhuman world. From such an angle, we discover a striking dynamic in Ciardi's and di Prima's poetry: an encounter with the numina--divine powers the spirits of place, that founds a theophanic aesthetics quite distinct from the Emersonian transparent eyeball, in which the nature of the other is subsumed in the All; from the Dickinsonian microcosmos, in which Vesuvius is contained by the domus; and from T. S. Eliot's adventures in Indic religion, in which rivers are, necessarily, brown gods. I call this poetic principle the aesthetic of real presence because the voice of the poet arises from an encounter with a creature whose role as an instance of the divine roots the diasporic speaker in place, despite any claim of Anglo-American dominion. Real presence is, of course, a reference to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a Christian idea of incarnation through liturgical action. I suggest, however, that the Catholic heritage of Italian American culture can be used to talk about religious experiences that are not strictly Christian. The incarnational imperative to encounter the divine in the world of the senses through the mediation of art radiates from the official sacraments, but is not confined to them. Aisthesis, the sensory experience of the divine in or as a creature, founds ethnesis, the production and renewal of culture. The idea of the Mediterranean peasant and her/his offspring as closer to nature is not so much displaced as revealed to be an alternate origin for civilization itself. …

Is it better to be moral than smart? The effects of morality and competence norms on the decision to work at group status improvement.

Three studies examined strategies of status improvement in experimentally created (Study 1 and 2) and preexisting (Study 3) low-status groups. Theory and prior research suggested that an in-group norm that established a particular strategy of status improvement as moral (rather than competent) would have a greater effect on individuals' decision to work at this strategy. Both Study 1 and Study 2 found that morality norms had a greater impact than competence norms on individuals' decision to work at group (rather than individual) status improvement. In both studies participants also needed less time to decide on a strategy of status improvement when it is was encouraged by a morality norm rather than a competence norm. Study 3 used a preexisting low-status group (i.e., Southern Italians) to further confirm that morality norms have a greater effect on the decision to work at group status improvement than do competence norms. Results are discussed in terms of social influence and identity management strategies.

The importance of a taste. A comparative study on wild food plant consumption in twenty-one local communities in Italy

A comparative food ethnobotanical study was carried out in twenty-one local communities in Italy, fourteen of which were located in Northern Italy, one in Central Italy, one in Sardinia, and four in Southern Italy. 549 informants were asked to name and describe food uses of wild botanicals they currently gather and consume. Data showed that gathering, processing and consuming wild food plants are still important activities in all the selected areas. A few botanicals were quoted and cited in multiple areas, demonstrating that there are ethnobotanical contact points among the various Italian regions (Asparagus acutifolius, Reichardia picroides, Cichorium intybus, Foeniculum vulgare, Sambucus nigra, Silene vulgaris, Taraxacum officinale, Urtica dioica, Sonchus and Valerianella spp.). One taxon (Borago officinalis) in particular was found to be among the most quoted taxa in both the Southern and the Northern Italian sites.However, when we took into account data regarding the fifteen most quoted taxa in each site and compared and statistically analysed these, we observed that there were a few differences in the gathering and consumption of wild food plants between Northern and Southern Italy. In the North, Rosaceae species prevailed, whereas in the South, taxa belonging to the Asteraceae, Brassicaceae, and Liliaceae s.l. families were most frequently cited. We proposed the hypothesis that these differences may be due to the likelihood that in Southern Italy the erosion of TK on wild vegetables is taking place more slowly, and also to the likelihood that Southern Italians' have a higher appreciation of wild vegetables that have a strong and bitter taste.A correspondence analysis confirmed that the differences in the frequencies of quotation of wild plants within the Northern and the Southern Italian sites could be ascribed only partially to ethnic/cultural issues. An additional factor could be recent socio-economic shifts, which may be having a continued effort on people's knowledge of wild food plants and the way they use them.Finally, after having compared the collected data with the most important international and national food ethnobotanical databases that focus on wild edible plants, we pointed out a few uncommon plant food uses (e.g. Celtis aetnensis fruits, Cicerbita alpine shoots, Helichrysum italicum leaves, Lonicera caprifolium fruits, Symphytum officinale leaves), which are new, or have thus far been recorded only rarely.

