Eating Attitudes and Dieting Behavior Among Religious Subgroups of Israeli-Arab Adolescent Females

Objectives The aim of the study was to compare the eating attitudes and behaviors, including weight concerns and dieting behavior, among three religious subgroups (Moslems, Druze, and Christians) and three age subgroups (12–13, 14–15, and 16–18 years old) of Israeli-Arab adolescent females. Methods The sample consisted of 1141 Israeli-Arab adolescent females, including 926 (81.2%) Moslem, 128 (11.2%) Christian, and 87 (7.6%) Druze schoolgirls in the seventh to twelfth grades. Participants were assessed using the EAT–26 questionnaire. Results The results showed that 75% of the students had a negative EAT-26 score (>20) and that 25% of the students had a positive EAT-26 score (<20). No significant differences were found in total scores, subscale scores, or scores above 20 between the age subgroups or the religious subgroups. The results demonstrated a high prevalence of disturbed eating attitudes and behaviors among Israeli-Arab adolescent schoolgirls. Discussion Higher prevalence of disturbed eating attitudes found among Israeli-Arab schoolgirls as compared to their Jewish counterparts. Although our sample is a communal based, there still remains an open question as to why the desired “slenderness culture” evident in the results is not reflected in the number of ED clinic referrals, among clinical population. These discrepancies were discussed in light of ethnicity-specific factors that may influence the perceived severity of eating disorders and the receptiveness of primary practitioners to address them.     

Motivational correlates of need for cognition

Need for cognition is usually characterized as an intrinsic desire to engage in challenging intellectual activity. In achievement situations, however, it could be associated with more extrinsic goals such as success or the avoidance of failure. Three experiments examined this possibility. Participants in all studies were led to believe they would perform either an easy or a difficult intellectual task that they were likely to fail. After inducing this expectation, indices of extrinsic motivation were obtained. Participants with high need for cognition became more motivated to avoid negative consequences of their behavior (e.g., failure) when they expected the task they would perform to be difficult. In contrast, participants with low need for cognition were not appreciably affected by these expectancies. The anticipation of engaging in intellectual activity apparently stimulates different motives in people with high and low need for cognition, and the mindset induced by these motives influences their later behavioral decisions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A comparison of mental and physical context reinstatement in forensic interviews with alleged victims of sexual abuse

Forensic interviews with 142 alleged victims of sexual abuse, ranging from 4.0 to 13.5 years of age, were conducted under three different interviewing conditions: at the scene of the incidents (Physical Context Reinstatement; PCR group), in the investigator's office with mental context reinstating instructions (MCR group), and in the office without contextual cueing (Control group). Children in the PCR, MCR, and Control groups did not differ significantly with respect to the total number of informative details reported. Children in the MCR condition provided more detailed responses to the main invitation and in their first narrative than did children in the PCR condition, however. They also provided proportionally more detailed responses to open‐ended invitations and fewer details in response to directive prompts than did children in the two other conditions. The MCR procedures were thus associated with greater improvements in the quality of information retrieval than were the PCR procedures. In all interviewing conditions, children aged 7 to 13 years provided significantly more details than 4‐ to‐6‐year‐old children did. The youngest children provided fewer details in response to invitations and directive utterances, and proportionally more details in response to option‐posing and suggestive utterances. No significant interactions between age and interviewing condition were apparent. Published in 2002 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of nonconsciously priming emotion concepts on behavior

Current empirical evidence regarding nonconsciously priming emotion concepts is limited to positively versus negatively valenced affect. This article demonstrates that specific, equally valenced emotion concepts can be nonconsciously activated, remain inaccessible to conscious awareness, and still affect behavior in an emotion-specific fashion. In Experiment 1A, participants subliminally primed with guilty emotion adjectives showed lower indulgence than did participants subliminally primed with sad emotion adjectives; even after the addition of a 5-min time delay, these results were replicated in Experiment 1B. Participants in the different priming conditions showed no differences in their subjective emotion ratings and were unaware of the emotion prime or concept activation. Experiments 2A and 2B replicated these findings using a helping measure, demonstrating that individuals primed with guilt adjectives show more helping than do individuals primed with sadness adjectives. In all studies, effects were moderated by individuals' specific emotion-response habits and characteristics.     

Age, gender, and level of activity as moderators of personal incentives to physical activity in Israel

The authors conducted an exploratory study with Israeli adults examining their personal incentives for physical activity (e.g., appearance, weight management). The participants formed a sample of 379 physically active Israelis, aged 20-89 years, divided into 3 age groups and 3 levels of activity. The authors found a similar profile for men and women for most incentives, with men scoring more highly than did women on only competition and fitness. Participants in the highest level of activity attributed greater importance to all incentives than did those in the other levels, and older adults attributed less importance to all incentives except for health benefits. The findings are relevant for planning activities intended to encourage adults to engage in more physical activity.     

Marital discord and well-being in older adults: is the association confounded by personality?

The associations between marital discord and multiple measures of well-being (depression, anxiety, life satisfaction, and self-esteem) were evaluated in a population-based sample of 416 couples in which the husband was 65 years or older. Results indicated that greater marital discord was associated with greater depression and lower life satisfaction and self-esteem. Furthermore, the associations between marital discord and well-being remained significant when statistically controlling for the rival explanation of the Big Five personality traits. Finally, there was little evidence for gender differences in the magnitude of the associations between marital discord and well-being. Findings suggest that marital discord is an important correlate of multiple measures of well-being in older individuals and that this association is not confounded by the Big Five personality traits.     

Learning words and rules: abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension

Children quickly acquire basic grammatical facts about their native language. Does this early syntactic knowledge involve knowledge of words or rules? According to lexical accounts of acquisition, abstract syntactic and semantic categories are not primitive to the language-acquisition system; thus, early language comprehension and production are based on verb-specific knowledge. The present experiments challenge this account: We probed the abstractness of young children's knowledge of syntax by testing whether 25- and 21-month-olds extend their knowledge of English word order to new verbs. In four experiments, children used word order appropriately to interpret transitive sentences containing novel verbs. These findings demonstrate that although toddlers have much to learn about their native languages, they represent language experience in terms of an abstract mental vocabulary. These abstract representations allow children to rapidly detect general patterns in their native language, and thus to learn rules as well as words from the start.     

Perceived group variability and dispositional need for closure

Based on the closure motivation theory proposed by Kruglanski and Webster (1996), it was hypothesized that the extent of perceived variability of target group members would be related to dispositional need for closure. Israeli teachers (n = 160) judged their professors by means of two methods and answered the need for cognitive closure questionnaire (NFCS, Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). The findings show that need for closure is related to social judgment. The perception of participants high in need for closure was less differentiated and more extreme, in comparison to participants low in need for closure. Findings also yielded that measures of variability are method dependent.     

Marital Quality and Global Well-Being Among Older Adult Israeli Couples in Enduring Marriages

In order to profile family therapy users in China, this study examined 612 cases of a family therapy center in Beijing, including demographic data and presenting problems. It was found that, different to the western experience, cases reviewed were predominately families who presented with problems concerning children and adolescents. Typically presenting relationship issues, individual users had lower intake than the family modality, and couples had the lowest among three modalities. The overall results would seem to evidence some Chinese cultural characteristics, such as prioritizing the filial relationship above the couple one, and a particular focus on the children.