Disordered Eating Cognitions as Predictors of Attitudes toward Seeking Professional Psychological Services

The present study investigated whether young adults’ disordered eating cognitions predicted attitudes toward seeking professional psychological services. Two hundred and eighty three 18- to 24-year-old undergraduate students completed a survey package that included measures of disordered eating cognitions and help-seeking attitudes. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that greater disordered eating cognitions uniquely predicted lower degrees of favorable help-seeking attitudes overall, lower stigma tolerance with respect to seeking professional psychological services, lower interpersonal openness in the context of help-seeking, and lower confidence in psychological professionals. The findings suggest that outreach interventions should, among other things, focus on stigma associated with help-seeking and disordered eating problems.     

Special Education Policy for Learners with Mild Intellectual Disability in New Zealand: Problems and Issues

Current policy developments are intended to broaden the group of children receiving special education provisions traditionally reserved for those with mild intellectual disability. A definite policy has been formulated to close special classes and the use of individualized intelligence testing has been largely discontinued as a basis for establishing special educational need‐‐thus ostensibly providing greater flexibility for service allocation. The term “backward” (the traditional term for mild intellectual disability in New Zealand) has been rejected, and children with mild intellectual disability are now included in a new category “children with educational and social difficulties"‐‐a category which also includes children with specific learning difficulties, those with mild sensory disabilities, and those with mild emotional/behavioural difficulties. It is argued that available resources are grossly insufficient to provide high quality special educational services for all “children with educational and social difficulties,” that the decision to close special classes represents a premature and unsound reduction in the range of options available to children with mild intellectual disability, and that research into the effects of current policies on the lives of learners with mild intellectual disability and their families is urgently required but will now be very difficult to undertake.     

Causal Explanations for Weight Influence Children’s Social Preferences: Biological-Essentialist Explanations Reduce,and Behavioral Explanations Promote,Preferences for Thin Friends

The current study experimentally investigated the impact of causal-explanatory information on weight bias over development. Participants (n = 395, children ages 4–11 years and adults) received either a biological or behavioral explanation for body size, or neither, in three between-subjects conditions. Participants then made preference judgments for characters with smaller versus larger body sizes. Results showed that both behavioral and biological explanations impacted children’s preferences. Relative to children’s baseline preferences, behavioral explanations enhanced preferences for smaller characters, and biological explanations reduced these preferences—unlike the typical facilitative impact of biological-essentialist explanations on other biases. The explanations did not affect adults’ preferences. In contrast to previous findings, we demonstrate that causal knowledge can impact weight bias early in development.     

Management education at a distance and its effects on career progression: The case of MBA in retailing and wholesaling students

Students who register for any MBA programme anticipate that their career opportunities will be improved. When they are also practising managers, evidence shows that career changes may occur at any time during the course of their programme. Using a survey on students studying the University of Stirling's MBA in Retailing and Wholesaling by distance learning this paper was able to support this evidence as well as investigating the type and frequency of career changes being experienced by managers.