Category: Learning & Education

Psychological discomfort discourages eating disorders

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 1, 2008

Popular culture’s image of the 21st-century woman is tall, large-breasted, narrow-hipped and ultra-slender. Like cultural standards of beauty throughout history, today’s “thin ideal” is unattainable for most women; for many, it also can be destructive.

Katherine Presnell, assistant professor of psychology, is helping at-risk teens challenge this ideal with the Body Project, an eating disorder prevention program that she helped develop with psychology professor Eric Stice at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her doctorate in 2005.

Since Stice conducted the first trial in 1998, more than 1,000 high school and college women, including 62 SMU students, have completed the program, including a research trial led by SMU Ph.D. students.

Independent studies conducted at universities nationwide and a recent analysis have shown that the Body Project significantly outperforms other interventions in promoting body acceptance, discouraging unhealthy dieting, reducing the risk of obesity and preventing eating disorders. And these results have persisted for three years.

Prevention is critical because about 10 percent of late-adolescent and adult female Americans experience eating disorder symptoms.

Katherine Presnell

Less than a third seek treatment, and less than half of those experience lasting results, says Presnell, director of SMU’s Weight and Eating Disorders Research Program in the Department of Psychology in SMU’s Dedman College.

While traditional interventions focus on education about anorexia, bulimia and binge eating, the Body Project is based on cognitive dissonance, which is the 1957 theory that inconsistent beliefs and behaviors create a psychological discomfort that motivates individuals to change their beliefs or behaviors.

While working with a patient who had anorexia during his postdoctoral studies at Stanford University, UT’s Stice says he asked her “to talk me out of being anorexic, and it was a very powerful exercise. Arguing against her own arguments caused her to rethink her perspective on her illness.”

Pictured right: Eric Stice

Body Project participants, recruited through fliers and mailings, argue and act against the thin ideal during four small-group sessions with a trained leader. They write letters to hypothetical girls about its emotional and physical costs, and challenge negative “fat talk” while affirming strong, healthy bodies.

“Many girls don’t question the messages we get from the media, the fashion industry, our peers and parents that it’s important to achieve the thin ideal at any cost,” Presnell says. “We have the girls critically evaluate the ideal, and that creates the dissonance they work to resolve.”

The Body Project includes a four-session weight management intervention that helps participants make small lifestyle changes to gain control over eating, such as scheduling time for daily exercise and a nutritious breakfast, and rewarding themselves with a book or bath rather than food.

“These little tweaks help participants maintain a healthy body weight and ward off unhealthy behaviors such as extreme dieting, fasting and self-induced vomiting to lose weight,” Presnell says. — Sarah Hanan

Tags Dedman College, Eric Stice, Katherine Presnell, SMU Department of Psychology

Culture, Society & Family Learning & Education Student researchers

Gender gap at top U.S. universities for women scientists

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 10, 2008

According to the National Research Council in 2006, women earned 44.7 percent of the doctorates awarded in the biological sciences between 1993 and 2004. Yet women comprised only 30.2 percent of the assistant professors at the top 50 U.S. universities.

In physics, the gap is far wider. Anne Lincoln, assistant professor of sociology in SMU’s Dedman College, is researching the reasons for the gender disparities.

In September Lincoln received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s Research on Gender in Science and Engineering program.

Lincoln will examine women’s and men’s reasons for pursuing academic science careers as well as their perceptions about women’s contributions to academic science.

Lincoln and a team of four sociology undergraduate students are nearing the completion of the sampling database. They have been preparing a list of all faculty and graduates students at top-20 biology and physics graduate departments in the United States. From that they will randomly select 2,500 to participate in an Internet-based survey.

A subsample of about 150 respondents will later be selected for more in-depth interviews, which will take place in 2009.

“In 2010, we will be wrapping up the study and mostly running analyses on the data,” she says.

Lincoln’s co-investigator is Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University.

In addition to expanding recent scholarly findings related to the role perceptions have in the decision to pursue a career in academic science, Lincoln’s research is expected to provide the “necessary research underpinnings to build university policies and practices that encourage women’s interest in science majors and careers.”

Tags Anne Lincoln, Dedman College, SMU Department of Sociology

Culture, Society & Family Learning & Education Mind & Brain Technology

Extreme reality: Women avoid sexual assault in virtual zone

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 30, 2008

SMU’s Department of Psychology and The Guildhall at SMU have joined forces against dating violence.

Psychology Professors Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald, with Guildhall Lecturer Jeff Perryman and Deputy Director Tony Cuevas, are collaborating on a role-playing program that combines virtual reality with behavioral insight to help teach and test sexual assault avoidance techniques.

The program’s environment of a rain-lashed car parked in an isolated area immerses women into not just a location, but also a “conversation” with a potential attacker.

It is the first step in what developers hope will be a program to help women practice strategies for averting sexual assault in a controlled situation that is safe, yet feels realistic.

“This is a potential breakthrough opportunity for gaming technology to help solve an important social problem,” Jouriles says.

