Bulimia: A case study with mediating cognitions and notes on a cognitive-behavioral analysis of eating disorders

A case study of a young woman who was following a complex bulimic chain is described. Her emotional-behavioral sequence involved (1) feeling upset, (2) feeling more upset and taking a high dose of laxatives, (3) hinging, (4) taking additional laxatives, (5) feeling depressed, guilty, and angry, and then (6) starving herself for days on end. This paper lists the selfdefeating cognitions mediating the above sequence of emotions and behaviors and reports on a successful disputation of them through a Rational-Emotive Therapy approach. She resumed a normal eating pattern; her menstrual cycle returned in 2 months after having been absent for 13 months; and at followup, 15 months after termination of therapy, disclosed normal weight with no regression to any bulimic behavior. The case study concludes with preliminary notes on a cognitive-behavioral analysis of eating disorders. A model for eating disorders is proposed based upon the study and treatment of other selfindulgent disorders.Paul J. Woods, Ph.D., Co-Editor of thisJournal, is a Fellow of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy in New York City, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Hollins College, and a Licensed Psychologist in independent practice in Roanoke, Virginia.Russell M. Grieger, Ph.D., Co-Editor of thisJournal, is a Fellow of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy in New York City, and a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in independent practice in Charlottesville, Virginia.     

Menarche: A crossroads that previews developmental change

In recent years the developmental implications of menarche have garnered particular attention. Investigators have determined that this developmental event tends to affect three significant domains of the adolescent girl's function: psychological status, relationships with peers, and role in the family. This paper explores these issues and introduces a new technique, referred to as previewing, that may help the teenage girl acclimate to the status of sexual maturity. Derived from the early life interactions of caregiver and infant, previewing promotes representational skills and enhances self-esteem as the adolescent confronts developmental challenges.     

Genetic and Environmental Effects on Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness: An Adoption/Twin Study

ABSTRACT Previous research has indicated that extraversion and neuroticism are substantially affected both by genotype and environment. This study assesses genetic and environmental influences on the other three components of the five-factor model of personality: Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. An abbreviated version of the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) was administered to 82 pairs of identical twins and 171 pairs of fraternal twins reared apart and 132 pairs of identical twins and 167 pairs of fraternal twins reared together. Estimates of genetic and environmental effects for Openness and Conscientiousness were similar to those found in other studies of personality: Genetic influence was substantial and there was little evidence of shared rearing environment. Results for Agreeableness were different: Genetic influence accounted for only 12% of the variance and shared rearing environment accounted for 21% of the variance. Few significant gender or age differences for genetic and environmental parameters were found in model-fitting analyses.     

Perceived Health Barriers and Health Value in Seniors: Implications for Well-Being and Mortality1

There is growing evidence to suggest that the ways in which people think about their health problems may have significant implications for psychological and physical well-being. This possibility has the greatest consequences for those groups facing health problems on a daily basis, in particular, the elderly. This study examined the role of perceived health barriers and value for health in later life. A Perceived Health Barriers (absent, present) by Health Value (low, medium, high) 2.3 factorial design was analyzed for younger and older seniors on: number of life-threatening diseases, need for health care, and life satisfaction. In addition, a longitudinal design was used to examine the joint roles of perceived health barriers (PHBs) and health value (HV) on mortality. Findings generally indicated that individuals’ PHBs and HV are associated with health-related outcomes; however, the results differed for young and old elders. Among young elders, those with PHBs and those with high HV had the most negati e profile. That is, they had more diseases, higher health care needs, and lower life satisfaction. Among older elders, the findings were more complicated in that the relationship between PHB and the outcomes depended on HV. Overall, the patterns for old elders suggest that perceived health barriers are most relevant among those with medium value for health and least relevant among those with low value for health.     

Social context and perceived task difficulty as mediators of depressive self-evaluation

