“Caught in the Same Webs”<Emphasis Type="Italic">—</Emphasis>Service Providers’ Insights on Gender-Based and Structural Violence Among Female Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada

Drawing on the experiences of service providers supporting live-in caregivers and migrant agricultural workers in two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec), we explore how structural violence shapes the precarious conditions of female temporary foreign workers. Service providers emphasized how transnational social pressures on women to maintain employment, the captivity involved in women’s employment contracts, the limits on unionization, and women’s isolation and lack of privacy, act together to create an unbalanced relationship between the employer and female worker. In turn, this leads to precarious migration and work conditions that foster a vulnerability to violence and abuse while at the same time limiting access to and delivery of services and social support to female temporary foreign workers. Amid these restrictions, service providers focus on making a difference where they can through initiatives such as human rights education workshops, offering support, understanding Canadian regulation, and empowerment workshops. Greater Canadian national options for permanent residency status could provide a basis for adequate services to temporary foreign workers as part of their universal human rights. Temporary foreign workers contribute to Canadian society, making it encumbant upon the Canadian state to ensure the respect of their universal human rights.     

Category learning in the context of co-presented items

A series of four studies explore how the presentation of multiple items on each trial of a categorization task affects the course of category learning. In a three-category supervised classification task involving multi-dimensionally varying artificial organism-like stimuli, learners are shown a target plus two context items on every trial, with the context items’ category membership explicitly identified. These triads vary in whether one, two, or all three categories are represented. This presentation context can support within-category comparison and/or between-category contrast. The most successful learning occurs when all categories are represented in each trial. This pattern occurs across two different underlying category structures and across variations in learners’ prior knowledge of the relationship between the target and context items. These results appear to contrast with some other recent findings and make clear the potential importance of context-based inter-item evaluation in human category learning, which has implications for psychological theory and for real-world learning environments.     

Syntactic Features in Reanalysis: Positive and Negative Symptoms

Meng and Bader have presented evidence that a Case conflict is a more effective cue for garden-path reanalysis than a number conflict is, for German wh-sentences with subject–object ambiguities. The preferred first-pass analysis has the wh-trace in subject position, although object position is correct. In a speeded grammaticality judgment task, perceivers accepted Case-disambiguated examples more often and more rapidly than number-disambiguated examples, although comprehension questions indicated that both were eventually understood correctly. For ungrammatical sentences, a Case mismatch error resulted in more false positive grammaticality judgments than a number mismatch error. We offer an explanation for why Case and number features differ in these two ways in their effects on sentence processing. We propose, within the Diagnosis Model of garden-path processing, that reanalysis triggered by a Case mismatch guides the parser more effectively toward the correct structure. Case is a positive symptom, which carries information about the new structure that must be built. By contrast, a number mismatch is a negative symptom; it invalidates the incorrect structure without showing how to rebuild it. This difference in the transparency of garden-path repair can also account for the greater overacceptance of Case-disambiguated ungrammatical sentences. The speeded grammaticality judgment task is designed to encourage hasty responses. Usually, these are hasty rejections of garden path sentences that, on calmer reflection, the parser would find acceptable. Conversely, over-hasty acceptance could occur if some initial progress is made in resolving a grammatical problem. Thus, a higher rate of false positives on ungrammaticals is to be expected where reanalysis proceeds successfully for a while before blocking.     

Assessment and Treatment of Compulsive Sex/Love Behavior

Sex-love compulsivity or addiction involves most of the same issues as other addictive or compulsive behavior. Reasons for the increase in attention to this problem are suggested, and assessment criteria and procedures, guidelines for treatment, and case examples are provided.     

Personality pathology among individuals with a lifetime history of anorexia nervosa

Anorexia nervosa (AN) appears to be associated with certain personality features. The degree to which personality pathology persists after the acute phase of illness is unclear. This study aimed to investigate personality pathology in a large sample (n = 153) of women with histories of AN using the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology (DAPP) and to evaluate the persistence of pathological personality features by comparing women with acute (n = 83) and remitted AN (n = 55). Women with AN demonstrated high levels of emotional dysregulation, social inhibition and compulsivity relative to age-matched healthy women (n = 124). Identity problems, intimacy problems and schizotypal features were highlighted as important. The same 14 pathological personality dimensions were significantly elevated in both ill and remitted participants, though remitted individuals' scores were reduced on 4 of the subscales. These results indicate that pathological personality features in AN are persistent traits, although some features may become exaggerated in the acute phase.     

The swimsuit issue: Correlates of body image in a sample of 52,677 heterosexual adults

Past research on adults’ body image has typically used small convenience samples, limiting the ability to examine associations of personal characteristics to body satisfaction. This study of 52,677 heterosexual adults ages 18–65 examined associations of body satisfaction to age, height, gender, and body mass index (BMI). Age and height were mostly unrelated to body satisfaction. Consistent with an Objectification Theory perspective, fewer men than women reported being too heavy (41% versus 61%), rated their body as unattractive (11% versus 21%), or avoided wearing a swimsuit in public (16% versus 31%). Men felt better about their bodies than women across most of the weight span, although among underweight individuals, women felt better than men. Slender women (BMIs 14.5–22.49) were more satisfied than most other women (BMIs 22.5–40.5). Among men, underweight and obese men were least satisfied. These findings highlight gender differences in the association of weight to body satisfaction.