‘He's got his father's bias’: Parental influence on weight bias in young children

Our aim was to explore the role of parents in the transmission of stereotypical body size attitudes and awareness of weight loss strategies to preschool children. Participants were 279 3‐year‐old children and their parents, who provided data at baseline and 1 year later. Parents completed self‐report body size attitude and dieting measures. Child weight bias and awareness of weight loss strategies were assessed through interview. Over time, negative associations with large bodies and awareness of weight loss strategies increased. Fathers’ attitudes prospectively predicted boys’ weight bias and awareness of weight loss strategies. Among girls, parental attitudes were less predictive. Findings confirm the importance of fathers in the development of boys’ body attitudes and inform prevention programmes.     

TWO ROUTES TO ELIMINATING GENDER DIFFERENCES IN PERSONAL ENTITLEMENT: Social Comparisons and Performance Evaluations

This analog study examined how the presence and absence of explicit social comparison standards and performance feedback influenced women's and men's perceptions of personal entitlement for pay. In the absence of both comparison information and performance feedback, women felt they deserved less pay than did men. However, these gender differences were eliminated when women and men were exposed to either the same comparison information or the same performance feedback. Path analyses further revealed that the effects of comparison information and performance feedback on judgments of pay fairness and satisfaction were mediated almost exclusively by feelings of entitlement.     

Evidence against a predictive role for rhythm in speech perception

Some languages create the impression of being stress timed. Claims have been made that this timing of stressed syllables enables the listener to predict the future locations of informative parts later in a sentence. The fact that phoneme monitoring is delayed when targets in a spoken sentence are displaced has been taken as supporting this claim (Meltzer, Martin, Bergfeld Mills, Imhoff and Zohar, 1976). In the present study temporal displacement was induced without introducing phonetic discontinuities. In Dutch sentences a word just in advance of a target-bearing word was replaced by another one differing in length. Results show that the temporal displacement per se did not have any effect on phoneme-monitoring reaction times. Implications for a theory of fpeech processing are discussed.     

The effect of varied physician affect on recall, anxiety, and perceptions in women at risk for breast cancer: an analogue study.

Evaluated the effect of varied physician affect on subject recall, anxiety, and perceptions in a simulated tense and ambiguous medical situation. Forty women at risk for breast cancer viewed videotapes of an oncologist presenting--with either worried or nonworried affect--mammogram results. Although the mammogram results and the oncologist were the same in both presentation, analyses indicated that, compared to the women receiving the results from a nonworried physician, the women receiving the results from a worried physician recalled significantly less information, perceived the clinical situation as significantly more severe, reported significantly higher levels of state anxiety, and had significantly higher pulse rates. These results suggest that physician affect plays a critical role in patient reaction to medical information. Implications for compliance research, patient satisfaction, and physician training are discussed.