This study examined two separate, but potentially interactive, influences on depressive self-evaluation: social context and perceptions of task difficulty. First, it was hypothesized that, if negative self-evaluations of depressed individuals are motivated by a desire to elicit attention and sympathy from others, depressed subjects should evaluate themselves more negatively than nondepressed subjects in a public setting, but not when they make self-evaluative judgments in private. Second, it was hypothesized that negative self-evaluation results from a bias to perceive tasks as being intrinsically easy, i.e., if a task is easy, a given score would be evaluated more poorly than if the task were difficult. It was found that the self-evaluations of depressed subjects were influenced by the social context, but not always in a negative direction. Depressed subjects did not differ from nondepressed subjects when performance evaluations were made in private. In a public condition, depressed subjects evaluated themselves more negatively than nondepressed subjects following an easy task, but evaluated themselves more positively following a difficult task. Depressed subjects did not evidence a bias to perceive tasks as being intrinsically easy. Depressed subjects did rate the tasks to be more difficult for themselves than they thought they would be for others and this expectancy was predictive of negative self-evaluation. These results were discussed in terms of alternative self-presentation motives and theories of social cognition. Self-evaluation often involves social comparison and researchers need to attend to the potentially complex interactions among social and cognitive processes.I would like to thank Deborah Davis and Paul Westerholm for their help in data collection, Ruth Maki for her statistical expertise, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. Portions of this paper were presented at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, 1989.     

“That man’s father is my father’s son”: The roles of structure,strategy, and working memory in solving convoluted verbal problems

Normative data (N=896) collected on solutions to the traditional reasoning problem “Brothers and sisters have I none,/That man’s father is my father’s son” was the platform for a set of experiments to investigate the roles of problem structure, subject strategy, and working memory in error making in a class of verbal problems. The normative data revealed that the modal, but incorrect response to the brothers and sisters problem was “himself,” whereas the correct response of “son” was given by only 17% of subjects for the traditional version above, rising to 40% for a reordered novel version. This problem’s structure, identified as adouble-modifier structure, was found to produce similar response patterns across a range of verbal problems. Results from (1) syntactical structure manipulations (e.g., “My father’s son is the father of that man”), and (2) efforts to teach subjects to use a linear strategy (a sequence of steps), interpreted within a framework of Just and Carpenter’s (1992) capacity theory of comprehension, suggested that working memory overload varies across within-structure modifications and subjects. Further-more, this overload may be compounded by subjects’ choices of strategy.     

Gender roles,computer attitudes,and dyadic computer interaction performance in college students

Females tend to score lower than males on measures of computer aptitude and attitudes. This study examined the potential effects of several mediating factors, sex of experimenter, sex of experimental partner, sex typing (Bem Sex Role Inventory score), and level of past experience, on a computer interaction task involving a dyad. College students, drawn from a primarily white college population, after completing paper-and-pencil measures assessing computer experience, computer attitudes, and gender roles, participated in a computer task involving drawing up to ten prescribed geometric patterns on a computer screen. Research assistants recorded the number of correctly completed patterns and videotaped participant interaction through a one-way mirror. Males reported experiencing more computer involvement than females. For males, past computer experience and masculinity were correlated with more positive computer attitude scores. For females, only past computer experience related to more positive computer attitude scores. Analyses of the computer interaction variable indicated that participants asked male research assistants significantly more questions than female research assistants. Several interaction effects were also found.A previous version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association, New Orleans, April 1991.     

Parental self-esteem and behavior problems in children: Similarities between mothers and fathers

The relationship between parental self-esteem and behavior problems in children was investigated using 1624 married couple's responses from the National Survey of Families and Households. The sample was weighted to be nationally representative in terms of race and ethnicity. It was hypothesized that the existence of behavior problems among children would be associated with low self-esteem among parents and that the parent's gender, child's gender, parents' gender role attitudes, and parental employment would moderate this relationship. The results indicated that parental self-esteem is negatively associated with behavior problems in children. However, none of the moderating variables had a significant impact. This suggests that the relationship between parental self-esteem and behavior problems among children is robust and does not vary appreciably with the gender of the parent, the gender of the child, the attitudes of the parent, or the employment of the parent.     

Critical bands and mixed-frequency scaling: sequential dependencies, equal-loudness contours, and power function exponents

Stimuli of random intensities and various but predictable frequencies were presented for repeated magnitude estimations on the same scale (mixed-frequency scaling). The frequencies for a particular judgment session were selected so that they lay either inside each other's critical bands or outside them. Contrastive dependencies of current magnitude estimation responses on previous stimuli of a different frequency were significantly affected by whether the two frequencies were inside or outside each other's critical bands, while assimilative dependencies were not. This reinforces the idea that such dependencies are sensory in nature and arise from a different mechanism than do the assimilative dependencies. Mixed-frequency scaling of loudness also gives rise to cross-frequency matching functions from which equal-loudness contours can be calculated. These contours calculated from the present judgments are similar to those produced from other methods, even when they are extrapolated to untested intensities. Power function exponents for loudness scaled in this way are larger for lower frequencies, as has been found in previous studies, and are consistent with the flattening of the calculated equal-loudness contours for low frequencies as intensity increases.