Eating Disorders in Men: Current Considerations

Over the past two decades, there has been a change in the way men think about their bodies. The media portrays images of men with muscular bodies and a six pack abdomen. These images can create body dissatisfaction in males. With the change in the way that the media and society in the United States look at men, so has the drive for men to achieve this ideal body image. Eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and strict exercise and diet regimens seem to plague young men as do the images in advertisements. Although eating disorders in men are similar to what women experience, men seem to strive for more body mass whereas women try to obtain thinness. Gay men and heterosexual men seem to experience eating disorders in the same way although there are differences between how they perceive their bodies. This paper outlines how the media contributes to body dissatisfaction in men. In addition to understanding how the media affects men, it is important to review and possibly revise out understanding of eating disorders and body dysmorphia symptoms to gain a solid understanding of how these symptoms appear in men today.     

Six-year-olds' contradictory judgments about knowledge and beliefs

By around the age of 4 years, children acknowledge that people can have false beliefs about the world. Six-year-olds are still inclined, however, to confuse their own knowledge with that of more ignorant others. In a recent paper, Hulme, Mitchell and Wood offer a novel explanation for six-year-olds' tendency to make such errors when asked to choose a picture to put in a story character's thought bubble.     

Scotopic sensitivity/Irlen syndrome and the use of coloured filters: a long-term placebo-controlled study of reading strategies using analysis of miscue

This study investigated the long-term effects of using coloured filters on the frequency and type of errors in oral reading. A double-masked, placebo-controlled crossover experimental design was used, with subjects being assessed over a period of 20 months. There were three experimental groups (Placebo tints, Blue tints, and Diagnosed tints) involving 113 subjects with reading difficulties, ranging in age from 9.2 yr. to 13.1 yr. The 35 controls (ranging in age from 9.4 yr. to 12.9 yr.) had reading difficulties but did not require coloured filters. There was a significant improvement for all groups in the accuracy of miscues over the period, although experimental groups over-all did not improve at a significantly different rate than the control group. The failure to find significantly greater improvement for the experimental groups over the control group for the total period, despite subjects' reports of improved print clarity, may be partly related to the lack of effective letter-sound analysis and synthesis skills and to the use of a word-identification strategy of guessing based on partial visual analysis.     

Photographic Individuality, Breadth of Perspective, and Creativity

Individuality is valued in most conceptions of personality, but is seldom operationalized. The present research used photo essays about the self as the medium for operationalizing self-construals that are unlike others (i.e., are uniquely creative, abstract, self-reflective, and multidimensional). Ratings of these photo essays from two samples ( N = 183 university students) served as the measure of individuality. This measure was predicted and found to correlate in both samples with Breadth of Interest from the Jackson Personality Inventory (JPI; Jackson, 1994). In Study 1, individuality also correlated with the JPI Complexity scale and with two measures of divergent thinking (unique word associations, and fluency on Wallach & Kogan's [1965] creativity tasks). In Study 2, individuality correlated with having more permeable boundaries, a nonprejudicial universal orientation, and imagining greater cultural diversity in one's future. Results suggest that individualistic persons take a broader, more complex and more creative perspective to their lives.     

Perceptions of quality of journals related to health education

Faculty and chairpersons (N = 102) at 34 programs granting doctoral degrees in health education were asked to rate the quality of professional journals related to health education. The American Journal of Public Health was the highest rated journal. Health Education Quarterly was second, and Health Education Research, the only other health education journal, was rated in the top 10 (rated 7). The journals from the epidemiology area rated higher than journals from other areas. The respondents were least familiar with journals on the environment, safety, and death education.     

Group Performance Depends on the Majority Rule

Some group decisions require a two-thirds or three-quarters majority of the people voting; others require only a simple majority. Does the accuracy of a group's decision making depend on which majority rule is used? A signal detection theory analysis was used to answer this question. Each member of a group was presented with a noisy display of either a signal or a nonsignal, and then each member cast a yes or no vote for the existence of a signal. The group decision was determined by a majority rule of the members' votes. Normative groups and groups of 5 or 7 people exhibited the same behavior: Performance was best when the group used a simple-majority rule and decreased when the group used more stringent rules. The worst performance was produced by a unanimous rule. Some group members adopted more liberal response criteria when the majority rule was made more stringent.     

Effects of error and errorless discrimination acquisition on reversal learning

The effectiveness of trial-and-error, graded-choice, and verbal-instruction procedures on the acquisition and maintenance of a two-choice simultaneous color discrimination in an intradimensional double-reversal learning situation was studied using 18 first-grade children. After acquiring a red-green discrimination during one 70-trial session, the discriminative roles of the stimuli were reversed for 30 trials, followed by a second reversal for 30 trials. Children in the graded-choice and verbal-instruction groups acquired and maintained the discriminations with fewer errors than children who learned by trial and error. The importance of the results in terms of two-stage discrimination learning theories is pointed out and similarities between errorless learning and overtraining are discussed.