Eating Disorders—The Regulation of Positive as well as Negative Emotion Experience

Disordered eating behaviors are often conceptualized as maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. The present study investigated links between emotional experience, schematic belief systems, and psychological themes associated with eating disorders. In contrast to the majority of studies, which focus on just one or two emotions and use nonclinical samples, this study compared the full range of emotional experience in women with eating disorders to a control group. Measures used include the Differential Emotional Scale-IV, Youngs Early Maladaptive Schema Questionnaire, and Eating Disorder Inventory-2. The study provides the first empirical evidence that women diagnosed with eating disorders report experiencing pleasant as well as unpleasant emotions more frequently than do controls. A surprising finding was that pleasant emotions (joy, interest, surprise) correlated with eating disorder themes (EDI-2 subscales) more consistently than unpleasant emotions in the eating disorder group, while the reverse was true of the control group. Also of note, eating-disordered women reported significantly less anger and similar levels of fear vs. controls. While eating-disordered women scored more highly than do controls on all maladaptive schema (suggesting high levels of distress in women with eating disorders), the pattern of correlations between schema and emotion experience was distinctly different for each group and counterintuitive for the eating disorder group. In particular, pleasant emotion was highly correlated with maladaptive schema in the eating-disordered group but not in the control group. These marked group differences in the pattern of relationships between emotion experience, eating disorder themes, and belief systems suggest that it is not valid to draw conclusions about eating disorders from research that employs only nonclinical samples. The authors discuss these findings, and suggest that women with eating disorders are proficient at using disordered eating behaviors to manipulate their experience of both positive and negative emotional states, and that this dynamic should be recognized as an important maintenance factor.     

Body image ups and downs: prediction of intra-individual level and variability of women's daily body image experiences

This investigation assessed body image states in the context of everyday life among 108 college women. Participants initially completed measures of body image traits and eating attitudes and subsequently called an automated telephonic response system twice daily for 6 days to convey current body image experiences on the Body Image States Scale. The research examined the extent to which selected pretest variables predicted the level and variability of body image states. As hypothesized, less favorable body image state levels were associated with lower trait body image satisfaction, more body image dysphoria, more dysfunctional investment in appearance, more disturbed eating attitudes, and the use of less adaptive and more maladaptive body image coping strategies. Also as expected, body image variability was predicted by psychological investment in one's appearance, disturbed eating attitudes, and appearance-fixing coping strategies. Implications of the results and future research directions are discussed.     

From Benign Mirror to Demon Lover: An Object Relations View of Compulsion Versus Desire

This article addresses the terrifying power of the father as a dynamic force within the psyche of the female. Its particular focus is on how the psychodynamic form of father internalization within the female effects her creative process and her creative work. Two cases vignettes of female writers are used to illustrate the interaction of traumatizing parental behavior and the daughters incestuous desire on promoting compulsions and inhibitions in creative work. Writing blocks will be seen as a symptom of trauma and psychic conflict that has taken place in the oedipal and post oedipal years, as opposed to the creative compulsions that result from primal stage preoedipal trauma.Address correspondence to Susan Kavaler-Adler, Ph.D., ABPP, Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 115 East 9th Street, 12P New York, NY 10003; e-mail: SUSKA674@aol.com.     

Environmental toxicants and developmental disabilities: a challenge for psychologists

Developmental, learning, and behavioral disabilities are a significant public health problem. Environmental chemicals can interfere with brain development during critical periods, thereby impacting sensory, motor, and cognitive function. Because regulation in the United States is based on limited testing protocols and essentially requires proof of harm rather than proof of lack of harm, some undefined fraction of these disabilities may reflect adverse impacts of this "vast toxicological experiment" (H. L. Needleman, as quoted in B. Weiss & P. J. Landrigan, 2000, p. 373). Yet the hazards of environmental pollutants are inherently preventable. Psychologists can help prevent developmental disabilities by mobilizing and affecting public policy, educating and informing consumers, contributing to interdisciplinary research efforts, and taking action within their own homes and communities to reduce the toxic threat to children.     

