Psychology

I don’t know if I have an eating disorder or not. Back in July, 2012, I started eating roughly 200-600 calories a day and exercising about 2-4 after my friend said, “If you eat, you lose the starvation contest.” I hate my body, and weight, but I hear people talk about how much they hate themselves all the time, so I’m not sure if this is really an eating disorder. Also, about a few months afterwards, I started binge-eating for a week and gaining roughly ten pounds, and then eating 0-100 calories for a week and losing the ten pounds. I’ve heard these are the symptoms for EDNOS, but since I’ve never gotten an official diagnosis or told anyone in real life, I am not certain on what this really is. Also, I lost seventeen pounds in three weeks, as well as gain thirty pounds in a month. If this really is EDNOS or any type of eating disorder, I don’t know if it’s as severe as some other people’s eating disorders and needs treatment. Please advise? A. I can’t say with certainty whether you have an eating disorder but your behavior is very troubling. Even if it seems normal in your circle of friends, your behavior is far from normal. Starving your body of food is harmful. You are barely eating. Your body is unable to function properly without the proper nutrients and these must be gotten daily. It is a problem. I would highly recommend that you report your behavior to your parents and ask them to take you to treatment. Meet with a mental health professional as soon as possible to deal with these issues. It is abnormal to be so restrictive in your diet and it is a sign that something is wrong. Eating disorders can be deadly and immediate treatment is required. Please speak to your parents as soon as possible and let them know that you want treatment from mental health professionals. Please take care. Dr. Kristina Randle Mental Health & Criminal Justice Blog

My boyfriend is 9 years older than me, he has 2 kids, a 9 year old daughter, and a 10 year old son. I have a 3 year old son also. We’ve been together for over a year now. He left his wife for me, and we’ve been going strong ever since, up until about 2 1/2 months ago. His ex up and skipped town, we got left with his 2 kids permantely. I’m 24, and all this is new to me, I went from being a mom with 3 years of experience to having a 3, 9, & 10 year old. His daughter talks to me any way she pleases, I punish her by sending her to her room, she’ll fight back with kicking, screaming, & moaning for literally hours, telling her dad she hates him for being with me, whereas most days she’s completely fine & loves me. His 10 year old son is mostly good, except he has jealous issues upon my 3 year old son. He is mean to him, takes toys, food, books, etc away from him just so he’ll cry. He has admitted that his problem with my son is that he has his mom in his life. My boyfriend worked at the time when his kids were growing up, so all this is briefly new to him also. We have tried everything since their mom left, family vacation, movies, shopping, even re-did their rooms, nothing seems to be good enough. I’be tried talking with his daughter & she will get up & tell me she is fine. Her grades are begining to slip, she lies about bathing, stopped doing household chores, & plain out doesn’t care. She is the most difficult time we.are having, its been causing us to argue, stress, & panic. I suggested she seen a counceler & she screamed at us we hated her & was trying to.put her in a girls home! I have no clue where she gets these things. I only want better for her. Some nights she’ll cry herself to sleep saying ” I want my moma.” What do we do? A: The most important thing to remember in this situation is that your boyfriend’s kids are grieving. Their mom abandoned them. They lost her and the home they’ve known. From their point of view, they can’t trust you or their dad either. They think that since their own mother could leave them, so could you. These kids aren’t bad. They are in enormous emotional pain. Being kids, they don’t have a way to understand what has happened or to talk about it clearly. They act out instead. Family vacations and movies, though wonderful family outings, are not going to balance out their feelings of anger and sadness. Then need support in dealing with their feelings. You and their father need support in learning how to support the kids. This isn’t easy stuff. But it is essential. You want to stabilize things before they get into adolescence, when kids normally push away from parental influence. You want to lay in trust and love and understanding now that you will be able to draw on later. Your instinct that it would be a good idea to see a therapist was on target. But the whole family needs to go, including your 3-year-old, not just the daughter. You all need to have a place to talk about how difficult the situation is for all of you and to figure out how to live together and, hopefully, how to love and trust each other. A trained family therapist can help you with that project. Please follow through. If you could have handled this on your own, you and your boyfriend would have fixed it already. I can tell you care about these kids and have compassion for them. Now you need some new skills. I wish you well. Dr. Marie

The Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion at Masaryk University is looking to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cognition and Culture. The successful candidate will be employed to work under the supervision of Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas (Director) on experimental studies of religion. The post involves carrying out behavioural experimental research in the LEVYNA lab facilities and in naturalistic settings.Responsibilities include contributing to the training and mentoring of graduate researchers from the humanities who work in experimental methods, providing help with research design and data analysis, and publishing peer-reviewed articles. (continued blow the fold)

