The development of a body comparison measure: the CoSS

Purpose This study reports on the development and validation of a brief and widely applicable measure of body comparison (the Comparison of Self-Scale—CoSS), which is a maintaining feature of eating disorders. Methods A sample of 412 adults completed the CoSS, an existing measure of aspects of body comparison, and eating pathology and associated states. Test–retest reliability was examined over 2 weeks. Results Exploratory factor analysis showed that 22 CoSS items loaded onto two factors, resulting in two scales—Appearance Comparison and Social Comparison—with strong internal consistency and test–retest reliability. Conclusions In clinical terms, the CoSS was superior to the existing measure of body comparison in accounting for depression and anxiety. Given that it is a relatively brief measure, the CoSS could be useful in the routine assessment of body comparison, and in formulating and treating individuals with body image concerns. However, the measure awaits full clinical validation

Judging the difference between attractiveness and health: does exposure to model images influence the judgments made by men and women?

Recent research has shown facial adiposity (apparent weight in the face) to be a significant predictor of both attractiveness and health, thus making it an important determinant of mate selection. Studies looking at the relationship between attractiveness and health have shown that individuals differentiate between the two by preferring a lower weight for attractiveness than for health in female faces. However, these studies have either been correlational studies, or have investigated weight perceived from only the face. These differences have been discussed with regard to sociocultural factors such as pressure from parents, peers and also media, which has been seen to have the highest influence. While exposure to media images has been shown to influence women’s own body image, no study has yet directly tested the influence of these factors on people’s preferred weight in other women’s bodies. Here we examine how a short exposure to images of models influences men’s and women’s judgments of the most healthy looking and attractive BMI in Malaysian Chinese women’s bodies by comparing differences in preferences (for attractiveness and health) between groups exposed to images of models of varying attractiveness and body weight. Results indicated that participants preferred a lower weight for attractiveness than for health. Further, women’s but not men’s preferred BMI for attractiveness, but not health, was influenced by the type of media images to which they were exposed, suggesting that short term exposure to model images affect women’s perceptions of attractiveness but not health

Distinct contributions of extrastriate body area and temporoparietal junction in perceiving one's own and others' body.

The right temporoparietal cortex plays a critical role in body representation. Here, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over right extrastriate body area (EBA) and temporoparietal junction (TPJ) to investigate their causative roles in perceptual representations of one's own and others' body. Healthy women adjusted size-distorted pictures of their own body or of the body of another person according to how they perceived the body (subjective task) or how others perceived it (intersubjective task). In keeping with previous reports, at baseline, we found an overall underestimation of body size. Crucially, EBA-rTMS increased the underestimation bias when participants adjusted the images according to how others perceived their own or the other woman's body, suggesting a specific role of EBA in allocentric body representations. Conversely, TPJ-rTMS increased the underestimation bias when participants adjusted the body of another person, either a familiar other or a close friend, in both subjective and intersubjective tasks, suggesting an involvement of TPJ in representing others' bodies. These effects were body-specific, since no TMS-induced modulation was observed when participants judged a familiar object. The results suggest that right EBA and TPJ play active and complementary roles in the complex interaction between the perceptions of one's own and other people's body

Automatic evaluation of body-related words among young women: an experimental study

Background: Sociocultural models of body image disturbance have linked the development of body dissatisfaction and eating disorders to exposure to media messages depicting the unrealistically slender female physique. Previous research has demonstrated that exposure to images depicting the thin female ideal has negative effects on some females’ levels of body dissatisfaction. Much of this research, however, has utilised relatively long stimulus exposure times; thereby focusing on effortful and conscious processing of body-related stimuli. Relatively little is known about the nature of females’ affective responses to the textual components of body-related stimuli, especially when these stimuli are only briefly encountered. The primary aim of the current research was to determine whether young women automatically evaluate body-related words and whether these responses are associated with body image concerns, including self-reported levels of appearance schematicity, thin internalisation, body dissatisfaction, and dietary restraint. Methods: An affective priming task was used to investigate whether females automatically evaluate body-related words, and whether this is associated with self-reported body image concerns. In a within-participants experimental design, the valence congruence of the prime and target pairs was manipulated. Participants selected body words as primes in Experiment 1 (N = 27), while normatively selected body words were primes in Experiment 2 (N = 50). Each prime was presented briefly, followed by a target word which participants judged as “good” or “bad”. The dependent variable was response latency to the target. Results: Automatic evaluation was evident: responding to congruent pairs was faster than responding to incongruent pairs. Body image concerns were unrelated to automaticity. Conclusions: The findings suggest that brief encounters with body words are likely to prompt automatic evaluation in all young women, and that this process proceeds unintentionally and efficiently, without conscious guidance. The potential implications for higher order, conscious information processing is discussed