Culture, Class and Cognition: Evidence from Italy

AbstractEast Asians have been found to reason in relatively holistic fashion and Americans in relatively analytic fashion. It has been proposed that these cognitive differences are the result of social practices that encourage interdependence for Asians and independence for Americans. If so, cognitive differences might be found even across regions that are geographically close. We compared performance on a categorization task of relatively interdependent southern Italians and relatively independent northern Italians and found the former to reason in a more holistic fashion than the latter. Furthermore, as it has been argued that working class social practices encourage interdependence and middle class practices encourage independence, we anticipated that working class participants might reason in a more holistic fashion than middle class participants. This is what we found – at least for southern Italy.

Tumor necrosis factor gene polymorphisms and clearance or progression of hepatitis B virus infection

We evaluated the influence of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) promoter gene polymorphisms on clearance of hepatitis B virus (HBV) and outcome of HBV chronic hepatitis. Four TNF-alpha promoter polymorphisms (T-1031C, C-863A, G-308A, and G-238A) were evaluated by direct sequencing in 184 chronic HBV carriers hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) positive and 96 controls with documented sero-clearance (HBsAg negativity, positivity for anti-HBs and anti-HBc IgG). Frequencies of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and haplotypes in the control group were compared with those of the chronic carrier group and with clinically defined subgroups of the latter: asymptomatic carriers, patients with compensated hepatitis, decompensated cirrhotics, and patients with hepatocellular carcinoma. Furthermore, subgroups of chronic carriers were compared among them. In the chronic carrier group, the -308 G allele was more frequent in those with a family history of HBV infection (96% vs 88% of those with non-familial transmission). The G/G genotype at position -308 was found in all chronic carriers with decompensated cirrhosis but in only 78% of controls (P=0.01) and was more frequent in decompensated cirrhotics than in the other subgroups. The distribution of TNF-alpha gene polymorphisms in the carrier group was not significantly different from that in the sero-clearance control group. TNF-alpha SNPs at positions -1031/-863 and -863/-238 were in linkage disequilibrium. The TCGG haplotype (-T1031, -C863, -G308, -G238) was significantly associated with end-stage liver disease. The TNF-alpha promoter polymorphisms do not appear to be determinant of HBV sero-clearance in southern Italians. The genotype -308G/G and haplotype TCGG are associated with an unfavorable prognosis in patients with chronic HBV infection.

“From the Bottom to the Top”: Frank Sinatra, the American Myth of Success, and the Italian‐American Image

When one thinks of Frank Sinatra, numerous images come to mind. Some will think of the young crooner, heartthrob to countless bobbysoxers; some will think of the cocky leader of the so-called Rat Pack. There is the bellicose casino owner daring the authorities to shut him down after it is reported that a well-known Mafioso had visited the property. There is the man of philanthropy, and cruelty. There is the liberal star challenging the McCarthyism of the nation's capital, the active democrat supporting John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, and the Reagan Republican campaigning for the great communicator in the 1980 election. There is the unrepentant womanizer, and the spurned lover. There is the broken man, nevertheless persevering to once again scale the heights of success. For people, one's recollections of Frank Sinatra share at least one essential feature: they are based upon media constructs, the product of media industries promulgating information satisfying various agendas and paymasters. As such, the meanings of texts comprising those media constructs are of paramount concern for any analysis of Sinatra's cultural importance. This article focuses on national media coverage of Sinatra, from his first appearance in a national magazine, Newsweek in March 1943, through his fall from grace during the late 1940s and early 1950s, to his eventual and ultimate rise back to the top of the entertainment industry following his Oscar-winning success for From Here to Eternity (1953). media images that came to dominate the national discourse on Sinatra throughout his career were the products of specific organizations operating at a particular time. It is the thesis of this study that the Sinatra known to millions that is, Sinatra's image-was promulgated through a national yet New York-centered media that, ensconced in an environment alive with both nativist and progressive rhetoric, presented Frank Sinatra, implicitly and explicitly, in ways consistent with local representations of Italian Americans. That is, the national media disseminated, through Sinatra's image, stereotypes of Italians and Italian Americans that originally circulated in local press items and progressive literature focused primarily upon migration of southern Italians to the United from 1890 to 1920. Within this context, this study provides an analysis of Sinatra's image, with particular reference to the American myth of success. Texts, Terms, and Concepts Texts This study addresses the dissemination of stereotypes in the national mass media. Hence, Time magazine, the often-read newsmagazine in the United States (Noune and Nourie 495), was chosen because of its status as a gatekeeper for information distributed to the public. It was, and remains, among the read magazines in the nation. Newsweek was chosen for similar reasons. This study, however, while focused upon Time and Newsweek, integrates analysis of materials appearing in other national publications, the vast majority of which were published in New York City (see Appendix). Seventy-one articles published were analyzed, fiftyseven of which were published in New York. Embedded within these texts is a star-making apparatus that had been perfected in Hollywood's promotion of its product and had developed its own values and themes. Of all of the conventions present in the star image, perhaps none is as ubiquitous as that of the American myth of success, and it is to this myth that we now turn. American Myth of Success For Richard Weiss, author of American Myth of Success (1969), the eponymous myth is among the most enduring expressions of American popular ideals, the notion that ours is an open society, where birth, family, and class do not significantly circumscribe individual possibilities: The belief that all men, in accordance with certain rules, but exclusively by their own efforts, can make of their lives what they will has been widely popularized for well over a century. …

