The impact of a rural or urban context in eating awareness and self‐regulation strategies in children and adolescents from eight European countries

Complex relationships exist between eating behaviour and personal and environmental factors. Rural and urban geographic contexts seem to play a role in eating behaviour, and therefore deserve a deeper study. A healthy eating behaviour and the conditions that promote it are a major issue in the promotion of adolescent health. The study aims to investigate the associations between the area of residence (urban vs. rural), self‐regulation strategies (TESQ‐E) and eating behaviours among children and adolescents. A total of 11,820 adolescents (50.6% girls) participated in the study, with a mean age of 13.30 years (SD= 2.13). Nine countries (The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Poland, Portugal, Denmark, Romania, Germany, Finland and Belgium) completed a questionnaire in the school context, asking about the use of self‐regulation strategies, eating behaviour awareness/care and sociodemographic questions such as age, gender and residential area. Both areas of residence (urban vs. rural) are associated with eating awareness/care in Romania and Portugal, controlling for age, gender and self‐regulation strategies. In some European countries at least, and most probably around the world, health promotion should focus on an ecological approach that includes the understanding of the effect of both environmental factors and personal skills on eating behaviour/awareness.     

Attention to Emotion and Non-Western Faces: Revisiting the Facial Feedback Hypothesis

In a modified replication of Strack, Martin, and Stepper's demonstration of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis (1988), we investigated the effect of attention to emotion on the facial feedback process in a non-western cultural setting. Participants, recruited from two universities in Ghana, West Africa, gave self-reports of their perceived levels of attention to emotion, and then completed cartoon-rating tasks while randomly assigned to smiling, frowning, or neutral conditions. While participants with low Attention to Emotion scores displayed the usual facial feedback effect (rating cartoons as funnier when in the smiling compared to the frowning condition), the effect was not present in individuals with high Attention to Emotion. The findings indicate that (1) the facial feedback process can occur in contexts beyond those in which the phenomenon has previously been studied, and (2) aspects of emotion regulation, such as Attention to Emotion can interfere with the facial feedback process.     

Is Disgust Prepared? A Preliminary Examination in Young Children

Children may be prepared to associate adult disgust reactions with adult disgust elicitors. To test this, three-year olds (and adults) were presented with two images and an emotive vocalization. The images and vocalizations included stimuli adults found disgusting, fear-provoking, and sad. On one set of trials, the main dependent variable (DV) was time spent looking at each image and on a second set of repeat trials the DV was knowledge of image-sound matches. Fear and disgust vocalizations were both more effective at orienting a child's attention to adult fear and disgust images, than sad vocalizations. Parental disgust sensitivity was associated with this effect, moderated by explicit matching knowledge. Matching knowledge was poor in children and good in adults. These data suggest that in children, fear and disgust vocalizations may both promote attention to stimuli that adults find disgusting and/or fear-provoking, suggesting that “preparedness” may not be wholly emotion-specific.     

Anxiety,Immigration, and the Search for Information

In this article, we use the issue of immigration to explore the role of anxiety in responses to political appeals. According to previous literature, anxiety motivates citizens to learn and pay more attention to news coverage. Literature in psychology demonstrates that anxiety is associated with a tendency to pay closer attention to threatening information. We predict that anxious citizens will seek more information but that they will seek out and be attracted to threatening information. In an experiment, we induce anxiety about immigration and then subjects have the opportunity to search for additional information in a website designed to mimic online news sources. The website has both immigration and nonimmigration stories, and the immigration stories are split between threatening coverage and nonthreatening coverage. We find that anxious subjects exhibit biased information processing; they read, remember, and agree with threatening information.     

Personalization in Mother–Child Emotion Talk Across Three Contexts

An unexplored aspect of contextual variation in emotion talk is the extent to which the emotions mothers and children discuss relate to the child, mother, or another self. To establish the extent to which mothers and children personalize the emotions they discuss, we examined the emotion talk of 40 American mother–child dyads in three conversational contexts: reminiscing, book reading, and play. We found that both mothers and children talked about emotions directly relevant to the child mostly in the reminiscing context and about emotions relating to another self mostly in the book context. Interestingly, the discussion of personalized emotions did not significantly differ between the book and play contexts, but did for the independent emotions. The discussion of mothers' own emotions occurred with almost the same frequency in all three contexts. In addition, within‐context analyses revealed that while mothers discussed the child's and their own emotions in the book and play contexts at about the same rate, children focused on their own emotions significantly more than on mothers' emotions in all three contexts. We contextualize the significance of the results in light of intervention programmes and future research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

青少年的学校适应问题：家庭亲密度、家庭道德情绪和责任感的作用

随机选取某市三所普通中小学四、六、八、十年级的755名青少年为被试,使用自评和他评问卷探讨家庭亲密度、家庭道德情绪和责任感与青少年学校适应之间的关系。结果显示：（1）青少年家庭亲密度、责任感与学校适应问题存在性别差异,女生家庭亲密度和责任感高于男生,外化和学业问题少于男生;家庭亲密度、道德情绪和责任感随年龄增长呈下降趋势;（2）家庭亲密度正向预测道德情绪和责任感,直接和间接负向预测青少年学校适应问题。（3）责任感负向预测学校适应问题,并在家庭亲密度和学校适应问题之间起部分中介作用;结构方程模型各指标的拟合效果较好。家庭亲密度、责任感是学校适应问题的良好预测指标。     

Unique associations between young adult men's emotional functioning and their body dissatisfaction and disordered eating

Research on emotional functioning, body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating in males is predominated by studies of negative affect and emotion regulation. Other aspects of emotional functioning, namely emotion recognition and attentional biases toward emotional stimuli, have received little empirical attention. The present study investigated the unique associations between different aspects of men's emotional functioning and their disordered eating attitudes, muscularity dissatisfaction, and body fat dissatisfaction. Results from 132 male undergraduates showed that muscularity dissatisfaction was uniquely associated with both emotion regulation difficulties and an attentional bias toward rejecting faces. Body fat dissatisfaction was not uniquely associated with any aspect of emotional functioning. Disordered eating was uniquely associated with emotion regulation difficulties. Collectively, the results indicate differences in the patterns of associations between men's emotional functioning and their body dissatisfaction and disordered eating.