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This study examined the relationship between body image and sexual avoidance. Of particular interest was whether this relationship was mediated by other variables. Participants were 362 undergraduate students who responded to a battery of questionnaires pertaining to three aspects of body image, sexually avoidant behavior, and three mediator variables, which included sexual esteem, sexual satisfaction, and sexual desire. Consistent with previous studies, a relationship between body image and sexual avoidance was found, indicating that those with a more negative body image displayed a greater tendency to avoid sexual activity. Furthermore, sexual esteem, sexual satisfaction, and sexual desire appeared to mediate this relationship. Implications of these results suggest that these mediator variables are important in the relationship between body image and sexual avoidance, and may be useful targets for those seeking treatment for sexual avoidance issues. Limitations of the study and avenues for future research are discussed.

Childhood maltreatment has been shown to have a stronger etiological relation to depression onset in adolescence than in adulthood. We propose that a maltreatment history may more strongly sensitize individuals to the depressogenic effects of proximal stressful life events in adolescence compared to adulthood. In an amalgamated sample of 176 unipolar depressed adolescents (age 12–17) and emerging adults (age 18–29), we examined the moderating role of age group on the relation of childhood maltreatment to sensitization to stressors that occurred just prior to episode onset. Among adolescents, but not among adults, those with a maltreatment history reported a lower severity level of life events prior to episode onset than reported by those without such a history. Further, this relation was specific to emotional abuse, and not physical or sexual abuse. We suggest that the pathological mechanisms associated with translating childhood maltreatment to depression may differ across developmental periods.

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The present work examined the relationship between sequential object recognition and variations in normal reading ability. A group of normal readers completed a battery of tests examining nonverbal intelligence, rapid-automatized naming, reading ability, and an attentional blink (AB) task in which they were asked to identify two sequential targets embedded amongst distractors. Consistent with previous studies, all participants showed a significant AB, with second-target identification improving as inter-target interval increased. More critically, low-normal readers showed a larger AB than high-normal readers. Considered in context with earlier work, these results imply that the ability to allocate capacity-limited processing resources to sequential visual inputs is linked to reading proficiency across the range of both disabled and normal readers.

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