Characteristics of muscle dysmorphia in male football, weight training, and competitive natural and non-natural bodybuilding samples

The purpose of this study was to identify differences in traits associated with muscle dysmorphia between collegiate football players (n = 66), weight trainers for physique (n = 115), competitive non-natural bodybuilders (n = 47), and competitive natural bodybuilders (n = 65). All participants completed demographic questionnaires in addition to the Muscle Dysmorphia Inventory (Rhea, Lantz, & Cornelius, 2004). Results revealed a significant main effect for group, and post hoc tests found that the non-natural bodybuilding group did not score significantly higher than the natural bodybuilding group on any subscale except for Pharmacological Use. Both the non-natural and natural bodybuilding groups scored significantly higher than those that weight trained for physique on the Dietary Behavior and Supplement Use subscales. The collegiate football players scored lowest on all subscales of the Muscle Dysmorphia Inventory except for Physique Protection where they scored highest. Findings are discussed with future research expounded.     

Literal meaning, conventional meaning and first meaning

Literal meaning is often identified with conventional meaning. In A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs Donald Davidson argues (1) that literal meaning is distinct from conventional meaning, and (2) that literal meaning is identical to what he calls first meaning. In this paper it is argued that Davidson has established (1) but not (2), that he has succeeded in showing that there is a distinction between literal meaning and conventional meaning but has failed to see that literal meaning and first meaning are also distinct. This failure is somewhat surprising, since it is through a consideration of Davidson's notion of radical interpretation that the distinction between literal meaning and first meaning becomes apparent.I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support, and to Mark Mercer, Tom Patton and Gary Wedeking for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank David Checkland, who discussed A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs with me at length some years ago.     

The meaning of "natural": process more important than content

The meaning of the desirable attribute "natural" was explored in two samples, American college students and adults in the Philadelphia jury pool. Participants rated the naturalness of a variety of "natural" entities, before and after they were transformed by operations such as freezing, adding or removing components, mixing with other natural or unnatural entities, domestication, and genetic engineering. Results support four hypotheses. First, the principle of contagion accounts for many aspects of the reduction of naturalness by contact with unnatural entities. Second, chemical transformations reduce naturalness much more than physical transformations do. Third, the history of an entity's processing is more important in determining its naturalness than is the nature of the entity's contents. Fourth, mixing like natural entities (e.g., water from different sources) does not markedly reduce naturalness. The insertion of a gene from another species, the process used in producing genetically modified organisms, produces the biggest drop in naturalness; domestication, a human-accomplished activity that changes genotype and phenotype in major ways, is considered much less damaging to naturalness.     

Gibbard on meaning and normativity

The paper is a critique of Allan Gibbard’s impressively crafted monograph Meaning and Normativity. The book relies on a subtle form of logical empiricism, developing a normative verificationist semantics within a subjective Bayesian framework. I argue that the resulting account of synonymy is too fine-grained, since it counts clearly synonymous words in different languages as non-synonymous. For similar reasons, Gibbard’s account of analytic implication relies on postulating untenable connections between semantics and epistemology. I conclude that one of the main obstacles to robust realism about normativity and morality, the supposed conceptual connections between normative language and action, is a myth.     

Horwich on meaning and use

Paul Horwich claims that theories of meaning ought to accommodate the commonsense intuition that meanings play a part in explaining the use of words. Further, he argues that the view that best does so is that according to which the meaning of a word is constituted by a disposition to accept, in some circumstances, sentences in which it features. I argue that if meanings are construed thus, they will in fact fail to explain the use of words. I also argue that if we insist, as Horwich does, on the commonsense assumption that meanings are a species of entity, all versions of the view that meaning is constituted by our dispositions to use words will have to be rejected. I do not, however, claim that such theories ought to be rejected. My point is that they are incompatible with the requirements of commonsense. Further, I suggest that it is premature to impose such requirements on theories of meaning.     