Imagine you are the driver & your chocolate cravings are unruly passengers If someone gave you a bag of 14 chocolates to carry around for five days, would you be able to resist eating them and any other chocolate? That was challenge faced by 135 undergrads in a new study that compared the effectiveness of two different "mindfulness" resistance techniques. To help them, Kim Jenkins and Katy Tapper taught 45 of their participants "cognitive diffusion", the essence being that "you are not your thoughts". The students were told to imagine that they are the driver of a mindbus and any difficult thoughts about chocolate are to be seen as awkward passengers. The students chose a specific method for dealing with these difficult thoughts/passengers and practised it for five minutes - either describing them, letting them know who is in charge, making them talk with a different accent, or singing what they are saying. Another group of students were taught an acceptance technique known as "urge surfing". They were instructed to ride the wave of their chocolate cravings, rather than to sink them or give in to them. A final group of students acted as controls and were taught a relaxation technique. As well as trying to resist the bag of chocolates, the students in all conditions were asked to avoid eating any other chocolate as far as possible, and to keep a diary of any chocolate they did eat over the five days. The key finding is that the mindbus group ate fewer chocolates from their bag as compared with students in the control group. By contrast, the urge surfing group ate just as many of their chocolates as the controls. Diary records showed the differences between groups in their other chocolate consumption was not statistically significant, although there was a trend for the mindbus group to eat less (13g vs. 52g in the urge surfing group and 44g in the control condition). Another way of describing the results is to say that 27 per cent of the mindbus group ate some chocolate over the five-day period, compared with 45 per cent of the urge surfers and 45 per cent of controls. A habits questionnaire suggested the mindbus technique was more effective because it reduced the students' mindless, automatic consumption of chocolate more than the other interventions. Jenkins and Tapper said their results show the mindbus "cognitive diffusion" technique is a "promising brief intervention strategy" for boosting self-control over an extended time period. The serious chocaholics among you may not be so convinced. Although the students were recruited on the basis that they wanted to reduce their chocolate consumption, they appeared to show saintly levels of abstinence. On average, even the control group participants ate just 0.69 chocolates from their bag over the five day period (compared with an average of 0.02 chocolates in the mindbus condition; 0.27 in the urge surfing condition). The controls other chocolate consumption amounted to the equivalent of little more than four individual chocolates over five days. You've got to wonder - how serious were these participants about chocolate and just how tasty were the chocolates in that bag? Another thing - the researchers included a measure of "behavioural rebound". After the students returned to the lab on day five, they were presented with a bowl of chocolates and invited to eat as many as they liked. The groups didn't differ in the amount of chocolates they consumed, which the researchers interpreted as a good sign - after all, the mindbus group hadn't compensated for their restricted intake during the week. But hang on, they also showed no evidence of greater resistance to the chocolate. Sounds to me like the passengers had taken over the bus. _________________________________ Jenkins, K., and Tapper, K. (2013). Resisting chocolate temptation using a brief mindfulness strategy. British Journal of Health Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjhp.12050 --Further reading

For The Nation, Ken Silverstein has a revealing article, titled “The Secret Donors Behind the Center for American Progress and Other Think Tanks.”  Paying special attention to the Center for American Progress, the article shows how ideas, policies, and people gain credibility, legitimacy, and influence through unseen corporate investments in think tanks. Here are a couple of excerpts: Nowadays, many Washington think tanks effectively serve as unregistered lobbyists for corporate donors, and companies strategically contribute to them just as they hire a PR or lobby shop or make campaign donations. And unlike lobbyists and elected officials, think tanks are not subject to financial disclosure requirements, so they reveal their donors only if they choose to. That makes it impossible for the public and lawmakers to know if a think tank is putting out an impartial study or one that’s been shaped by a donor’s political agenda. “If you’re a lobbyist, whatever you say is heavily discounted,” says Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert on political ethics. “If a think tank is saying it, it obviously sounds a lot better. Maybe think tanks aren’t aware of how useful that makes them to private interests. On the other hand, maybe it’s part of their revenue model.” * * * [M]any [think tanks] lure big donors with a package of benefits, including personalized policy briefings, the right to directly underwrite and shape research projects, and general support for the donor’s political needs. Most think tanks are nonprofit organizations, so a donor can even get a nice tax break for contributing. But it’s their reputation for impartiality and their web of contacts that makes them especially useful as policy advocates. “Think tanks can always draw a big audience to your event, including government folks,” a Washington lobbyist who has worked with several told me. “And people generally don’t think they would twist anything, or wonder about where they get their money.” While think tanks portray themselves as altruistic scholarly institutions, they emphasize their political influence when courting donors. “If you have a particular area of policy interest, you can support a specific research effort under way,” the Brookings Institution says in one pitch for cash. Those interested in ?”a deeper engagement”—read: ready to fork over especially large sums of money—get personal briefings from resident experts and can work directly with senior Brookings officials to draw up a research agenda that will “maximize impact on policymaking.” The Center for Strategic and International Studies advertises itself as being “in the unique position to bring together leaders of both the public and private sectors in small, often off-the-record meetings to build consensus around important policy issues.” It allows top-tier donors to directly sponsor reports, events and speaker series. Read the entire article here. Related Situationist posts: 2013 PLMS Conference Deep Capture – Part VII Deep Capture – Part IX Captured Science Industry-Funded Research Industry-Funded Research – Part II The Corporate Situation of Universities The Greasy Situation of University Research The Deeply Captured Situation of Spilling Oil Tushnet on Teles and The Situation of Ideas – Abstract The Situation of Policy Research and Policy Outcomes The Situation of Medical Research The company ‘had no control or influence over the research’ . . . . The Situation of University Research The Situation of How We Became Fat – Part 3 The Situation of How We Became Fat – Part 2 The Situation of How We Became Fat – Part 1 Michael Pollan on the Political Situation of Food Marion Nestle on The Situation of Our Food Dr. David Kessler Waxes SituationistThe Situation of our Food – Part I Larry Lessig’s Situationism A Convenient Fiction The Situation of Swift-Boating The company “had no control or influence over the research” The Century of Dispositionism – Part I, P

