Effects of parental comments on body dissatisfaction and eating disturbance in young adults: A sociocultural model

This study examined a sociocultural model of the influence of parental comments on body shape and eating concerns among males and females. Questionnaires were completed by 338 undergraduates. Participants reported levels of perceived parental comments, internalization of media ideals, appearance comparison, body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness and bulimia. Results revealed that, regardless of gender, internalization and appearance comparison only partially mediated the relationship between parental comments and the outcome variables. The final model for females explained a larger proportion of the variability in body shape and eating concerns than in males, with positive and negative parental comments directly related to body dissatisfaction and through it to eating outcomes. In males, only negative comments were directly related to body dissatisfaction. These findings highlight the role of parental influences in sociocultural models of the development of body dissatisfaction and eating concerns, and the gender-specific patterns of sociocultural influence.     

The presence of Spinoza in the exchanges between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland1

Although Freud recognized his profound affinity with Spinoza, we seldom find explicit and direct references to the philosopher in his works. The correspondence between Romain Rolland, the ‘Christian without a church’, and Freud, the ‘atheist Jew’, is full of Spinozian reminiscences that nourish their works of this period and are underpinned by their mutual transference. The Future of an Illusion is written according to a Spinozian blueprint and aims at replacing religion, qualified as superstition, by psychoanalysis. A quotation from Heine, ‘brother in unbelief’, is a direct reference to Spinoza. Concurring with Freud’s critiques of dogmas and churches, Rolland proposes an analysis of the ‘oceanic feeling’ as a basis of the religious sentiment. Freud replies with Civilization and Its Discontents. In 1936, on the occasion of Rolland’s 70th birthday, Freud sends him an open letter, A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis, where the strange feeling that he has experienced in front of the Parthenon refers inter alia to his double culture: Jewish and German. In the light of this correspondence, the creation of psychoanalysis turns out to be a quest for the sacred that has disappeared in modernity; Freud, though, was able to find it inside man’s unconscious.     

Chronic glucocorticoid hypersecretion in Cushing’s syndrome exacerbates cognitive aging

Cumulative exposure to glucocorticoid hormones (GC) over the lifespan has been associated with cognitive impairment and may contribute to physical and cognitive degeneration in aging. The objective of the present study was to examine whether the pattern of cognitive deficits in patients with Cushing’s syndrome (CS), a disorder characterized by chronic exposure to elevated levels of glucocorticoids (GC), is similar to that observed in older individuals. Ten subjects with CS were compared to sex-, age-, and education-matched healthy controls and older subjects (age of CS subjects + 15 yr). All participants were administered tests to assess attention, visuospatial processing, learning and memory, reasoning, concept formation and verbal fluency. MANCOVAs with depression scores as covariate and polynomial contrasts revealed that the age-matched control group performed better than the CS and older subject groups in visual target detection, trail making test, stroop task, digit symbol substitution, block design, object assembly, visual reproduction, spatial memory and similarities. The CS and older subjects performed similarly on these tasks. Further, a principal component analysis revealed two significant factors, representing general cognitive function and verbal memory explaining 39.9% and 10.0% of the variance, respectively. Additional MANCOVAs with depression as a covariate revealed that CS and older control subjects showed impaired performance on general cognitive function compared to age-matched controls. These results suggest that hypersecretion of GCs has “aging-like” effects on cognitive performance in individuals with CS.     

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Effects of a timing signal on simple reaction time with a rectangular distribution of foreperiods

It was hypothesized that the time course of preparation during a variable interstimulus interval (ISI) of a simple reaction time (RT) experiment was partly determined by the subjective distribution of conditional probabilities of the executive signal (ES). Sixty subjects performed a simple auditory RT task with various ranges of six ISI durations organized in rectangular frequency distributions. In order to give the subjects information about elapsed time during ISI, a recurring time-marking click, the periodicity of which was varied, was introduced during the ISI in one of the three series of trials each subject performed. A strong decreasing RT--ISI relationship was observed supporting the main hypothesis. However, a clear increase of mean RT over all ISIs combined, was also found. Because these two mixed effects were greatest when the click intervened at the possible times of ES occurrence only, three functions of time-information given by the click are discussed: (a) a reduction of the usual increase of time estimation error with increased ISI; (b) an increase of the subjects knowledge of the ISI range resulting from the discontinuity of the time-marking click which makes easier a discrete time-intervals numbering process; (c) a change of the simple-RT task into a discrimination task.