Estimation of parameters for the Grice theory of simple reaction time

The variable-criterion theory of simple reaction times proposed by G. R. Grice is briefly summarized. Grice's method of parameter estimation is described, and it is shown how these procedures can be converted to a least-squares estimation. Finally, the likelihood function is derived from the theory, thereby permitting use of the method of maximum likelihood for estimating the Grice parameters in experiments of simple reaction times.     

The Medium Shapes the Message: McLuhan and Grice Revisited in Race Talk Online

Compared with the wealth of research accumulated on face‐to‐face social interactions, relatively little research has examined race talk within anonymous Web 2.0 mediums. We investigated online threaded comments on YouTube video clips of two race‐related incidents involving New Zealand television presenter Paul Henry. Through thematic content analysis, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis, it was found that characteristics unique to Web 2.0 were associated with the appearance of old‐fashioned racism and high‐levels of obscenity (together with modern racism/symbolic racism). The hyper‐low context of communication led to interpretive ambiguity; conversation sequences failed to follow Gricean maxims for cooperative communication, with most comments attracting no replies and the modal sequence being two turns. There was almost never resolution to a disagreement online: rather there was points‐scoring against opposing opinions and a tangential style of dialogue influenced by the asynchronous and anonymous nature of communication. The YouTube medium shaped but did not determine the message, as obscenity and racist content in the target video from the eliciting public figure influenced the subsequent degree of obscenity and hostility in the responses. A third corpus that examined responses to our own research on race talk presented on a news website (stuff.co.nz) underlined this point by engendering a dramatically different response to the same subject, retaining the tangential style of communication, but with little to no obscenity. A framework to understand race talk as a function of both medium and context effects is proposed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Awe and meaning: Elucidating complex effects of awe experiences on meaning in life

Research on the experience of awe suggests that awe has positive impacts on outcomes like life satisfaction and belongingness. No published work, however, has reported effects of awe on the experience of meaning in life. We reasoned that awe might have complicated effects on meaning. On the one hand, many awe experiences likely contain a positive flavor that contributes to both awe and general positive affectivity (happiness). Positive affectivity has a robust positive effect on meaning in life, suggesting that positive awe experiences might increase meaning. At the same time, however, awe experiences lead to a diminished self that reflects feelings of smallness and insignificance, which might negatively predict meaning. We thus hypothesized that awe experiences can, in some contexts, produce competing indirect effects on judgments of meaning in life through happiness and small-self feelings. The results of five studies (N = 1,690) supported these predictions.     

Body and meaning

Abstract

This paper discusses the very important but disregarded theme of somatization. Somatizers comprise a wide-ranging group of patients, who normally choose to consult doctors rather than psychoanalysts for treatment. We present two clinical reports of somatizing patients in which the psychoanalyst played a considerable role in the study and treatment of their problems. The subjects were not only totally relieved of their physical symptoms, but also dramatically changed their psychic lives.     

Intonation and meaning

A general theory of meaning is introduced, based on a distinction between the content of a mental act and its mode of arousal. The distinction is extended to speech acts and to the role of intonation in determining their mode of utterance. Difference judgments based on intonation are used to produce a mode space with dimensions of Credence, Option, Salience, Arousal, and Weak Belief. It is argued that the modal function of intonations should not be restricted to the enrichment of declarations. The distinction between mode and content is used to separate the specficially linguistic content of intonations from other contents which they convey perceptually and by implication.This research was supported by a Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship) (W70 3030, W71 4373).     

Profiles of meaning and search for meaning among prisoners

Meaning in life and searching for meaning are central in how people organize their lives and deal with various challenges during them. Studies on meaning and the search for meaning among prisoners are virtually nonexistent. Based on the presence of meaning in their lives and on their search for meaning, we discovered four different profiles in a sample of 365 prisoners: High Presence High Search, High Presence Low Search, Low Presence High Search, and Low Presence Low Search. Compared to prisoners with low meaning profiles, those whose profiles were marked by higher levels of meaning displayed less distress, more positive world assumptions, and higher levels of self-worth. They also show more empathy for others. Older prisoners and prisoners who were sexually abused during childhood were more represented in the profile that was marked by extremely low levels of meaning and low levels of search for meaning.