Eating Regulation Styles, Appearance Schemas, and Body Satisfaction Predict Changes in Body Fat for Emerging Adults

Obesity and high body fat percentages are a major public health issue. The percentage of obese and overweight Americans has increased over the past 30 years. On average, overweight individuals with higher percent body fat than normal weight individuals are at increased risk for numerous negative outcomes both physically and mentally. A prime time to investigate changes in body composition and associated psychological influences on decision making is during the emerging adulthood period. The first few years of college are a time when adolescents begin to regulate for themselves their own eating behaviors. Previous research shows that freshmen gain weight and increase in percent body fat during their first year of college. The current study addresses the limitations of previous research by investigating (1) individual growth in percent body fat over a longer period of time in college than previous available research and (2) important psychological and sex differences in this growth. This study measures percent body fat across the first 3 years of college at 8 time points for 542 undergraduates (351 females, 65 %; 191 males, 35 %). Longitudinal data analysis was conducted to identify changes in percent body fat, psychological predictors of those changes, and how changes differ for males and females. Our study found that significant increases exist in percent body fat during undergraduates' college years and that change differs for males and females. In addition, through the use of nested hierarchical models, eating regulation style (autonomous or controlled regulation), appearance schema (self-evaluative salience or motivational salience), and body satisfaction were identified as influential predictors of change in percent body fat. For example, young females, who do not feel in control of their physical appearance yet spend a great deal of time maintaining their appearance, have the highest initial body fat percentage and the steepest increase in percent body fat. Overall, males and females with high autonomous regulation and high motivational salience are likely to maintain (instead of increase) percent body fat over the college years. Knowing the influence of these predictors can be useful for promoting health and intervening with young adults in the college setting and other emerging adults who are not enrolled in postsecondary institutions.     

Achieving Effective Collaborations to Help Communities Age Well

Effective policy responses to the ageing of the population are a priority area for government and non‐government agencies across Australia, particularly at the community level. This article focuses on the policy goal of ageing well at the local level, and more specifically, the strong principle of collaboration that underpins this goal. Too little is known about how to achieve effective collaboration in the ageing field. This article aims to address this by developing an analytical framework from the broad literature on collaborative processes, and applying this framework to data collected from interviews with stakeholders in ageing across two local communities in Queensland. While participants recognise the importance and strength of working together and provide local examples of how this has been achieved effectively, they also acknowledge the associated challenges and complexity. This all spanned the six factors of the framework: the context of ageing; the characteristics and relationships between partners; the need for adequate procedures; as well as structure and relationships aimed at building capacity; a shared sense of purpose; and access to adequate resources.     

Size and e-Democracy: Online Participation in Norwegian Local Politics

This study of municipal e-participation in Norway, comprising local politicians as well as citizens, explores the impact of municipal size on online participation. First, the analyses show that the conventional predictors of offline participation also influence online participation, but the Internet encourages more activity among young people. Second, the same digital divides are generally found within the local political elite as among the citizens. Municipal size is, however, an exception. In the case of the local politicians, higher online participation rates are found in populous municipalities. This territorial digital divide is absent among the citizens. The findings indicate that the relatively high level of traditional participation in small municipalities also promote e-participation.     

Strategic Spending: Does Politics Influence Election Administration Expenditure?

Recently, election administration has been an important part of the national and global conversation about the results of elections. The important issue of election administration spending has not been examined extensively, and the influence of politics on election administration spending levels has not been examined in the United States. While theories of voter turnout and policy preference suggest that politics should influence election administration spending levels in the counties that administer elections, to our knowledge, there has been no evidence produced to support a partisan election administration expenditure effect. This research finds that Republican county commissions in North Carolina spend significantly less on election administration once the county electorate is a sufficient Republican majority. The article presents a novel model and method for estimating election administration spending and calls for additional research to examine the outcomes of these significant differences in spending on election administration.     

