The acceptance model of intuitive eating: a comparison of women in emerging adulthood, early adulthood, and middle adulthood

The acceptance model of intuitive eating (Avalos & Tylka, 2006) posits that body acceptance by others helps women appreciate their body and resist adopting an observer's perspective of their body, which contribute to their eating intuitively/adaptively. We extended this model by integrating body mass index (BMI) into its structure and investigating it with emerging (ages 18-25 years old, n = 318), early (ages 26-39 years old, n = 238), and middle (ages 40-65 years old, n = 245) adult women. Multiple-group analysis revealed that this model fit the data for all age groups. Body appreciation and resistance to adopt an observer's perspective mediated the body acceptance by others-intuitive eating link. Body acceptance by others mediated the social support-body appreciation and BMI-body appreciation links. Early and middle adult women had stronger negative BMI-body acceptance by others and BMI-intuitive eating relationships and a stronger positive body acceptance by others-body appreciation relationship than emerging adult women. Early adult women had a stronger positive resistance to adopt observer's perspective-body appreciation relationship than emerging and middle adult women.     

The adolescent brain

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by suboptimal decisions and actions that give rise to an increased incidence of unintentional injuries and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Traditional neurobiological and cognitive explanations for adolescent behavior have failed to account for the nonlinear changes in behavior observed during adolescence, relative to childhood and adulthood. This review provides a biologically plausible conceptualization of the neural mechanisms underlying these nonlinear changes in behavior, as a heightened responsiveness to incentives while impulse control is still relatively immature during this period. Recent human imaging and animal studies provide a biological basis for this view, suggesting differential development of limbic reward systems relative to top-down control systems during adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood. This developmental pattern may be exacerbated in those adolescents with a predisposition toward risk-taking, increasing the risk for poor outcomes.     

Counselling in primary care: a systematic review of the evidence

Primary objective: To undertake a systematic review which aimed to locate, appraise and synthesise evidence to obtain a reliable overview of the clinical effectiveness, cost‐effectiveness and user perspectives regarding counselling in primary care. Main results: Evidence from 26 studies was presented as a narrative synthesis and demonstrated that counselling is effective in the short term, is as effective as CBT with typical heterogeneous primary care populations and more effective than routine primary care for the treatment of non‐specific generic psychological problems, anxiety and depression. Counselling may reduce levels of referrals to psychiatric services, but does not appear to reduce medication, the number of GP consultations or overall costs. Patients are highly satisfied with the counselling they have received in primary care and prefer counselling to medication for depression. Conclusions and implications for future research: This review demonstrates the value of counselling as a valid choice for primary care patients and as a broadly effective therapeutic intervention for a wide range of generic psychological conditions presenting in the primary care setting. More rigorous clinical and cost‐effectiveness trials are needed together with surveys of more typical users of primary care services.     

Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition

All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding articles (e.g., la and el, the feminine and masculine forms of "the," respectively). Adult native speakers of languages with grammatical gender exploit this cue in on-line sentence interpretation. In a study investigating the early development of this ability, Spanish-learning children (34-42 months) were tested in an eye-tracking procedure. Presented with pairs of pictures with names of either the same grammatical gender (la pelota, "ball [feminine]"; la galleta, "cookie [feminine]") or different grammatical gender (la pelota; el zapato, "shoe [masculine]"), they heard sentences referring to one picture (Encuentra la pelota, "Find the ball"). The children were faster to orient to the referent on different-gender trials, when the article was potentially informative, than on same-gender trials, when it was not, and this ability was correlated with productive measures of lexical and grammatical competence. Spanish-learning children who can speak only 500 words already use gender-marked articles in establishing reference, a processing advantage characteristic of native Spanish-speaking adults.     

The aftermath of 9/11: effect of intensity and recency of trauma on outcome

Does trauma exposure have a long-term impact on the brain and behavior of healthy individuals? The authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the impact of proximity to the disaster of September 11, 2001, on amygdala function in 22 healthy adults. More than three years after the terrorist attacks, bilateral amygdala activity in response to viewing fearful faces compared to calm ones was higher in people who were within 1.5 miles of the World Trade Center on 9/11, relative to those who were living more than 200 miles away (all were living in the New York metropolitan area at time of scan). This activity mediated the relationship between group status and current symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. In turn, the effect of group status on both amygdala activation (fearful vs. calm faces) and current symptoms was statistically explained by time since worst trauma in lifetime and intensity of worst trauma, as indicated by reported symptoms at time of the trauma. These data are consistent with a model of heightened amygdala reactivity following high-intensity trauma exposure, with relatively slow recovery.     

The Mysterious Silence of Mother Earth in Laudato Si'

Laudato si' attempts simultaneously to disrupt prevailing global environmental discourse and to reorient central concepts in Catholic moral tradition by requalifying the meaning of dominion and by ecologically expanding human dignity. The image of Earth crying out to humans from within a kinship relation plays a central role in both arguments. However, the political consequences of those shifts remain vague because the “voice” of Earth remains silent in crucial loci of the encyclical's argument.