On the limits of infants' quantification of small object arrays

Recent work suggests that infants rely on mechanisms of object-based attention and short-term memory to represent small numbers of objects. Such work shows that infants discriminate arrays containing 1, 2, or 3 objects, but fail with arrays greater than 3 [Feigenson, L., & Carey, S. (2003). Tracking individuals via object-files: Evidence from infants' manual search. Developmental Science, 6, 568-584; Feigenson, L., Carey, S., & Hauser, M. (2002). The representations underlying infants' choice of more: Object files versus analog magnitudes. Psychological Science, 13(2), 150-156]. However, little is known about how infants represent arrays exceeding the 3-item limit of parallel representation. We explored possible formats by which infants might represent a 4-object array. Experiment 1 used a manual search paradigm to show that infants successfully discriminated between arrays of 1 vs. 2, 2 vs. 3, and 1 vs. 3 objects. However, infants failed to discriminate 1 vs. 4 despite the highly discriminable ratio, providing the strongest evidence to date for object-file representations underlying performance in this task. Experiment 2 replicated this dramatic failure to discriminate 1 from 4 in a second paradigm, a cracker choice task. We then showed that infants in the choice task succeeded at choosing the larger quantity with 0 vs. 4 crackers and with 1 small vs. 4 large crackers. These results suggest that while infants failed to represent 4 as “exactly 4”, “approximately 4”, “3”, or as even as “a plurality”, they did represent information about the array, including the existence of a cracker or cracker-material and the size of the individual objects in the array.     

Never getting to zero: Elementary school students' understanding of the infinite divisibility of number and matter

Clinical interviews administered to third- to sixth-graders explored children's conceptualizations of rational number and of certain extensive physical quantities. We found within child consistency in reasoning about diverse aspects of rational number. Children's spontaneous acknowledgement of the existence of numbers between 0 and 1 was strongly related to their induction that numbers are infinitely divisible in the sense that they can be repeatedly divided without ever getting to zero. Their conceptualizing number as infinitely divisible was strongly related to their having a model of fraction notation based on division and to their successful judgment of the relative magnitudes of fractions and decimals. In addition, their understanding number as infinitely divisible was strongly related to their understanding physical quantities as infinitely divisible. These results support a conceptual change account of knowledge acquisition, involving two-way mappings between the domains of number and physical quantity.     

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: doctoral students' experiences of family therapy research training through alternative forms of data representation

In this study, we interviewed 14 doctoral students from 10 COAMFTE-accredited doctoral programs to learn more about how they experienced their research training and what they might suggest to strengthen the research culture in their training programs. We solicited somewhat unconventional data--metaphors, poetry, free associations, critical experiences--to (a) tap into our participants' underlying thought processes, (b) capture the multifaceted nature of their doctoral research training, and (c) represent the richness of our participants' subjective experiences. The themes we identified reflect both positive and negative research training experiences and suggest several ways that family therapy program faculty might improve their programs' research training and culture.     

Visual discrimination of spectral distributions

Human observers seem to be able to use different features that classify materials with a large degree of accuracy. In this paper, we look at human perception of statistical properties of the spectral distribution in a scene. We investigated whether human observers can discriminate just as accurately between coloured textures that have a spectral distribution due either to shading only or to both shading and specular reflectance as between uniform colours. Thresholds for the discrimination of coloured textures are about 15 times as high as thresholds for the discrimination of uniform colours, provided there is a sharp transition between the two colours. However, the coloured texture thresholds are only 1.5 times higher when we introduce a gradual transition between the two colours. There are also distinct qualitative differences in discrimination thresholds for different base colours. These differences cannot be predicted from discrimination thresholds for uniform colours. Human observers are surprisingly good at discriminating between a material edge and a shadow edge in complex scenes. Statistical differences in the orientation of the colour distributions in colour space might be used to accomplish this. In a second experiment we investigated how well observers can discriminate between two linear distributions in colour space that have the same base colour but different orientations. When we vary the line-length in R, G, B space, thresholds cannot be predicted completely by the conservation of the average distance between the two distributions. This means that observers use not only the maximum colour difference in the stimulus to do the task, but other cues are also involved.     

Neuroreceptor imaging of stress and mood disorders

Techniques such as positron emission tomography and single photon emission computed tomography allow for the imaging of neurotransmitter receptors and transporters in the brain. These tools have been used to investigate serotonergic, dopaminergic, and opioidergic function in healthy subjects as well as in patients with major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and other mood disorders. Pharmacologic challenges, such as amphetamine challenge, and physiologic stressors, such as pain challenge, have been used to further examine the function of these neurotransmitter systems. Neuroimaging of patient populations before and after medication treatment may be useful to understand changes in neurotransmission that accompany disease remission. As new radiotracers with higher selectivity for the various receptors and transporters are developed, imaging techniques may provide new insights into the pathophysiology of mood disorders, leading to improved diagnosis and treatment.