Whiteness, multiculturalism and nationalist appropriation of Celtic culture: the case of the League of the South and the Lega Nord

The League of the South (USA) and Lega Nord (Italy), formed in 1994 and 1991 respectively, are nationalist organizations that have utilized claims to Celtic ethnicity to further their appeal. In this article we explore these claims, made in relation to the southern United States and northern Italy, and argue that they are used by these organizations to justify exclusionary politics. By claiming a privileged status for Celtic culture, heritage and genealogy, the League of the South and Lega Nord envision their putative nation-states as accommodating other ethnic groups in subordinate roles. We argue that claiming Celtic ethnicity is an implicit appeal to white privilege. In the proposed nation-states of the Confederate States of America and Padania, white authority would be sustained. Further, the way these groups use Celticness allows them to make links to specific historical and material geographies. Claiming Celtic origins enables northern Italians to distinguish themselves from southern Italians, and to make an associated historical-geographical connection between themselves and northern Europe, enabling disassociation from the Mediterranean. The League of the South claim to ‘Anglo-Celtic’ ethnicity enables their membership to distinguish themselves from other residents of the United States, be these non-white residents of the southern states or other white people within the USA. Finally, we suggest that some dominant political commitments to multiculturalism facilitate precisely such claims to Celtic origins, however tenuous, to be made in the name of recognizing and protecting cultural difference.

Singularité des vagues migratoires en France

All migrants are in search of a better life. Since there are highly diverse forms of migration in France, it would be better to talk about migrations. There has been no set mechanism for the successive waves of migration of different origin, that is, emigration from rural to urban areas during the first half of the 19th century, followed by migration from neighbouring countries (Belgium, Italy). Then a significant wave of migration took place after the First World War, with a substantial number of people coming from European countries that are further away (Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia). In 1931, foreign-origin residents exceeded 6% of the total French population, a percentage which would be reached again only in 1975. They were followed by the Southern Italians and Spanish in the 1950s, then the North Africans in the 1970s. From 1990 onwards, there was a real diversification, reflecting the globalization of migration phenomena. All these historical phases have quite precise causes and even more subtle forms. Today, three trends should be considered: 1) temporary migrations which are no doubt replacing permanent migrations; 2) the globalization of origins and journeys and the intermediary of the smuggling rings; 3) the migration of semiskilled workers, reversing the profiles encountered during the •Glorious Thirties.” Lastly, the article suggests a comparative examination of migrations within the European space and to the United States.

Misogyny: the male malady

The Trotula was the most influential compendium on women's medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. Yet as Monica H. Green reveals in her introduction to this first edition of the Latin text since the sixteenth century, and the first English translation of the book ever based upon a medieval form of the text, the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world. Arguing that these texts can be understood only within the intellectual and social context that produced them, Green analyzes them against the background of historical gynecological literature as well as current knowledge about women's lives in twelfth-century southern Italy. She examines the history and composition of the three works and introduces the reader to the medical culture of medieval Salerno from which they emerged. Among her findings is that the second of the three texts, On the Treatments for Women, does derive from the work of a Salernitan woman healer named Trota. However, the other two texts-On the Conditions of Women and On Women's Cosmetics-are probably of male authorship, a fact indicating the complex gender relations surrounding the production and use of knowledge about the female body. Through an exhaustive study of the extant manuscripts of the Trotula, Green presents a critical edition of the so-called standardized Trotula ensemble, a composite form of the texts that was produced in the mid-thirteenth century and circulated widely in learned circles. The facing-page complete English translation makes the work accessible to a broad audience of readers interested in medieval history, women's studies, and premodern systems of medical thought and practice.

