Adolescent body image and psychosocial functioning

Researchers have highlighted the significance of a poor body image in the development of dysfunctional eating but have systematically investigated few other outcomes. The authors examined the relationships between different aspects of body image and psychosocial functioning. Participants were 245 boys and 173 girls from Grades 8 and 9 (M age = 13.92 years, SD = 0.69 years). Respondents completed measures of physical attractiveness, body satisfaction, body image importance, body image behaviors, appearance comparison, social physique anxiety, self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and same-sex and opposite-sex relations. Whereas girls tended to report a more negative body image than did boys, the relevance of body image to self-esteem was similar for boys and girls. Concern about others' evaluation of their bodies was especially important in understanding low female self-esteem, whereas for boys, ratings of general attractiveness most strongly predicted self-esteem. The authors found a negative body image to be unrelated to symptoms of negative affect but to be strongly associated with poor opposite-sex peer relationships, especially among boys. A negative body image also affected same-sex relations among girls.     

Responding to a Challenging Perceptual-Motor Task as a Function of Level of Experiential Avoidance

The Psychological Record - Participants displaying high versus low levels of experiential avoidance as assessed by the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (Hayes, Strosahl, et al., 2004) were...     

Setting goals, solving problems, and seeking social support: developing adolescents' abilities through a life skills program

The Going for the Goal (GOAL) program is designed to teach adolescents life skills. There have been few efforts to assess whether the skills that GOAL is designed to teach are being learned by adolescents involved in the program. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of GOAL on the acquisition of skills in the areas of setting goals, solving problems, and seeking social support. Interviews were conducted with twenty adolescents. Those who participated in GOAL reported that they had learned how to set goals, to solve problems effectively, and to seek the appropriate type of social support.     

Through the Lenses of Gender, Race, and Class: Students’ Perceptions of Childless/Childfree Individuals and Couples

Earlier research has documented negative perceptions of childless couples, particularly the voluntarily childfree, among college students. In this project we used hypothetical vignettes to assess variations in students’ (N?=?478) perceptions of childless couples related to the couple’s race, occupations of husband and wife, and assumed reasons for childlessness. Perceptions were strongly influenced by occupational status and gender, but we found few race differences. Neither infertility nor chosen childlessness was rated negatively, but couples were rated more positively if they were perceived as temporarily rather than permanently childless. Our findings suggest that delayed parenthood is regarded as normative and that students have few negative biases regarding infertility or chosen childlessness. Perceptions were strongly conditioned by economic and employment considerations, which reflect current concerns about balancing work and family trajectories.     

Morningness–Eveningness and Risk Taking

ABSTRACT. Depending on individual differences in biological rhythms and diurnal preferences, people have long been described as either “larks” or “owls.” Larks and owls differ greatly in personality aspects, but from the behavioral perspective it is unclear whether they have significant differences in terms of risky behaviors. Whether morning types or evening types are consistently more risk-taking or risk-averse in different domains remains unknown. This study adopted a general American adult sample to systematically investigate the relationship between chronotype and individuals’ risky behaviors in different domains. By using different methods to measure risky behaviors in different domains, the current research obtained convergent results that morningness was negatively related only to financially risky behaviors for American adults. More specifically, by using the composite scale of morningness and the domain-specific risk attitude scale, Study 1 showed that for American adults, morning types were less likely than evening types to engage in financially risky behaviors (N = 212). In Study 2, after scenario-based methods were used to measure risky behavior, results showed that that participants engaged less in risky behaviors in the domains of gambling and investment (N = 187). A mediator test showed that the negative relationship between morningness and financially risky behaviors was partly mediated by individuals’ self-control ability (self-control scale, Study 1).     

Objecting (to) Infrastructure: Ecopolitics at the Ukrainian Ends of the Danube

Abstract

In southern Ukraine, two hydraulic infrastructures continue to exist despite environmentalist campaigns that have exposed them as fragile, broken, or unprofitable. The Danube–Dnister Irrigation Project, a Soviet mega-project that diverted water from the Danube and turned the Sasyk estuary into a reservoir, receives state funding despite a 1994 ban on its use for irrigation. The Bystre Shipping Canal, built in 2004 despite domestic and international opposition, is losing money but continues to operate. These cases exemplify the material politics of infrastructuring in which infrastructure is understood as an antagonistic process of assembling networks of humans and nonhumans rather than a fixed facility. This approach helps explain how the confluence of unruly coastal matters and the politics of expertise have facilitated the re-embedding of these shipping and irrigation infrastructures’ in bureaucratic networks. These cases show that obduracy and fragility, as well as visibility and invisibility—conditions that figure prominently in infrastructure studies—should be considered in terms of oscillation rather than as ontologically distinct or static conditions. This analysis highlights the limits of the modernist search for scientific certainty in resolving environmental conflicts in Ukraine, and some possibilities to experiment politically with new decision-making procedures. This account can thus point beyond reform impulses that re-enact modernist narratives of progress within a strict nature-society divide.     

Intuitive Dualism and Afterlife Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Study

It is widely held that intuitive dualism—an implicit default mode of thought that takes minds to be separable from bodies and capable of independent existence—is a human universal. Among the findings taken to support universal intuitive dualism is a pattern of evidence in which “psychological” traits (knowledge, desires) are judged more likely to continue after death than bodily or “biological” traits (perceptual, physiological, and bodily states). Here, we present cross-cultural evidence from six study populations, including non-Western societies with diverse belief systems, that shows that while this pattern exists, the overall pattern of responses nonetheless does not support intuitive dualism in afterlife beliefs. Most responses of most participants across all cultures tested were not dualist. While our sample is in no way intended to capture the full range of human societies and afterlife beliefs, it captures a far broader range of cultures than in any prior study, and thus puts the case for afterlife beliefs as evidence for universal intuitive dualism to a strong test. Based on these findings, we suggest that while dualist thinking is a possible mode of thought enabled by evolved human psychology, such thinking does not constitute a default mode of thought. Rather, our data support what we will call intuitive materialism—the view that the underlying intuitive systems for reasoning about minds and death produce as a default judgment that mental states cease to exist with bodily death.