Abnormalities in visual processing amongst students with body image concerns

Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) appear to possess abnormalities in the way they observe and discriminate visual information. A pre-occupation with perceived defects in appearance has been attributed to a local visual processing bias. We studied the nature of visual bias in individuals who may be at risk of developing BDD – those with high body image concerns (BICs) – by using inverted stimulus discrimination. Inversion disrupts global, configural information in favor of local, feature-based processing. 40 individuals with high BIC and 40 low BIC controls performed a discrimination task with upright and inverted faces, bodies, and scenes. Individuals with high BIC discriminated inverted faces and bodies faster than controls, and were also more accurate when discriminating inverted bodies and scenes. This reduction in inversion effect for high BIC individuals may be due to a stimulus-general local, detail-focused processing bias, which may be associated with maladaptive fixation on small features in their appearance.     

When to think like an epistemicist

Epistemicism is the view that seemingly vague predicates are not in fact vague. Consequently, there must be a sharp boundary between a man who is bald and one who is not bald. Although such a view is often met with incredulity, my aim is to provide a defense of epistemicism in this essay. My defense, however, is backhanded: I argue that the formal commitments of epistemicism are the result of good practical reasoning, not metaphysical necessity. To get to that conclusion, I spend most of the essay arguing that using a formal system like classical logic to manage seemingly vague situations requires practical principles to mediate between the formalism and what it aims to represent.     

Effects of the Student Success Skills Program on Executive Functioning Skills,Feelings of Connectedness,and Academic Achievement in a Predominantly Hispanic,Low‐Income Middle School District

The authors examined the effects of the Student Success Skills program on executive functioning, feelings of connectedness, and academic achievement of a sample of 193 middle school students in a predominantly Hispanic and economically challenged school district in the southwestern United States. Using multilevel regression analyses in a two‐level randomized design, the authors found treatment effects for multiple executive functioning scales, feelings of connectedness to classmates, and mathematics and reading achievement.     

The Interplay of Cross‐Situational Word Learning and Sentence‐Level Constraints

A variety of mechanisms contribute to word learning. Learners can track co‐occurring words and referents across situations in a bottom‐up manner (cross‐situational word learning, CSWL). Equally, they can exploit sentential contexts, relying on top–down information such as verb–argument relations and world knowledge, offering immediate constraints on meaning (word learning based on sentence‐level constraints, SLCL). When combined, CSWL and SLCL potentially modulate each other's influence, revealing how word learners deal with multiple mechanisms simultaneously: Do they use all mechanisms? Prefer one? Is their strategy context dependent? Three experiments conducted with adult learners reveal that learners prioritize SLCL over CSWL. CSWL is applied in addition to SLCL only if SLCL is not perfectly disambiguating, thereby complementing or competing with it. These studies demonstrate the importance of investigating word‐learning mechanisms simultaneously, revealing important characteristics of their interaction in more naturalistic learning environments.     

Psychology Without Psy Professionals: Exploring an Unemployed Centre Families Project as a Mental Health Resource

The activities and technologies of the psychology (Psy) disciplines, in the process of privileging professional understandings of distress, could be seen to be potentially facilitating corrosion in the capacity of the lay public to understand and ameliorate their distress. This paper draws on the experiences of people who use an Unemployed Centre Families Project in the South of England to provide an example of community mental health work that does not draw on the dominant discourses, institutions or practitioners of the Psy sciences. Through interviews with centre users, staff and volunteers, a picture emerges of a community space that provides a variety of services, projects and opportunities that have a very considerable positive impact on the mental well‐being of the centre users. This picture highlights non‐medical intersubjective processes that offer possibilities for recoveries from mental distress but that are often neglected and subordinated in the professional worlds of Psy and psychiatry. Such centres facilitate social networks and practical help, and transitions in identity can be beneficial for those experiencing mental distress. In so doing, they make prominent some of the key limitations of biomedical approaches to recovery. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.