‘He's got his father's bias’: Parental influence on weight bias in young children

Our aim was to explore the role of parents in the transmission of stereotypical body size attitudes and awareness of weight loss strategies to preschool children. Participants were 279 3‐year‐old children and their parents, who provided data at baseline and 1 year later. Parents completed self‐report body size attitude and dieting measures. Child weight bias and awareness of weight loss strategies were assessed through interview. Over time, negative associations with large bodies and awareness of weight loss strategies increased. Fathers’ attitudes prospectively predicted boys’ weight bias and awareness of weight loss strategies. Among girls, parental attitudes were less predictive. Findings confirm the importance of fathers in the development of boys’ body attitudes and inform prevention programmes.     

Sexual Attitudes of Males and Females as Predictors of Interpersonal Attraction and Marital Compatibility1

Two investigations examine the effect of similarity of sexual attitudes on (a) attraction to a stranger and (b) marital sexual satisfaction. In an experiment using undergraduates, manipulation of subject-stranger similarity in general affective orientation to sexuality affected attraction and other evaluative dependent variables. In the second investigation, married couples revealed sexual attitudes and sexual satisfaction. Husbands and wives were similar (r= 0.58, p < 0.001) in their affective orientations to sexuality. Discrepancy between the partners’ scores predicted sexual dissatisfaction in both partners. In addition, the wife's affective orientation to sexuality predicted more indices of sexual satisfaction and adjustment in both the wife and the husband than did the husband's affective orientation to sexuality. Finally, spouses with a positive affective orientation to sexuality were more accurate when judging their partner's sexual enjoyment, compared to spouses with a negative orientation. The findings have implications for the effects of similarity of attitudes on interpersonal attraction and on relationship quality.     

Self-Compassion and Need Frustration Moderate the Effects of Upward Appearance Comparisons on Body Image Discrepancies

Abstract

Drawing from diverse theoretical frameworks, we examined predictors of discrepancy between current and ideal body image in a sample of 396 Greek adolescents. The participants completed assessments of the frequency of comparing oneself with someone of perceived better appearance, appearance evaluations, frustration of basic psychological needs, and appearance self-compassion. We found that upward appearance comparisons negatively predicted appearance evaluation, which in turn was a negative predictor of body image discrepancy. Moderated mediation analyses showed that appearance self-compassion buffered, whereas psychological need frustration augmented the negative effects of upward comparisons on appearance evaluation. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on body image discrepancies in adolescence by examining moderating factors that amplify or buffer such discrepancies, hence identifying viable intervention pathways.     

Decision-makers use social information to update their preferences but choose for others as they do for themselves

People's risky decisions are susceptible to the social context in which they take place. Across three experiments using different paradigms, we investigated the influence of three social factors upon participants' decisions: the recipient of the decision-making outcome (self, other, or joint), the nature of the relationship with the other agent (friend, stranger, or teammate), and the type of information that participants received about others' preferences: none at all, general information about how previous participants had decided, or information about a specific partner's preference. We found that participants' decisions about risk did not differ according to whether the outcome at stake was their own, another agent's, or a joint outcome, nor according to the type of information available. Participants did, however, adjust their preferences for risky options in light of social information.     

Changing the guard: new leadership for an established group

When the leader of an established therapy group decides to leave, the group may wish to continue with a new leader. This decision deserves careful exploration. The transfer of leadership to a new leader is a powerful event in a group. New leaders often experience strong countertransference reactions. Specific recommendations for new leaders include meeting individually with each continuing member, helping the group stabilize and process the meaning of the change, and developing ownership of the leader role. When managed successfully, a leadership transition can strengthen the group cohesion and offer important therapeutic opportunity.     