Italy - Mascalucia ZEB

This book of case studies is based on the work of IEA-EBC Annex 62 “Ventilative Cooling” and the research findings of the participating countries. The publication is an official Annex report. Beside this guide the Annex has produced the following official reports: � Ventilative Cooling Design Guide � Ventilative Cooling Source Book � Ventilative Cooling Recommendations for Standards and Legislation � Ventilative Cooling Summary Report All reports can be found on the website of IEA-EBC, www.iea-ebc.org This book is aimed for both architects and engineers to support the design of ventilative cooling systems. It is the hope, that it will be helpful for both architects, engineers and professional building owners in their search for innovative and energy-efficient ventilative cooling solutions

Empirical and comparative validation of an original model to simulate the thermal behaviour of outdoor test cells

Calorimetric methods for the performance assessment (e.g. for the determination of the solar factor) of transparent building components have been largely applied in indoor laboratories under steady-state conditions and in outdoor test cells under dynamic boundary conditions provided by real weather. In the latter case the accuracy of the measurements depends significantly on the temporary storage of energy in the test cell envelope. An analysis by Pagliano et al. (2017) developed a dedicated lumped thermal model in Matlab environment in order to improve the design of calorimeters for the measurement of the solar factor by minimizing the energy storage effects in the envelope of the calorimeter and estimating precisely their entity. The developed model was based on literature studies on buildings’ dynamic energy simulations and adopted some common hypotheses used by existing building energy simulation software tools. However, when modelling light-mass and highly insulated buildings, such as test cell facilities, small variations in the power inputs can generate significant variations of the internal temperatures, challenging for the model to follow accurately. In order to verify the accuracy of the developed model in predicting the thermal behaviour of an outdoor test cell, an extensive validation work has been carried out. In particular, this paper summarises (i) an experimental validation carried out using a data set from the BESTLab facility, located at the research centre Électricité de France R&D Les Renardières (FR) and (ii) an intermodel comparison between the code developed in the Matlab environment and TRNSYS, a well-established building energy simulation tool. Concerning the validation at the BESTLab, the results show that the model is able to predict the temperature evolution of the internal air and of the internal surfaces of the envelope with good accuracy, with residuals lying within a range of ± 1 °C; reasons for discrepancies between measurements and predictions are discussed in the paper. As regards the intermodel comparison, the correspondence between the two software tools is generally good, with residuals lying most of the time within a range of ± 0.5 °C. The residuals are lower for the intermodel comparison, partly because input values are in this case not affected by uncertainty. Although TRNSYS and the developed Matlab code adopt some similar assumptions and simplifications, they also present some modelling differences that are highlighted in the paper. © 2017 Elsevier B.V

Électrodes modifiées par oxydation du carbazole et des carbazoles N-substitués en milieu acide

Des polymères conducteurs sont déposés sur Au, C et Pt par oxydation anodique du carbazole et de certains de ses dérivés N-substitués, conduite en solution hydroalcoolique de HClO4. Deux processus redox principaux sont mis en évidence par voltamétrie cyclique, dont le moins anodique est complètement réversible. Les résultats des analyses élémentaires, IR et RPE, sont donnés

Use of the bending-beam-method for the study of the anodic oxidation of Si in dilute fluoride media

The chemical dissolution of anodically grown Si oxides in acidic fluoride medium has been studied in-situ with the Bending Beam Method (BBM). Current and deflection transients were recorded after switching the electrode from the given polarisation conditions to zero applied field and monitoring the etchback process. Oxide stress values estimated with this approach are free from contributions due to film electrostriction and to changes in surface tension. Transients recorded after polarisation in the regime of current or potential oscillations show dissolution patterns which contain information on the properties of oxide film along its depth profile. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved