Dear Roberto, 

I would like to recommend you this classic book: "The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings" (W.W. Norton & Company, 1981), by Jan Harold Brunvand. Hope it helps. 

Best wishes, 

Julio 

There is a chapter on urban legends in A colorful history of popular delusions. By Bartholomew, Robert E.; Hassall, Peter

2015.

This eclectic history of unusual crowd behavior describes a rich assortment of mass phenomena ranging from the amusing and quirky to the shocking and deplorable. What do fads, manias, urban legends, moral panics, riots, and other mass expressions of emotion have in common? By creating a typology of such behavior, past and present, the authors show just how prevalent extraordinary group reactions to fear or excitement are. Vivid, detailed, and thoroughly researched, this is a fascinating overview of collective human behavior in its many unusual forms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Serial killers, spiders and cybersex: Social and survival information bias in the transmission of urban legends. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12073

By Stubbersfield, Joseph M.; Tehrani, Jamshid J.; Flynn, Emma G.

British Journal of Psychology, Vol 106(2), May 2015, 288-307.

This study uses urban legends to examine the effects of the social information bias and survival information bias on cultural transmission across three phases of transmission: the choose‐to‐receive phase, the encode‐and‐retrieve phase, and the choose‐to‐transmit phase. In line with previous research into content biases, a linear transmission chain design with 60 participants aged 18–52 was used to examine the encode‐and‐retrieve phase, while participants were asked to rank their interest in reading the story behind a headline and passing a story on for the other two phases. Legends which contained social information (Social Type), legends which contained survival information (Survival Type), and legends which contained both forms of information (Combined Type) were all recalled with significantly greater accuracy than control material, while Social and Combined Type legends were recalled with significantly greater accuracy than Survival Type legends. In another study with 30 participants aged 18–22, no significant differences were found between legend types in either the choose‐to‐receive phase or the choose‐to‐transmit phase. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Corpses, maggots, poodles and rats: Emotional selection operating in three phases of cultural transmission of urban legends. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342107

By Eriksson, Kimmo; Coultas, Julie C.

Journal of Cognition and Culture, Vol 14(1-2), 2014, 1-26.

In one conception of cultural evolution, the evolutionary success of cultural units that are transmitted from individual to individual is determined by forces of cultural selection. Here we argue that it is helpful to distinguish between several distinct phases of the transmission process in which cultural selection can operate, such as a choose-to-receive phase, an encode-and-retrieve phase, and a choose-to-transmit phase. Here we focus on emotional selection in cultural transmission of urban legends, which has previously been shown to operate in the choose-to-transmit phase. In a series of experiments we studied serial transmission of stories based on urban legends manipulated to be either high or low on disgusting content. Results supported emotional selection operating in all three phases of cultural transmission. Thus, the prevalence of disgusting urban legends in North America may be explained by emotional selection through a multitude of pathways. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Retelling urban legends. By Fox Tree, Jean E.; Weldon, Mary Susan

The American Journal of Psychology, Vol 120(3), 2007, 459-476.

We explored factors influencing the retelling of urban legends. As predicted by prior work, people retold truthful and scary stories. But people also retold well-known stories. This contrasts with the expectation that people would not pass on a story that everyone already knew. Also as predicted by prior work, repeating a story increased its credibility. But repeating also increased a story's importance, scariness, and likelihood of retelling. In general, contextualizing a story and increasing the number of details did not affect the likelihood of retelling a story. The exception was that details increased the likelihood of retelling a newly heard story. However, if people read a story with context or details, more contextual elements and details were included in their retellings. At the same time, people confabulated details to an equal degree no matter what type of embellishments they had read. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Dear professors, thank you so much for providing me such abundant sources.

Thank you so much for your kindness.

Roberto

Please see my film, Tales of the Supernatural, at www.folkstreams.net

It came out before Brunvand used the term urban legend but it addresses them quite fully.  Brunvand wrote a number of books on this topic as did Gart Allen Zfine. 

The Ordeal of Change by Eric Hoffer (1952) may lend insight to this.  Also, Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Campion-Vincent Véronique, « Dossier. Rumeurs et légendes urbaines », Diogène 1/2006 (n° 213) , p. 202-249

URL : www.cairn.info/revue-diogene-2006-1-page-202.htm.

DOI : 10.3917/dio.213.0202.

A interresting article, in french language, that list the main researches on urban legends from 2001 to 2006. The topic of this scientific journal (Diogène, n°1/2006) was specifically gossips and urban legends.

Hope it can be usefull,

Christophe Gibout

Also, 2 ancient books but still interresting :

Françoise Reumaux (1994), Toute la ville en parle. Esquisse d'une théorie des rumeurs. Paris, L'Harmattan.

Françoise Reumaux (1996) La veuve noire. Message et transmission de la rumeur. Paris, Méridiens Klincksieck.

Hello,

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell could be useful. 

Good luck! 

Thank you all for precious suggestions.

 I would suggest that there is no "general way", and that different cultures react in different ways to social change. Japan and Italy are so different and are facing sets of social change that are different. Japan was forced into a democratic governmental system 65 years ago but is socialist in some cultural aspects,  still has an emperor and still retains some pre-WWII mores. Being monocultural the people have a homogeneous worldview within which they tackle the problems of change differently than Italians or Americans would. I lived in Japan a long time, and one example I can give is when I was doing conversational pair-work with 18-year-olds I asked them to do a dialogue about their morning and what they had to eat for breakfast.  They looked at me quizzically and one of them said, "I don't have to ask her what she had for breakfast, we all eat the same thing." And they did. This was in 1980, and they all had miso soup, rice, grilled fish, and tea.  What I'm getting at here is that cultural solidarity can be a bulwark in itself against the anxiety of change.  But the opposite also applies: the pressure to be a part of the group in Japan is atrociously heavy, and teenage suicides are very high.

Manga are a typical way for Japanese to create urban legends and work through gossip items, as well as internet chat sites, and I think you must get in touch with some Japanese social science researchers to ask your question about anxiety in Japanese society and ways Japanese deal with it. Japanese office workers routinely get physically sick drunk from trying to keep up with the demands made upon them to keep up with change in the workplace.  A very large percent of young women don't get married or have kids because of how they view their parents and because of the freedom they want as a new and different educated and professional generation with money and therefore independence.

Gossip is a way of keeping people in line, but I think the kinds of gossip today in Japan would be fractured to degree not known before the War, when society was more closed and uniform, especially concerning women's rights. So, gender gossip among men is a relatively new thing.

Also, TV,  film and music create urban legends regardless of social pressures or anxiety, but because of capitalism and its need to constantly create consumers. So, you have a big problem disentangling gossip/urban legend from whether it arises from anxiety or rather from commercialism, or from people's need for creating an "Identity", which is a really complex issue.

There are lots of excellent Japanese researchers who can help you, and I would recommend going to The Japan Academy web site to start with and I think you can get a good introduction to people through them.

Best,

Stephen Childress