Social exchange, reciprocity and amoral familism: Aspects of Italian chain migration to Australia

This paper examines new evidence on Italian chain migration to Australia. General theories stressing social and cultural differences between Northern and Southern Italians are challenged. The argument is in two parts. The first involves a critique of the idea of Southern Italian amoral familism, based on evidence of convergence between Northern and Southern patterns of chain migration and settlement. This finding is corrosive both of Banfield's work on Southern Italian family structure, and Putnam's more recent representation of Southerners as inescapably locked into cultural structures that militate against mutual aid and trust. In the second part of the argument an attempt is made to locate patterns of social exchange evident in the chain migration process. Models of reciprocity are rejected in favour of notions of sponsorship as a non-reciprocal gift among family, friends and paesani.

Teaching History Through Immigration Stories

W hat is typical immigrant story? Most of my students at Trinity College?a small, selective, liberal arts institu tion in Connecticut?would frame answer conven tionally, in terms of what they vaguely know: people coming from Ireland or Pale to escape persecution, avoid draft, have enough to eat, practice their religion in peace, or participate in something they like to the American dream. Of course, from viewpoint of a serious historian, question is more of a problem than answer?after all, no single set of experiences can typify enormously varied processes which brought people to these shores. Pilgrims came to insure their own but no one else's?religious practices; Africans were brought in chains; around turn ofthe last century most Jews came in families and stayed, while a majority of Southern Italians were single men who returned to their homeland (1). Besides, if one is teaching history ofthe United States in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, why should one be interested in narratives other than historical one being constructed and examined in class? Why get involved with complicating fictions or even those forms of fiction we call autobiography ? The short answer to such questions is that strategic use of literary texts is effective in engaging students. The longer answer involves asking what our classroom objectives might be. We are interested in helping students first to grasp and then to get of events that constitute historical accounts. But there are at least two stumbling blocks to their doing so. First, like most of us, students carry around in their heads certain unexamined no tions?for example, about typical immigrant story?which often keep them from reading evidence, evaluating it sensibly, and posing alternative explanations, all central tasks in achieving historical knowledge. And, second, getting inside events requires acts of imagination. Literary texts are very helpful, both in penetrating ideological screens that disable student perceptions, and in modeling for them ways of imagining others' lives in other times and other places. It is also true, of course, that any text can be read, with great care and modesty, as historical and ethnographic evidence. Mary Rowlandson's narrative of her captivity by Indians tells us something about Narragansett, something also about beginnings of what would become an important literary-religious genre, but probably most of all, it tells us about world view of a group of late seventeenth-century English settlers in New World. The texts I will be discussing here illuminate cultural conflicts generated when rural people migrated a century or so ago to growing cities not only ofthe Western hemisphere but also of Europe. In this sense, texts constitute not so much evidence for historian's files, which, with a variety of other more empirical data, might be used to draw conclusions; rather, they represent historical speculations that express certain structures of feeling of people in historical moments about which we study (2). The United States of a century ago seems to most of our students extraordinarily remote?a world still poised between horse power as a literal statement and as a metaphor of measure, between daguerreotype and moving picture, between presumed and long celebrated virtues of agrarian life and newly consolidated

The Pursuit of Serviceable Labour in Australian Capitalism: The Economic and Political Contexts of Immigration Policy in the Early Fifties, with Particular Reference to Southern Italians

The paper examines the class context of Australian mass immigration from southern Europe, particularly from southern Italy, in the late forties and early fifties. I argue that economic and political considerations were primary in the minds of the industrialists (especially from the automotive and iron and steel sectors), politicians and senior public servants who developed policy on the size and composition of mass immigration at the time. These considerations included the desire to overcome chronic labour shortages through the importation of what was commonly considered to be 'docile'and 'hard working' labour. The industrialists who deeply influenced mass immigration policy were convinced that the mass immigration of southern Europeans (particularly southern Italians) would shift the balance of power between organised labour and capital further towards the latter. This created tensions within the councils of immigration policy development between the industrialists and those representing the trade unions. The role of the public service and of the Immigration Minister in quarantining the policy advice of the industrialists from excessive trade union intervention is also considered in this paper.

Eating attitudes and prevalence of eating disorders: a survey in secondary schools in Lecce, southern Italy.

