Effects of Physical Appearance Social Comparisons and Perceived Attainability of an Ideal Body on Body Dissatisfaction and Weight-Management Behaviors Among Young Japanese Women

This study was designed to test a model in which tendencies to engage in physical appearance social comparisons and perceived ideal body attainability interact to predict body dissatisfaction, and are associated with weight-control behaviors (WCBs) as past studies have rarely examined perceived attainability in their analytic models. College women (N = 297) from two universities in Japan completed a paper-and-pencil survey. A path analysis revealed that appearance comparisons were positively associated with body dissatisfaction over and above the effects of body mass index and self-esteem. Body dissatisfaction, in turn, was positively related to low-risk, moderate-risk, and high-risk WCBs. There was a significant interaction effect between appearance comparison and attainability, but the nature of the interaction was the opposite from our expectation: the positive association between appearance comparison and body dissatisfaction was more pronounced among women who reported higher confidence in attaining an ideal body, whereas this association was nonsignificant for those with low confidence in attaining an ideal body. Finally, perceived ideal body attainability was directly and positively related to low-risk and moderate-risk WCBs.     

Kierkegaard on Imitation and Ethics: Toward a Secular Project?

This essay demonstrates the prominence of imitation in Kierkegaard’s ethics. I move beyond his idea of authentic existence modeled on Christ and explore the secular dimension of Kierkegaard’s insights about human nature and imitation. I start with presenting imitation as key to understanding the ethical dimension of the relationship between the universal and individual aspects of the human self in Kierkegaard. I then show that Kierkegaard’s moral concepts of “primitivity” and “comparison” are a response to his sociological and psychological observations about imitation from an ethical point of view. In the final section of this paper, I briefly engage Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “ethics of individuality” and Gabriel Tarde’s “laws of imitation” to explore Kierkegaard’s consideration of ethics and imitation as situated within the context of a broader conversation on imitation.     

Arbitrary social comparison,malicious envy,and generosity

Existing work on the effects of social comparison on envy and generosity typically involves manipulation of social comparison with respect to dimensions that carry personal meaning and reflect upon the self, for example, performance, ability, or achievement. In the current work, we examine the effects of social comparison based on a purely arbitrary, manipulated situation. We measure malicious envy via monetary decisions that have real consequences for the target of comparison, in place of a self-reported questionnaire. In addition, we test the effects of the preliminary social comparison on generosity in a subsequent and ostensibly unrelated situation. In Experiment 1 we demonstrate the effect of randomly manipulated upward social comparison on a monetary allocation decision, and we establish the link between this allocation decision and malicious envy. In Experiment 2 we show that upward comparison affects not only malicious envy towards the target of the comparison but also decreases generosity towards a third party in a subsequent, ostensibly unrelated situation. Experiment 3 shows the effect of this type of social comparison, beyond a specific direction, on reducing generosity towards a third party.     

Comparing theories of consciousness: Object position,not probe modality,reliably influences experience and accuracy in object recognition tasks

People often claim seeing images completely despite performing poorly. This highlights an issue with conscious representations. We introduce an experimental manipulation aiming to disentangle two prevalent positions: Rich views posit that people virtually represent the external world with unlimited capacity; Sparse views state that representations are reconstructed from expectations and information. In two experiments using the object recognition task, we tested two probe types: Images, which should aid reconstruction more, and Words, which should aid it less. From a sparse view, one should expect that Images lead to greater accuracy and reported experience. We found no reliable differences in accuracy and reported experience across probe types; however, we observed that the object positions influenced both accuracy and reported experience, which is surprising from a Rich view as it seemingly requires assumptions of different access across the visual field. Both theoretical positions thus currently need further development to explain our results.     

Religion,Violence, and Human Rights

Beginning with the support given by religious groups to humanitarian intervention for the protection of basic human rights in the debates of the 1990s, this essay examines the use of the human rights idea in relation to international law on armed conflict, the “Responsibility To Protect” doctrine, and the development of the idea of sovereignty associated with the “Westphalian system” of international order, identifying a dilemma: that the idea of human rights undergirds both the principle of non‐intervention in the internal affairs of states and the idea of an international responsibility for humanitarian intervention in cases of oppression. The pre‐Westphalian conception of sovereignty as moral responsibility for the common good is then examined as an alternative that avoids this dilemma, and the essay concludes by suggesting that religious ethics also has other resources that, if used, may shed useful light on resolving this problem.     