Youth organizations as a Battlefield in the Cold War

In the late 1960s it was revealed that ever since 1952 the CIA had financed and was still financing, by way of a whole series of ‘screen’ foundations, the overwhelming majority of youth and student organizations, not only in the United States, but throughout the free world. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as respectable as the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), Pax Romana and the World Assembly of Youth (WAY) had benefited, at various times in their history, from the generosity and ‘liberalism’ of the CIA. The key to understanding this paradoxical American involvement in leftist organizations lies in the Soviet Union's policy of systematically infiltrating Western civil society and international organizations. Its constant aim, relentlessly pursued and never openly avowed, was to control Western opinion and further the goals of Soviet foreign policy. By 1950 the communists had succeeded in effectively controlling all the international mass organizations. This study deals with the crucial Berlin Youth Festival of 1951 and the East-West struggle for dominance in the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the International Union of Students (IUS).     

The spectre of Haiti: structural antiblackness,the far-right backlash and the fear of a black majority in Brazil

Abstract

This article situates the far-right backlash in Brazil within the larger Latin American context, including its colonial legacy, leftist governments’ failure to deliver promises of inclusion, and the US–China geopolitical dispute over the region’s strategic natural resources. By situating Bolsonaro’s electoral victory within these dynamics, our analysis presents an alternative to two common perspectives. First, studies of the region’s political moment and of Brazilian society in particular do not pay enough attention to institutional and everyday racism, and instead focus mostly on comparative analysis of governmental policies and social class dynamics. Second, critical perspectives that take into account racial inequalities are often not attuned to structural dynamics of gendered antiblackness, and instead present racism as a broad set of practices that negatively affect non-white people in related manners. Our context-specific analysis of the electoral reemergence of the far right in Brazil aims at contributing to an understanding of persistent dynamics of racial inequality within the region as part of a long, enduring and foundational odium of Black people.     

Population data for Y-chromosome haplotypes defined by 17 STRs (AmpFlSTR YFiler) in Portugal

The 17 Y-chromosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) included in the AmpFlSTR YFiler Amplification Kit (AB Applied Biosystems) (DYS19, DYS389I, DYS389II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393, DYS385, DYS437, DYS438, DYS439, DYS448, DYS456, DYS458, DYS635 and GATA H4.1) were typed in 250 samples from Portugal. A total of 231 different haplotypes were found, where 17 haplotypes were shared by two individuals and one haplotype by three. The overall haplotype diversity (HD) was 0.9994. DYS458 non-consensus alleles found in 5 samples (out of 85) are all associated with paragroup J*(xJ1,2). Population comparisons with available Yfiler loci data in European samples were undertaken, namely with Northern Portuguese data (N=174) where no significant differences were observed with our sample (Rst=0.0000; P=0.8649+/-0.0310). Since both Portuguese databases can be joined (N=424; HD=0.9997; 394 distinct haplotypes), a study on the best loci for HD increment in this sample was also undertaken: by fixing the haplotypes generated from the minimal haplotype and SWGDAM core set (www.yhrd.org) and adding the other Yfiler loci one by one, the order in which the loci contribute more is DYS458, DYS456, GATA H4.1, DYS437 or DYS635, and finally DYS448. Therefore, at least in this population sample, all Yfiler loci are contributing for haplotype discrimination.     

Compassionate Killings: The Case for a Partial Defence

The focus of this article is upon compassionate killings, that is, criminal cases where a parent/spouse has killed or assisted to die a child/spouse who was suffering from severe disabilities, debilitating injury, chronic or terminal illness. We argue that the partial defence of diminished responsibility, while appropriate for some cases, fails to acknowledge the compassionate and relational nature of these acts and thus fails to identify the quality of the harm committed. We also argue that the general defences of duress of circumstances and necessity, even if they were to be become available, are inappropriate. Developing the concept of ‘compassion’, which is a consideration in relation to prosecution for assisted suicide, we argue for the introduction of a partial defence of ‘compassionate killing’ which would reduce the offence from murder to manslaughter in recognition of the killing as a responsive, relational act of care.