Assessment of human obesity: The measurement of body composition

The most common methods of assessing degree of obesity in humans are reviewed. These include anthropometry, somatotyping, bodyweight, skinfold calipering, densitometry, and several nondensitometric procedures. The evidence suggests that bodyweight may often be an unreliable and invalid index of obesity. The parameters influencing its inaccuracy are discussed. These include age, height, sex, muscularity, and degree of obesity or amount of recent weight loss. The most reliable and valid measures of human bodyfat are generally the most complicated and impractical. Compromise assessment procedures involving nonintrusive measurement of subcutaneous fat and selected anthropometric dimensions may offer an incomplete but welcome improvement over sole reliance on bodyweight as an index of obesity.     

MODIFICATION OF THE EXCESSIVE INAPPROPRIATE CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR OF TWO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS USING HOME-BASED CONSEQUENCES AND DAILY REPORT-CARD PROCEDURES1

Two experiments investigated home-based reinforcement contingencies to control excessive behavior in normal classrooms. Subjects were, respectively, a 12-yr-old fifth-grade boy and a 9-yr-old fourth-grade boy, each in a separate classroom and with a different teacher. Following baseline observations in which observers recorded several categories of student behavior and teacher-student interaction, separate conferences were held including parents of the two children, the principal, teachers, and experimenters. A daily report-card procedure was agreed on, stipulating a one-day suspension from school following three successive “undesirable” daily report cards as well as the supervision of home-based privileges and other reinforcers usually contingent on satisfactory daily reports. Measurements of daily rates of teacher attention indicated no important change in this variable throughout the various experimental conditions. The daily report procedure significantly reduced disruptive classroom behavior. In a second experiment, a teacher-operated timer cued her own time-sample observations. Reliability measures revealed that the teacher could accurately measure the child's behavior while she was teaching the class. The procedure was ultimately successfully expanded to the teacher's total contact hours each day.     

Educating the Senses: Explorations in Aesthetics,Embodiment and Sensory Pedagogy

Studies in Philosophy and Education - This volume takes two different, albeit intertwined approaches. The first concerns a reformulation of aesthetics in education—one which highlights the...     

Justice and power: when will justice concerns encourage the advantaged to support policies which redistribute economic resources and the disadvantaged to willingly obey the law?

Two studies are presented which test whether justice can motivate support for government policies and authorities even when such support is not in people's obvious personal or group interest. In the first study, White San Francisco Bay area residents' attitudes toward Congressionally-authored affirmative action policies and anti-discrimination laws were investigated. In the second study, African-American San Francisco Bay area residents' feelings of obligation to obey the law were investigated. The results from both studies show a significant relationship between evaluations of social justice and respondents' political attitudes. More importantly, a significant relationship between relational evaluations of Congress and political attitudes is found in both studies. This relationship suggests how justice can motivate policy and government support even if such support does not yield direct personal or group benefits. Finally, the results from both studies indicate when instrumental and relational concerns will be related to political attitudes. If people identified with their particular advantaged or disadvantaged group, instrumental concerns were more strongly related to their political attitudes, but if people identified with a superordinate category that included both potential outgroup members and relevant superordinate authorities, relational concerns were more strongly related to their political attitudes.     

Parental Involvement and Adolescents’ Academic Achievement: Latent Profiles of Mother and Father Warmth as a Moderating Influence

Parental involvement in their adolescents’ education plays an important role in promoting their children's academic outcomes. Yet, more research is needed to examine the relationship between parenting practices and parental warmth as well as to consider the potential joint contribution of warmth from both fathers and mothers. Thus, the primary purpose of the current study is to examine the extent to which patterns of parental warmth across fathers and mothers moderate the association between parental involvement and adolescents’ grade point average (GPA) and school engagement behaviors. Latent profile analysis was conducted to identify disparate profiles of fathers’ and mothers’ warmth within a nationally representative sample of 2,306 youths (51% male; mean age = 15.31 years, SD = 1.50; 77% non-Hispanic White) residing in opposite-sex, two-parent families from Wave I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Latent-class enumeration processes support a five-profile solution characterized by differences in levels of parental warmth and congruency across parents: (a) Congruent High Warmth, (b) Congruent Moderate Warmth, (c) Congruent Low Warmth, (d) Incongruent High Mother/Low Father Warmth, and (e) Incongruent Low Father/Lower Mother Warmth. Subsequent multiple linear regression analyses reveal a moderating effect for Congruent Low Warmth on the relationship between parental involvement and adolescents’ GPA. Ultimately, the results show that variation in parental warmth exists across fathers and mothers with differing impact on adolescents’ outcomes. Excluding one parent without considering the joint effects of both parents will not produce an accurate and precise understanding of parenting in research or practice.     

A brief review of technology-based antecedent training procedures

This brief review summarizes recent research on technology-based antecedent staff training procedures, highlights key methodological components, and concludes with potential directions for future research.     

Effects of Gender and Appearance Comparisons on Associations Between Media-Based Appearance Pressure and Disordered Eating: Testing a Moderated Mediation Model

Sex Roles - Appearance pressure from mass media and appearance social comparisons have been implicated in theory and research on disordered eating. However, mediating effects of upward and downward...     

Thought-shape fusion in anorexia nervosa: an experimental investigation

Cognitive biases and cognitive distortions have been implicated as important factors in the development and maintenance of many disorders. The concept of thought-shape fusion (TSF) in eating disorders was developed by Shafran, Teachman, Kerry, and Rachman (British Journal of Clinical Psychology 38 (1999) 167) as a variant of thought-action fusion, described by Shafran, Thordarson and Rachman (Journal of Anxiety Disorders 10 (1996) 379). TSF occurs when thinking about eating certain types of food increases a person's estimate of their shape and/or weight, elicits a perception of moral wrongdoing, and/or makes the person feel fat. Shafran et al. (1999) examined both the psychometric and experimental properties of TSF in an undergraduate sample. This paper reports an extension of this work to a clinical group (N=20) of patients with anorexia nervosa. After completing a set of relevant questionnaires, participants were asked to think about a food which they considered extremely fattening. They were then asked to write out the sentence, "I am eating--.", inserting the name of the fattening food in the blank. After being asked to rate their anxiety, guilt, feelings about their weight, morality, etc., participants were given the opportunity to neutralize their statement in any way they chose. The majority of the participants neutralized in ways consistent with the findings of Shafran et al. (1999). The results are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioural formulations of eating disorders, and of the influence of cognitive biases and cognitive distortions on the processing of information relevant to food, weight and shape in anorexia nervosa.     

Conceiving of entities as objects and as stuff

What is the difference between conceiving of an entity as an object of some kind and conceiving of it as an amount of solid stuff? We propose that the difference lies in how one thinks about the entity's structure. Object construals require thinking of the structure as being nonarbitrary, whereas substance construals require thinking of the structure as being arbitrary. We report six experiments that provide empirical support for this proposal. Regularity of structure, repetition of structure, and the existence of structure-dependent functions, all of which provide reasons to consider the structure of an entity to be nonarbitrary, were shown to bias participants towards object construals. We also discuss how the proposed account of what it means to construe an entity as an object or as some stuff can account for a range of findings in the literature on lexical development. These include the relation between cohesiveness and ontological category, shape and ontological category, and complexity of shape and ontological category. Finally, we discuss the nature of construals and the relation of object and substance construals to the physical, design, and intentional stances.