Social comparisons and quality of life among survivors of childhood cancer and their mothers

Abstract

Sixty-three survivors of childhood cancer (mean age 17 years), currently well and off-treatment, and their mothers were interviewed individually about their experiences and the impact of their illness on their lives. Survivors also completed four questionnaire measures of different aspects of quality of life (perceptions of illness experience, future worries, health problems and body image satisfaction), whereas mothers recorded their perceptions of their child's quality of life on the same four scales. These scales showed good internal consistency and convergent validity for both survivors and mothers. Mothers also completed a measure of their own quality of life (the SF-36). The interviews with both survivors and mothers were content-analysed for statements expressing social comparisons. These statements were coded according to whether the comparison implied a favourable, neutral or unfavourable evaluation of the individual survivor. Mothers who made a higher proportion of unfavourable comparisons reported worse adjustment for their child on all four scales and described their own quality of life more negatively. Among survivors, those who made a higher proportion of unfavourable comparisons gave significantly more negative self-ratings on one of the four scales. Correlations between survivors' and mothers' ratings on the four scales were positive, but comparatively low. This reinforces concerns about using parents as proxy judges of young people's quality of life, although the correlations were more satisfactory in the case of younger rather than older (>18.5 years) survivors. Mothers who rated their own quality of life as less satisfactory reported more problems for their child on all four scales, irrespective of how the survivors described themselves.     

The development of children’s sympathy,moral emotion attributions,and moral reasoning in two cultures

The current study investigated the development of children’s sympathy, moral emotion attributions, and moral reasoning in two cultures: Chile and Switzerland. One hundred seventy-six children in two age groups (i.e., 6 and 9 years old) were asked to report their sympathy. Moral emotion attributions and moral reasoning were measured using two hypothetical moral transgressions (i.e., omitting a prosocial duty, stealing from another child). Younger Chilean children reported higher levels of sympathy than younger Swiss children. Across cultures, older children attributed more moral emotions than did younger children. Younger Swiss children used more moral reasoning following judgements about rule violations than did younger Chilean children. The findings are discussed from both a developmental and cross-cultural perspective.     

Reciprocal involvement in adolescent dating aggression: An Italian–Spanish study

This study aimed to: (1) analyse the association of different patterns of reciprocal involvement in dating aggression (reciprocal psychological and physical aggression; reciprocal psychological aggression; non-aggressive individuals) with different qualities of romantic relationship; and (2) compare results in two European countries, Italy and Spain. Participants were 304 adolescents (141 Italy, 163 Spain) with a current dating relationship. Results in both countries showed that adolescents involved in reciprocal psychological and physical aggression are more likely to have higher levels of couple conflict and power imbalance as compared to the reciprocal psychological aggressive group and to the non-aggressive individuals. Besides, adolescents involved in reciprocal psychological aggression are more likely to have lower levels of support as compared to the non-aggressive individuals. Discussion is focused on different patterns of reciprocal involvement differentiated in relation to level of aggression, conflict and power imbalance.     

Rational numbers: Componential versus holistic representation of fractions in a magnitude comparison task

This study investigated whether the mental representation of the fraction magnitude was componential and/or holistic in a numerical comparison task performed by adults. In Experiment 1, the comparison of fractions with common numerators (x/a_x/b) and of fractions with common denominators (a/x_b/x) primed the comparison of natural numbers. In Experiment 2, fillers (i.e., fractions without common components) were added to reduce the regularity of the stimuli. In both experiments, distance effects indicated that participants compared the numerators for a/x_b/x fractions, but that the magnitudes of the whole fractions were accessed and compared for x/a_x/b fractions. The priming effect of x/a_x/b fractions on natural numbers suggested that the interference of the denominator magnitude was controlled during the comparison of these fractions. These results suggested a hybrid representation of their magnitude (i.e., componential and holistic). In conclusion, the magnitude of the whole fraction can be accessed, probably by estimating the ratio between the magnitude of the denominator and the magnitude of the numerator. However, adults might prefer to rely on the magnitudes of the components and compare the magnitudes of the whole fractions only when the use of a componential strategy is made difficult.     

Embodied representation of the body contains veridical spatial information

In two experiments, the extent to which mental body representations contain spatial information was examined. Participants were asked to compare distances between various body parts. Similar to what happens when people compare distances on a real visual stimulus, they were faster as the distance differences between body parts became larger (Experiment 1), and this effect could not (only) be explained by the crossing of major bodily categories (umbilicus to knee vs. knee to ankle; Experiment 2). In addition, participants also performed simple animate/inanimate verification on a set of nouns. The nouns describing animate items were names of body parts. A spatial priming effect was found: Verification was faster for body part items preceded by body parts in close spatial proximity. This suggests automatic activation of spatial body information. Taken together, results from the distance comparison task and the property verification task showed that mental body representations contain both categorical and more metric spatial information. These findings are further discussed in terms of recent embodied cognition theories.