Sexual,body-image,and personality attitudes in anorexia nervosa

Assessment of adolescent females with anorexia nervosa was carried out at the time of hospitalization and again at discharge. Findings were compared to those from a normal weight control group. The anorexic subjects at the start of treatment indicated significantly negative attitudes about sexual issues. They also reported a significantly poorer self-evaluation of their body, personality, and social skills than was evident in the comparison group. An improvement in attitude regarding these issues was demonstrated by the end of treatment. The function of weight loss in dealing with these problem areas was discussed.     

Reliability analysis of observational data: Problems,solutions, and software implementation

In the reliability analysis literature, little attention has been given to the various possible ways of creating a basis for the comparison required to compute observer agreement. One needs this comparison to turn a sequential list of behavioral records into a confusion matrix. It is shown that the way to do this depends on the research question one needs to answer. Four methods for creating a basis for comparison for the computation of observer agreement in observational data are presented. Guidelines are given for computing observer agreement in a way that fits one’s goals. Finally, we discuss how these methods have been implemented in The Observer software. The Observer 4.1 supports all the methods that have been discussed. Most of these methods are not present in any other software package.     

Non-bayesian inference: causal structure trumps correlation

The study tests the hypothesis that conditional probability judgments can be influenced by causal links between the target event and the evidence even when the statistical relations among variables are held constant. Three experiments varied the causal structure relating three variables and found that (a) the target event was perceived as more probable when it was linked to evidence by a causal chain than when both variables shared a common cause; (b) predictive chains in which evidence is a cause of the hypothesis gave rise to higher judgments than diagnostic chains in which evidence is an effect of the hypothesis; and (c) direct chains gave rise to higher judgments than indirect chains. A Bayesian learning model was applied to our data but failed to explain them. An explanation-based hypothesis stating that statistical information will affect judgments only to the extent that it changes beliefs about causal structure is consistent with the results.     

Mother as Messenger of Love and Death

For mothers, the act of giving birth also brings them close to death as well as other human experiences. The mother represents the dual structure of life and death in the mind. It was this unconscious convergence that stirred the interest in reconsidering the subject of the loss of children and its effect on individual development. This article demonstrates what happens when death triumphs over life chronologically close to birth. The author presents a clinical report on a six-year-old girl, Dinah, who suffered the effects of the mother's mourning. She illustrates the therapeutic approach to mourning over time, at moments in which the shadow of pain is more clearly present. These are moments when the loss must be brought to consciousness, because of the unconscious effects it has on the survivors. Dinah's problems were not caused by the loss itself, but rather the fact that the loss occurred in a phase of her emotional development when she was only a baby an unable to react in a mature manner.     

Correction to: Religious and Spiritual Practices Used by Children and Adolescents to Cope with Cancer

Journal of Religion and Health -     

Loneliness and appearance: Toward a concept of ontological agency

In this paper, I posit loneliness, as Hannah Arendt defines it in the final chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism as the conceptual opposite of agency. I give a brief overview of Arendt's phenomenology of loneliness, which is the total loss of the common world—the state in which one is incapable of being an interlocutor, through thought, speech, or action, with others and, ultimately, incapable of appearing as an individual to others. Though loneliness is realised in its most extreme form in the concentration camps, it is a problem that haunts all human interaction. It is often very difficult, especially for marginalised and traumatised subjects, to give an account of themselves, indeed, to make any sense of their lives at all. I argue that this difficulty is not insurmountable and make the claim that ontological agency, understood as the appearance as oneself to others in the world (the exercise of self‐disclosure), is an irreducible and constant capacity of every individual, no matter how deeply silenced or oppressed she may have been. I argue, further, that ontological agency is a precondition for meaningful political agency, understood as the public articulation of a well‐formed opinion or judgment.     

Dependability of personality, life satisfaction, and affect in short-term longitudinal data

The consistency of individual differences across time has implications for theory building and clinical applications. Indeed, personality psychologists have long worked to place constructs on the continuum of consistency of more trait-like to more state-like constructs. Recently, Chmielewski and Watson () highlighted the importance of dependability coefficients for interpreting the results of stability studies. These coefficients provide an estimate of how strongly short-term transient error affects retest correlations for a given measure. In this article, we use a modified version of Kenny and Zautra's (, ) STARTS model to estimate dependability of personality, life satisfaction, and affect in a 2-month longitudinal study of 8 waves. Results from 226 undergraduate students indicated that personality ratings were least influenced by transient state factors, whereas affect was most influenced. We discuss these findings in terms of their implications for the continuum of consistency and for the practical issue of selecting retest intervals for dependability analyses.     

Cognitive control of language production in bilinguals involves a partly independent process within the domain-general cognitive control network: evidence from task-switching and electrical brain activity

In highly proficient, early bilinguals, behavioural studies of the cost of switching language or task suggest qualitative differences between language control and domain-general cognitive control. By contrast, several neuroimaging studies have shown an overlap of the brain areas involved in language control and domain-general cognitive control. The current study measured both behavioural responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) from bilinguals who performed picture naming in single- or mixed-language contexts, as well as an alphanumeric categorisation task in single- or mixed-task context. Analysis of switch costs during the mixed-context conditions showed qualitative differences between language control and domain-general cognitive control. A 2 × 2 ANOVA of the ERPs, with domain (linguistic, alphanumeric) and context (single, mixed) as within-participant factors, revealed a significant interaction, which also suggests a partly independent language-control mechanism. Source estimations revealed the neural basis of this mechanism to be in bilateral frontal-temporal areas.