Epidemiological studies on eating disorders in southern Italy are practically non-existent. This study evaluated the eating attitudes and the prevalence of eating disorders in a sample of 795 students (588 females and 207 males) among 6 secondary schools from Lecce. A two-stage study was conducted: a first screening stage followed by a clinical interview. 58.4% of girls and 19.7% of boys displayed dissatisfaction with regard to their own body. Current dieting was more prevalent in girls (18.7%) than in boys (4.8%); 17.9% of normal weight girls and 11.7% of underweight girls were on a restrictive diet; while only 2.5% of normal weight boys were on a diet. Point prevalence rates of eating disorders found in our sample were: 0.2% anorexia nervosa, 1.7% bulimia nervosa, and 4% eating disorders not otherwise specified category. Although southern Italians are stereotypically different from the northern Italians in terms of physical traits, historical, cultural and social backgrounds, the prevalence of eating disorders in southern Italian adolescent sample is surprisingly similar to those reported by the areas of both northern and central Italy as well as other western countries.

Linguistic intergroup bias: Evidence for in-group-protective motivation.

Linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) is the tendency to describe positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors more abstractly than negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors. Two experiments investigated the role of in-group-protective motives, by varying threat to ingroup identity of hunters vs. environmentalists (Experiment 1, N = 160) and northern vs. southern Italians (Experiment 2, N = 212). Participants whose in-group had or had not been threatened described positive and negative behaviors of in-group and out-group protagonists. In both experiments, the LIB was greater under identity threat. Experiment 1 also showed that LIB was positively related to postexperimental but not to preexperimental individual and collective self-esteem. Results suggest that the magnitude of LIB depends on in-group-protective motivation and that in-group-favoring language may be functional to self-esteem maintenance. Recently, there has been increasing interest in the role that language may play in the transmission and maintenance of positive in-group perceptions and negative out-group perceptions (Graumann & Wintermantel, 1989; Hamilton, Gibbons, Stroessner, & Sherman, 1992; Maass & Arcuri, 1992; Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Semin, 1989). In particular, the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) model developed by Maass et al. (1989) identifies a systematic bias in language use that may contribute in a subtle way to the maintenance of stereotypes. The main prediction states that positive behaviors are described in more

Hypervariability of the human thyroid peroxidase gene in Italy

Using a PCR based method, we determined hypervariable markers of the Thyroid Peroxidase gene (TPO-VNTR markers) by size classification of alleles in a total of 146 blood samples (76 from Sicily and 70 from Lombardy, South and North Italy respectively). A total of 22 alleles were identified. They varied in size from 6 (0.4 Kbp) to 27 (1.5 Kbp) repeats and showed a unimodal distribution (peak at 15 repeat number). Data were compared with those previously obtained in two other Italian samples from Calabria (South Italy) and from Sardinia. Heterogeneity G tests on allele frequency distributions led to the following conclusions: 1) as observerd for the majority of the known polymorphisms, the Sardinian sample is clearly distinguishable from all the others; 2) although on the whole no significant heterogeneity emerges from the comparison between southern and northern Italians, certain allelic frequencies are able to distinguish between groups.

The Representation of Antecedents of Emotions in Northern and Southern Italy

Antecedents of six emotions in two different Italian subcultures were studied through the analysis of their verbal representations. One hundred participants (50 from northern Italy and 50 from southern Italy) were asked to write two short stories about each of the six emotions considered (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, and surprise). These stories were scored at six levels of progressively higher abstraction. The results showed that for each emotion there is a modal category, which frequently was identical, and some secondary categories that varied considerably with culture. Southern Italians showed significantly more interest in other people then northern Italians, both in the sense of worrying more about others' negative behavior and considering it very important to feel good about other people. Northern Italians tended to center their attention on the self; they reported greater worry about self-achievement than about relationships with other people and feared personal harm more than loneliness.

Mitochondrial DNA polymorphisms in a sample of Albanian population (Tirana)

RFLPs of mtDNA for HpaI, BamHI, HaeII, MspI, AvaII and HincII were analysed in a sample of 100 from collected in Tirana (Albania). Eighteen mtDNA types were identified, four of which are new: two because of new morphs for Hpa/HincII (HpaI-9Tir/HincII-17Tir) and AvaII (AvaII-35Tir), and two because of new associations between morphs which were already known. Albanian data were compared with corresponding ones from Calabrians (Southern Italians) and Arbreshes (people of Albanian ancestry living in Calabria). Even though the examined mtDNA markers do not reveal important differences among the three groups, the analysis of both morphs and types shows a trend which places Arbreshes closer to Calabrians than to Albanians.