BODY OBJECTIFICATION AND DEPRESSION IN ADOLESCENTS: THE ROLE OF GENDER, SHAME, AND RUMINATION

Objectification theory posits that the tendency to view oneself as an object to be looked at and evaluated by others negatively affects girls', but not boys', subjective well-being. Although it has been established that women self-objectify more than men, research in this area has been limited to the study of adult college women. The aim in the current longitudinal study was to investigate the role of body shame and rumination in the link between self-objectification and depression among a community sample of girls and boys at ages 11 and 13. Results indicated that adolescent girls reported higher levels of self-objectification, body shame, rumination, and depression than boys. The findings support a model in which body shame and rumination mediate a direct relation between self-objectification and depression among girls; developmentally, the gender difference in self-objectification appears before the gender differences in rumination and depression.     

Rumination and attention in major depression

Up until recently, it had been assumed that attentional biases for negative information do not exist in depression. However studies using post-conscious exposure durations have produced contradictory results. The limitations of common attentional tasks, suitability of stimulus materials and differences in stimulus duration times may have contributed to these inconsistencies. We aimed to address many of these issues and examine attentional responses in major depression at two post-conscious exposure times. We also investigated possible roles for rumination and distraction in increasing and lessening attentional biases for negative information. We used a fully controlled experimental design to test the effects of both induced and trait rumination and distraction on attention in patients with major depression and healthy controls. Attention was assessed using the dot-probe task. The findings revealed an attentional bias for negative information in depressed patients only at the longer post-conscious exposure duration. Furthermore although this bias was not influenced by either induced or trait distraction, it was related to trait rumination. Overall, the results showed that depression is associated with a strategic attentional bias towards negative information and that this bias is stronger in individuals who habitually ruminate.     

The self-fulfilling prophecy in intensive care

Predictions of poor prognosis for critically ill patients may become self-fulfilling if life-sustaining treatment or resuscitation is subsequently withheld on the basis of that prediction. This paper outlines the epistemic and normative problems raised by self-fulfilling prophecies (SFPs) in intensive care. Where predictions affect outcome, it can be extremely difficult to ascertain the mortality rate for patients if all treatment were provided. SFPs may lead to an increase in mortality for cohorts of patients predicted to have poor prognosis, they may lead doctors to feel causally responsible for the deaths of their patients, and they may compromise honest communication with patients and families about prognosis. However, I argue that the self-fulfilling prophecy is inevitable when life-sustaining treatment is withheld or withdrawn in the face of uncertainty. SFPs do not necessarily make treatment limitation decisions problematic. To minimize the effects of SFPs, it is essential to carefully collect and appraise evidence about prognosis. Doctors need to be honest with themselves and with patients and their families about uncertainty and the limits of knowledge.     

Simultaneous presentation of similar stimuli produces perceptual learning in human picture processing

Human participants received unsupervised exposure to difficult-to-discriminate stimuli (e.g., A and A'), created with a morphing procedure from photographs of faces, before learning a discrimination between them. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that prior exposure enhanced later discrimination and that intermixed exposure (A, A', A, A'...) resulted in better subsequent discrimination than blocked exposure (B, B, ...B', B'...). Experiments 3 and 4 showed that simultaneous exposure to 2 similar stimuli facilitated the later acquisition of both a simultaneous and a successive discrimination, and this effect was observed even though simultaneous exposure to 2 stimuli fostered the development of an excitatory association between them (Experiment 5). The findings of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed a perceptual learning effect with pictures of faces, and the findings of Experiments 3-5 are difficult to reconcile with associative analyses of perceptual learning.     

Class Size and Student Achievement

Contents:
Introduction, p.1
Quasi-Experimental Studies, p.3
Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Studies, p.15
Why Does Class Size Matter? Inferences from Existing Research, p.20
Implications of the Class-Size Findings, p.25
References, p.26
Appendix, p.29     

Women, men, work, and family. An expansionist theory.

The lives of women and men, the relationships that they establish, and their work have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, but the dominant theories driving research in these areas have not. In this article, the authors argue that the facts underlying the assumptions of the classical theories of gender and multiple roles have changed so radically as to make the theories obsolete. Moreover, a large body of empirical data fails to support the predictions flowing from these theories. Yet the development of new theory for guiding research and clinical practice has not kept pace. The authors attempt to fill this theoretical gap by reviewing the research literature and articulating an expansionist theory of gender, work, and family that includes four empirically derived and empirically testable principles better matched to today's realities.     

Perceiving affect from the voice and the face

This experiment examines how emotion is perceived by using facial and vocal cues of a speaker. Three levels of facial affect were presented using a computer-generated face. Three levels of vocal affect were obtained by recording the voice of a male amateur actor who spoke a semantically neutral word in different simulated emotional states. These two independent variables were presented to subjects in all possible permutations—visual cues alone, vocal cues alone, and visual and vocal cues together—which gave a total set of 15 stimuli. The subjects were asked to judge the emotion of the stimuli in a two-alternative forced choice task (either HAPPY or ANGRY). The results indicate that subjects evaluate and integrate information from both modalities to perceive emotion. The influence of one modality was greater to the extent that the other was ambiguous (neutral). The fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP) fit the judgments significantly better than an additive model, which weakens theories based on an additive combination of modalities, categorical perception, and influence from only a single modality.     

Perceiving speech from inverted faces

We examined whether the orientation of the face influences speech perception in face-to-face communication. Participants identified auditory syllables, visible syllables, and bimodal syllables presented in an expanded factorial design. The syllables were /ba/, /va/, /δa/, or /da/. The auditory syllables were taken from natural speech whereas the visible syllables were produced by computer animation of a realistic talking face. The animated face was presented either as viewed in normal upright orientation or inverted orientation (180° frontal rotation). The central intent of the study was to determine if an inverted view of the face would change the nature of processing bimodal speech or simply influence the information available in visible speech. The results with both the upright and inverted face views were adequately described by the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP). The observed differences in the FLMP’s parameter values corresponding to the visual information indicate that inverting the view of the face influences the amount of visible information but does not change the nature of the information processing in bimodal speech perception