Water Resources Planning and Social Goals: Conceptualization Toward a New Methodology

A modeling concept relating water resource use t

Goal Priming in Dieters: Recent Insights and Applications

What are the psychological mechanisms that make dieting so challenging in our food-rich living environment? Social psychological research on goal priming provides a useful framework for answering this question, as well as implications for how to enhance dieting success. This review presents and discusses recent research which shows that attractive food cues prime the hedonic eating goal in dieters, and thus facilitate overeating. However, external cues priming the goal of weight control can be used to offset these effects and thus to facilitate dieting success, as is demonstrated in both field and laboratory experiments. In addition, recent strategies to prevent hedonic effects of attractive food, such as mindful attention, can facilitate self-regulation. These recent advances in our understanding of dieting behavior have theoretical and practical implications for how successful dieting can be facilitated, both by means of individual strategies, as well as by environmental changes

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

Changing deep-rooted implicit evaluation in the blink of an eye: negative verbal information shifts automatic liking of Gandhi

It is often assumed that, once established, spontaneous or implicit evaluations are resistant to immediate change. Recent research contradicts this theoretical stance, showing that a person’s implicit evaluations of an attitude object can be changed rapidly in the face of new counter-attitudinal information. Importantly, it remains unknown whether such changes can also occur for deep-rooted implicit evaluations of well-known attitude objects. We address this question by examining whether the acquisition of negative information changes implicit evaluations of a well-known positive historic figure: Mahatma Gandhi. We report three experiments showing rapid changes in implicit evaluations of Gandhi as measured with an Affect Misattribution Procedure and Evaluative Priming Task but not with an Implicit Association Test (IAT). These findings suggest that implicit evaluations based on deep-rooted representations are subjective to rapid changes in the face of expectancy-violating information, while pointing to limitations of the IAT for assessing such changes

Optimal Utilization of Playa Lake Water in Irrigation

From the Proceedings of the 1971 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - April 22-23, 1971, Tempe, ArizonaPlaya lakes usually occur in arid or semiarid regions where lands are flat and there is an absence of well-developed surface drainage nets. They are usually filled by surface runoff from highly erratic precipitation patterns. There are about 20,000 of them in the high plains of Texas and their volume of storage is an estimated 2.5-3 maf. As such, they represent a major underutilized water source. The major drawbacks to their utilization are high evaporation losses, questionable depth-area relations and the stochastic nature of the rainfall source. This paper assumes that the water is available and presents a dynamic programming model useful in determining the optimal utilization of the water for irrigation. If irrigation is the major use, its timing of application is of paramount importance. A deterministic dynamic programming model, utilizing the state variables of antecedent soil moisture and amount of available water, is presented, and provides the time and amount of irrigation required to maximize crop response. A better stochastic model is also presented which considers rainfall probability and resulting lake filling. The models are only first attempts and do not incorporate all possible variables.This article is part of the Hydrology and Water Resources in Arizona and the Southwest collections. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science and the University of Arizona Libraries. For more information about items in this collection, contact [email protected]

Conditional Streamflow Probabilities

From the Proceedings of the 1971 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - April 22-23, 1971, Tempe, ArizonaStreamflows of monthly or shorter time periods, are, in most parts of the world, conditionally dependent. In studies of planning, commitment and operation decisions concerning reservoirs, it is probably most computationally efficient to use simulation routines for decisions of low dimensions, as planning and commitment, and optimization routines for the highly dimensional operation rule decisions. This presents the major problem of combining the 2 routines, since streamflow dependencies in simulation routines are continuous while the direct stochastic optimization routines are discrete. A stochastic streamflow synthesis routine is described consisting of 2 parts: streamflow probability distribution and dependency analysis and a streamflow generation using the relationships developed. A discrete dependency matrix between streamflow amounts was then sought. Setting as the limits of interest the class 400-500 thousand acre ft in January and 500-600 thousand acre ft in February, and using the transforms specified, the appropriate normal deviates were determined. The next serious problem was calculating the conditional dependency based on the bivariate normal distribution. In order to calculate the joint probability exactly, double integrations would be required and these use too much computer time. For the problem addressed, therefore, the use of 1-dimensional conditional probabilities based on the flow interval midpoint is an adequate and effective procedure.This article is part of the Hydrology and Water Resources in Arizona and the Southwest collections. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science and the University of Arizona Libraries. For more information about items in this collection, contact [email protected]