Cosmetic surgery in inpatients with eating disorders: attitudes and experience

Body image disturbance is frequent among individuals undergoing cosmetic surgery and core to the pathology of eating disorders (ED); however, there is little research examining cosmetic surgery in ED. This study examined body image related measures, ED behaviors, and depression as predictors of attitudes toward cosmetic surgery in 129 women with ED. Patients who had undergone surgery (n = 16, 12%) were compared to those who had not. Having a purging diagnosis, linking success to appearance, and making physical appearance comparisons were predictive of more favorable cosmetic surgery attitudes. All of those who had undergone surgery had purging diagnoses and, on average, were older, had higher BMIs, and were more likely to make physical appearance comparisons and know someone who had undergone surgery. In ED, acceptance and pursuit of cosmetic surgery appears to be related to social group influences more than weight and shape disturbance, media influences, or mood.     

The interleaving of actions in everyday life multitasking demands

It has been argued that executive tests should capture central aspects of executive functions in everyday life such as initiating and monitoring parallel actions in low-structured environments (so-called multitasking; see Burgess, 2000). We present a cooking task in order to assess executive function impairments in brain-damaged patients, which focuses on a central feature of multitasking, the interleaving of tasks (Burgess, 2000). Behavioural performance of 21 brain-damaged patients (stroke, traumatic brain injury) and of a group of matched controls was analysed on the basis of a standardized protocol. In comparison to controls, the patients explored less, were less successful in monitoring their actions and corrected errors less efficiently. Interleaving of actions was observed less frequently in patients, with respect to both cooking itself as well as to subordinate goals (e.g., cleaning up). Interleaving proved efficient, as it was associated with less time to complete the task. Patients' scores in the cooking task correlated with performance in both the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS) Zoo Map Test and the BADS Six Elements Test, but not with tests of attention, verbal memory, or figural fluency, thus demonstrating convergent and discriminant validity. In summary, our task demonstrates that cooking can provide a valid testing ground for assessing a central aspect of everyday multitasking demands, namely, the interleaving of actions.     

Hey stud: Race, sex, and sports

This article is an examination of how the intersection of sport and race plays out in the sexualization of the sporting role of African American male athletes. Further, the article is an examination of the multiple roles the media, sport, and race play as these impact the public persona of African American male athletes in high-profile sports. The article concludes with a number of recommendations for ending the negative images of African American male athletes. To the white public, we are athletes, rappers, preachers, singers—and precious little else. We are also robberts, rapists, mentally deficient and sexually well endowed. —Ellis Cose, The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America (2002; New York: Washington Square Press, 3–4) First of all, let me say good after ... good late afternoon. Because of the HIV virus I have attained, I will have to announce my retirement from the Lakers today. I just want to make clear, first of all, that I do not have the AIDS disease, because I know a lot of you want to know that, but the HIV virus. My wife is fine, she’s negative, so no problem with her. I plan on going on, living for a long time, bugging you guys like I always have. So you’ll see me around. I plan on being with the Lakers and the league—hopefully [Commissioner] David [Stern] will have me for a while—and going on with my life. I guess now I get to enjoy some of the other sides of living—that [were missed] because of the season and the long practices and so on. I just want to say that I’m going to miss playing. And I will now become a spokesman for the HIV virus because I want people, young people, to realize they can practice safe sex. And, you know, sometimes you’re a little naive about it and you think it could never happen to you. You only thought it could happen to, you know, other people and so on and on. And it has happened. —Magic Johnson—Press Conference at L.A. Lakers Compound Washington Post, November 9, 1991     

Reactions to Receiving Aid as a Function of Cost to Donor and Opportunity to Aid1

Drawing on equity theory, two possibilities that might reduce resentment of the donor following the receipt of aid which cannot be repaid were investigated: (a) the cost to the donor is minimized, and (b) the recipient has an opportunity to aid a third party. The results provide evidence that the recipient will like the donor less and be less willing to request future aid when he cannot repay the aid than when he can. Weak support was received by the hypothesis that the tendency to like the donor less when the aid cannot be repaid will be stronger, the greater the perceived cost. Support was found for the hypothesis that the decreased willingness to request future aid when the aid cannot be repaid will be stronger, the greater the perceived cost. Support was found for the hypotheses that the recipient will like the donor more and be more willing to request future aid when he has an opportunity to aid a third party than when he cannot aid anyone.     

Immediate memory for faces: Long- or short-term memory?

Immediate recognition memory span and short-term forgetting for non-verbal stimuli (“unfamiliar faces”) were investigated in normal subjects and amnesic patients. Surnames were used as a verbal control. It was found that normal subjects had a reliable immediate recognition span of one for faces and that there was no decrement in performance in the retention of three faces over a 30-s interval. Amnesic subjects were impaired on both the immediate memory span task and on the short-term forgetting task. This pattern of results contrasts with those obtained using surnames on which the results were comparable to other verbal S.T.M. tasks. It is suggested that performance on these tasks of recognition memory for faces is determined by L.T.M. processes. The implications for the interpretation of S.T.M. are discussed.     

Mechanisms underlying writing and speech in aphasia

As a parallel to the dual decoding concept for processing of written language we proposed that phonological encoding does not necessarily occur in writing and that the phonemic and graphemic subsystems can be independent on the one-word level. This hypothesis was tested by comparing oral and written performance in a picture-naming task in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics. In addition, the residual tacit knowledge of the orthographic properties of the names of the pictures was examined with a multiple-choice recognition task. The principal finding is that Broca's aphasics who were better in written than in oral naming showed more graphemically and semantically motivated errors than aphasics who were better in oral than in written naming, the latter producing more phonemically motivated errors. This result supports the dual encoding concept for writing on the singleword level, implying a direct route from the mental lexicon to the graphemic system in parallel with a route mediated by the phonemic system. Multiple-choice recognition was found to be superior to both oral and written performance in both Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics.     

Ambiguous musical figures and auditory streaming

Three experiments with musicians and nonmusicians (N=338) explored variations of Deutsch’s musical scale illusion. Conditions under which the illusion occurs were elucidated and data obtained which supported Bregman’s suggestion that auditory streaming results from a competition among alternative perceptual organizations. In nExperiment 1, a series of studies showed that it is more difficult to induce the scale illusion than might be expected if it is accepted that an illusion will be present for most observers despite minor changes in stimuli and experimental conditions, The stimulus sequence seems better described as an ambiguous figure. Having discovered conditions under which the scale illusion could be reliably induced, Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated additional properties of the stimulus (timbre, loudness, and tune) to provide cues to streaming other than pitch and location. The data showed that streaming of this sequence can be altered by these properties, supporting the notion of a general parsing mechanism which follows general gestalt principles and allows streaming by many stimulus dimensions. Finally, suggestions are made as to how this mechanism might operate.