During one session, the experience starts in a small, nondescript office where two automobile seats are bolted to a raised platform: An actor sits in the driver’s seat, and a woman sits in the passenger seat to his right. When she puts on video goggles and a headset, she suddenly finds herself in a parked car during a howling rainstorm. Rivulets of water stream down the windshield, flashes of lightning illuminate the interior of the car, and thunder beats a steady cadence.

She doesn’t see the actor beside her, she sees a three-dimensional video game character at the wheel of the car. She is drawn into small talk, but the driver turns increasingly aggressive, eventually demanding sexual intimacy. It is nothing short of frightening and, oddly enough, very real.

Role-playing is a well-established method for teaching people to deal with complex social situations, says Jouriles, professor and chair of psychology in Dedman College. But he hit a wall in his research when he tried the method to teach relationship violence avoidance techniques to a high school health class in the late 1990s.

“The role-playing produced giggles,” Jouriles says. “And from my perspective, it didn’t capture the imaginaton of the students.”

SMU psychologists Ernest Jouriles and Renee McDonald.

Jouriles and McDonald, associate professor of psychology in Dedman College, joined the SMU faculty in August 2003, when a handful of psychologists around the country were beginning to experiment with virtual programs to treat anxiety disorders, such as allowing people who were afraid of flying to “practice” without boarding an airplane.

They wondered whether SMU’s newly opened Guildhall could help teach and test sexual assault avoidance techniques by immersing a woman into not just a virtual location, but also a “conversation” with a potential attacker.

“We created an enclosed environment,” says Perryman, Guildhall lecturer, who worked on the program with Guildhall’s Cuevas.

“We wanted our participant to feel powerless. The rain was added to isolate her. The car is particularly creepy. We worked hard at that,” says Perryman.

The simulation requires participants to wear a head-mounted video display with tracking technology that senses head movements and an audio headset, which transmits the voice of the avatar “driver” and other sounds from the virtual environment. The avatar’s lips move in sync with the voice of the actor, who controls the character’s facial expressions and movements through a video keyboard. The virtual driver can be made to nod, shrug, even pound the steering wheel in anger when he is rebuffed.

Jouriles, McDonald and their team studied the responses of 62 undergraduate women who were randomly assigned to traditional or virtual reality role-play and outfitted with heart monitors. All were asked to complete questionnaires afterward on their moods and experience.

The women who donned the headgear and went through the virtual scenario rated the experience’s realism higher than those in the traditional role play group. Behavioral observations also suggested that women experiencing the virtual car scene appeared more angry and afraid.

Jouriles calls those results “very promising.” The next step, he says, is to develop a virtual scenario that can test techniques to avert sexual assault. He hopes to see some variation on the virtual program developed for use in high schools and colleges. — Kim Cobb

Tags Dedman College, Ernest Jouriles, Jeff Perryman, Renee McDonald, SMU Department of Psychology, The Guildhall, Tony Cuevas

Health & Medicine Learning & Education Mind & Brain Researcher news

Who and why? Déjà vu gets a second look

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 1, 2005

It is a discussion that seems familiar. But new findings show that people who travel frequently are more likely to experience déjà vu. Political liberals report more déjà vu experiences than conservatives do. And déjà vu becomes less common as people grow older.

Most of us have experienced déjà vu, which means “already seen” in French, yet few scientists have studied it. Understanding its causes, however, promises to explain other mysteries of the brain, says Alan Brown, professor in the SMU Department of Psychology in Dedman College and a leading researcher on memory.

“The community of research psychologists is largely silent on the topic, but findings from such research could expand our understanding of routine memory functions,” Brown says.

Many explanations for the déjà vu experience have been connected to the supernatural, he says. In a new book, “The Déjà Vu Experience: Essays in Cognitive Psychology” (2004, Psychology Press), Brown surveys scientific research as well as popular notions of déjà vu from the early 19th century.

From the scientific studies, Brown has identified common facts about déjà vu. A majority of people experience déjà vu, some two-thirds of the population. The frequency of déjà vu decreases with age and is most common among people ages 15 to 25. People with higher incomes and more education have more déjà vu experiences. Déjà Vu appears to be associated with stress and fatigue. Those who travel have more déjà vu experiences. For some, déjà vu experiences appear to repeat prior dreams.

Although there are no definitive answers for what causes déjà vu, Brown offers four scientifically plausible possibilities: two cognitive processes become momentarily out of phase; a brief dysfunction in the brain, such as a seizure, or disruption in the speed of normal neuronal transmission; a memory that we forgot connects with part of the present experience; and an initial perception under distracted conditions is quickly followed by a second perception of the same thing under full attention.

Déjà vu research presents a unique challenge for Brown.

“There is a thrill of examining something that seems to be on the fringes, then pulling it into the scientific realm,” he says.

Brown, who joined the Psychology Department in 1974, is the author of four books, including “Maximizing Memory Power: Using Recall in Business” (1986, John Wiley & Sons).

Tags Alan S. Brown, Dedman College, SMU Department of Psychology