Friends' kid, 2nd grade assignment, questions and his answers.* Q: What does your father do? A: nothing Q: What does your mother do? A: nothing really * Parents occupations are linked.

A key–perhaps the key–to a happy life is self-knowledge, because as the Fifth Splendid Truth holds, I can build a happy life only on the foundation of my own nature. In my own case, I’ve found that the more my life reflects my real interests, values, and temperament, the happier I become. But it’s very hard to know ourselves. It’s easy to be distracted by the way we wish we were, or think we ought to be, or what others think we should be, until we lose sight of what is actually true. There’s a certain sadness to self-knowledge. As Christopher Alexander observed: It is hard, so terribly hard, to please yourself. Far from being the easy thing that it sounds like, it is almost the hardest thing in the world, because we are not always comfortable with that true self that lies deep within us. Here is a list of questions meant to help you think about yourself, your daily habits, your nature, and your interests. There are no right or wrong answers; they’re fodder for reflection. If something is forbidden, do you want it less or more? Is there an area of your life where you feel out of control? Especially in control? If you unexpectedly had a completely free afternoon, what would you do with that time? Are you comfortable or uncomfortable in a disorderly environment? How much time do you spend looking for things you can’t find? Are you motivated by competition? Fill in the blank: “I really wish I could make consistent progress on my project to _______.” Do you find it easier to do things for other people than to do things for yourself? Whom do you envy? Why? What do you lie about? For instance, a friend told me he’d been telling people that he walked to work, when in fact he almost never does. What did you do for fun when you were ten years old? Do you still do that activity–or would you like to do it? Do you work constantly? or think you should be working? Do you embrace rules or flout rules? Do you keep New Year’s resolutions? Do you work well under pressure? Deadlines? What would your perfect day look like? How much TV do you watch in a week (and yes, this includes computer time spent watching videos, movies, YouTube)? Are you a morning person or a night person? What’s more satisfying to you: saving time or saving money? Do you like to be in the spotlight? Is your life “on hold” in any aspect? Until you finish your thesis, get married, lose weight, move? What would you do if you had more energy? If you suddenly had an extra room in your house, what would you do with it? What people and activities energize you? Make you feel depleted? For instance, as an under-buyer, I very much dislike shopping. Is it hard for you to get rid of things that you no longer need or want? On a typical night, what time do you go to bed? How many hours of sleep do you get? If at the end of the year, you had accomplished one thing, what is the one accomplishment that would make the biggest difference to your happiness? Is there an activity that you love to do–yet somehow never seem actually to do it? The process of answering these questions is meant to help spur ideas for possible change. I often find that once I start paying attention to an area of my life, it becomes natural and easy to make helpful alterations in my everyday habits. Here’s a final question for you: What questions would you add to this list, to help other people know themselves better? It’s so important, and so elusive.

While this study found that some interpersonal problems may be connected to binge eating, it also helped show that dialectical behavior therapy can be beneficial for both issues....

A tantrum is a strong emotional display, usually in response to anger, sadness, or frustration. While anyone can have a tantrum, the term is most often applied to the behavior of <a href="http://www.goodtherapy.org/therapy-children-teens.html" target="_blank">children</a>. &nbsp; What is a Tantrum? A tantrum is a strong and sudden emotional outburst. Children having tantrums may scream, flail their bodies, cry, or become incoherent, often while throwing themselves on the floor. Adults might break things, yell, insult the people they love, cry, or make unreasonable demands of the people ...