Knowledge of object manipulation and object function: dissociations in apraxic and nonapraxic subjects

An influential account of selective semantic deficits posits that visual features are heavily weighted in the representations of animals, whereas information about function is central in the representations of tools (e.g., Warrington & Shallice, 1984 ). An alternative account proposes that information about all types of objects-animate and inanimate alike-is represented in a distributed semantic architecture by verbal-propositional, tactile, visual, and proprioceptive-motor nodes, reflecting the degree to which these systems were activated when the knowledge was acquired (e.g., Allport, 1985 ). We studied a group of left hemisphere chronic stroke patients, some of whom were apraxic, with measures of declarative tool and animal knowledge, body part knowledge, and function and manipulation knowledge of artifacts. Apraxic (n=7) and nonapraxic (n=6) subjects demonstrated a double dissociation of performance on tests of tool and animal knowledge, suggesting that the apraxic group was not simply more severely impaired overall. Apraxics were relatively impaired in manipulation knowledge, whereas nonapraxics tended to be relatively impaired in function knowledge. Apraxics were also more impaired with body parts than nonapraxics. The association of gestural praxis, tool knowledge, body part knowledge, and manipulation knowledge suggests a coherent basis for the organization of semantic artifact knowledge in frontoparietal cortical regions specialized for sensorimotor functions, and thus provides support for the distributed architecture account of the semantic system.     

Remembering Alexandra Symonds

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

An examination of Euro-American and African-American differences in social physique anxiety among college women

Many studies have examined sex differences in social physique anxiety; however, few researchers have examined possible perceptual differences in such anxiety based on ethnicity. The present purpose was to examine social physique anxiety among college-age women of Euro-American and African-American descent. Participants (N = 91) from physical activity classes at a university located in the southeastern United States completed the Social Physique Anxiety Scale. The participants were 67 Euro-Americans and 24 African Americans. An independent t test yielded a significant difference (p =.01) between groups on Eklund's scale, which supports the hypothesis.     

“Girls Are as Good as Boys at Math” Implies That Boys Are Probably Better: A Study of Expressions of Gender Equality

Although “Girls are as good as boys at math” explicitly expresses equality, we predict it could nevertheless suggest that boys have more raw talent. In statements with this subject‐complement structure, the item in the complement position serves as the reference point and is thus considered more typical and prominent. This explains why “Tents are like houses,” for instance, sounds better than “Houses are like tents”—people generally think of houses as more typical. For domains about ability, the reference point should be the item that is typically more skilled. We further propose that the reference point should be naturally more skilled. In two experiments, we presented adults with summaries of actual scientific evidence for gender equality in math (Experiment 1) or verbal ability (Experiment 2), but we manipulated whether the reference point in the statements of equality in the summaries (e.g., “Boys’ verbal ability is as good as girls’”) was girls or boys. As predicted, adults attributed more natural ability to each gender when it was in the complement rather than subject position. Yet, in Experiment 3, we found that when explicitly asked, participants judged that such sentences were not biased in favor of either gender, indicating that subject‐complement statements must be transmitting this bias in a subtle way. Thus, statements such as “Girls are as good as boys at math” can actually backfire and perpetuate gender stereotypes about natural ability.     

What factors underlie children’s susceptibility to semantic and phonological false memories? Investigating the roles of language skills and auditory short-term memory

Two experiments investigated the cognitive skills that underlie children’s susceptibility to semantic and phonological false memories in the Deese/Roediger–McDermott procedure ( and ). In Experiment 1, performance on the Verbal Similarities subtest of the British Ability Scales (BAS) II (Elliott, Smith, & McCulloch, 1997) predicted correct and false recall of semantic lures. In Experiment 2, performance on the Yopp–Singer Test of Phonemic Segmentation (Yopp, 1988) did not predict correct recall, but inversely predicted the false recall of phonological lures. Auditory short-term memory was a negative predictor of false recall in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. The findings are discussed in terms of the formation of gist and verbatim traces as proposed by fuzzy trace theory (Reyna & Brainerd, 1998) and the increasing automaticity of associations as proposed by associative activation theory (Howe, Wimmer, Gagnon, & Plumpton, 2009).