A comparison of obese and normal-weight families' sychological characteristics

Abstract

The present study assessed obese and normal-weight family members' perceptions of their nuclear family's social and environmental characteristics. Preliminary results support previous correlational and case studies that suggest obese families are dysfunctional. Results from the Family Environment Scale indicate that obese families perceive their family characteristics differently compared to normal-weight families or to a representative sample of families. Specifically, obese families perceive their homes as less cohesive, more conflictual, less interested in social and cultural activities, and less organized compared to normal-weight families. Obese parents also perceive themselves as more controlling and their families as less independent compared to nonobese parents.     

Perceptual asymmetry and youths’ responses to stress: Understanding vulnerability to depression

This research examined the hypothesis that reduced posterior right hemisphere activity interferes with the regulation of emotions and behaviour in response to stress, creating vulnerability to depression. Consistent with a diathesis–stress model, we predicted that youths with a reduced posterior right hemisphere bias in emotional processing would engage in less adaptive responses to stress, which would be associated with depressive symptoms in those who reported the recent experience of high, but not low, levels of stress. Participants were 510 4th through 8th graders who completed the Chimeric Faces Task and measures of responses to stress and depressive symptoms. Results supported the idea that responses to stress account for the association between reduced posterior right hemisphere activity and depressive symptoms in youths who report high, but not low, levels of stress. This study provides insight into one process through which reduced posterior right hemisphere activity may confer vulnerability to depressive symptoms, and implicates responses to stress as a target for intervention.     

Avoiders vs. Amenders: Implications for the investigation of guilt and shame during Toddlerhood?

Abstract

Recent research and theory highlights the distinctive features of shame vs. guilt, as well as the important implications of that distinction for typical and atypical behaviour regulation. Briefly, shame is characterised by withdrawal and hiding from judgemental others, and guilt by making amends–repairing and confessing. The present study was aimed at determining whether a shame-relevant and a guilt-relevant pattern of responses to a standard violation could be distinguished in toddlers.

Two-year-old children participated in a play session, during which a mishap occurred that the children appeared to have caused. Based upon whether or not children avoided the experimenter (E) after the mishap, they were dichotomised into a shame-relevant group of subjects (Avoiders) who avoid E after the mishap, are slow to make reparation, and are slow to tell E about the mishap; and a guilt-relevant group (Amenders) showing the opposite pattern. All guilt-relevant behaviours were greater for Amenders than Avoiders, and all but one shame-relevant behaviour was greater for Avoiders than for Amenders, suggesting coherence in the organisation of responses. Moreover, convergent evidence from a maternal report questionnaire indicated that in non-laboratory settings as well, Amenders manifested greater guilt relative to shame than did Avoiders. Further research is needed to determine developmental antecedents and consequences of the Avoider/Amender dichotomy.     

Rethinking Middle School Reading Instruction: A Basic Literacy Activity

Reading fluency has been identified as a key component in effective literacy instruction (National Reading Panel, 2000). Instruction in reading fluency has been shown to lead to improvements in reading achievement. Reading fluency instruction is most commonly associated with guided repeated oral reading instruction. In the present retrospective study we examine the effects of a computer-based silent reading fluency instructional system called Reading Plus (Taylor Associates, Winooski, Vermount, USA) on the reading comprehension and overall reading achievement of a large corpus of students in an urban school setting. Findings indicate that the program resulted in positive, substantial, and significant improvements in reading comprehension and overall reading achievement on a criterion referenced reading test for Grades 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 and on a norm-referenced test of reading achievement for Grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10. Moreover, mean gains made by students in the Reading Plus intervention were greater than mean gains for all students at the state and district level. The findings were generally positive for all subpopulations studied, including special education and regular education students. Qualitative reports from teachers who participated in the study were also supportive of the program. Implications for the study are explored for particular subgroups of students and for the role of fluency instruction with struggling adolescent readers.     

Task conflict,information processing,and decision-making: The damaging effect of relationship conflict

A popular theoretical assumption holds that task-related disagreements stimulate critical thinking, and thus may improve group decision making. Two recent meta-analyses showed, however, that task conflict can have a positive effect, a negative effect, or no effect at all on decision-making quality (De Dreu & Weingart, 2003; De Wit, Greer, & Jehn, 2012). In two studies, we built upon the suggestion of both meta-analyses that the presence of relationship conflict determines whether a task conflict is positively or negatively related to decision making. We hypothesized and found that the level of perceived relationship conflict during task conflict (Study 1), and the actual presence (vs. absence) of relationship conflict during task conflict (Study 2), increased group members’ rigidity in holding onto suboptimal initial preferences during decision making and thus led to poor decisions. In both studies the effect of relationship conflict on decision making was mediated by biased use of information.     

The Relationship Between Arousal and the Remembered Duration of Positive Events

The relation between affect and retrospective duration estimation has hardly been examined. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by studying the influence of arousal on the remembered duration of positive events. On the basis of the contextual change model, we expected that high‐arousal positive events would be remembered as longer compared with low‐arousal positive events. To test this hypothesis, we set up a naturalistic study in which participants were asked at the end of a pleasant amusement park ride at the local fair to rate how pleasant and aroused they felt during the ride as well as to estimate the ride's duration. Feeling more aroused during a ride was associated with longer estimates of the ride's duration. Results are discussed within the framework of retrospective time estimation models. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Existentialism and Humanism: Humanity—Know Thyself!

At times, an individual in modernity can feel dehumanised by work, by administration, by technology, and by political power. This experience of being dehumanised can take the individual to an existential awareness of the priority of existence over essence. But what does this existential experience mean? Are there ways in which this experience can reconnect the individual to her being human, or to her being part of humanity? Any such reconnection is further complicated by the suspicion that universal presuppositions concerning ‘humanity’ or ‘human being’ or ‘humanism’ carry pretensions of imperialist grandeur that must be challenged. How, then, might one proceed to connect existential vertigo with a culture of humanism that, while resisting such pretensions, nevertheless can find meaning for the dehumanised individual? In what follows I argue that a concept of modern metaphysics, with an aporetic (Hegelian) logic of subjective experience, can carry this reconnection of the I and the We, offering meaning not in the resolution of their opposition, but in learning that the meaning of their opposition, and the meaning of humanity, is learning, is our education. I argue that it is only within modern educational metaphysics that humanity and the individual Know Thyself.     

The Concept of Experience by John Dewey Revisited: Conceiving, Feeling and ��Enliving��

The concept of experience by John Dewey revisited: conceiving, feeling and ??enliving??. Dewey takes a few steps towards a differentiation of the concept of experience, such as the distinction between primary and secondary experience, or between ordinary (partial, raw, primitive) experience and complete, aesthetic experience. However, he does not provide a systematic elaboration of these distinctions. In the present text, a differentiation of Dewey??s concept of experience is proposed in terms of feeling, ??enliving?? (a neologism proposed in this paper) and conceiving. Feeling refers to the basic mode of experience where action, emotion, cognition and communication constitute an original unity. Enliving, aesthetic experience, constitutes the lifeworld, as a person-in-world experience. Even though enliving is holistic and relational, a certain distance emerges between action, emotion and cognition which allows contemplation and choice. Conceiving, on the other hand, refers to the isolating and abstracting understanding of the world with even greater distance between action, emotion and cognition. Such a differentiation provides a clearer understanding of the scope of education. It avoids the risks of regressive tendencies in the concept of experience, and it helps to include conceiving within the realm of experience.