A salient feature of anorexia nervosa (AN) is the persistent and severe restriction of food, such that dietary intake is inadequate to maintain a healthy body weight. Experimental tasks and paradigms have used illness-relevant stimuli, namely food images, to study the eating-specific neurocognitive mechanisms that promote food avoidance. This systematic review, completed in accordance with PRISMA guidelines, identified and critically evaluated paradigms involving images of food that have been used to study AN. There were 50 eligible studies, published before March 10th 2018, identified from Medline and PsychINFO searches, and reference screening. Studies using food image-based paradigms were categorised into three methodologic approaches: neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Paradigms were reviewed with a focus on how well they address phenomena central to AN. Across tasks, differences between individuals with AN and healthy peers have been identified, with the most consistent findings in the area of reward processing. Measuring task performance alongside actual eating behaviour, and using experimental manipulations to probe causality, may advance understanding of the mechanisms of illness in AN.
This paper reviews developments in policy on early childhood education and care – early years – under the Coalition Government in England. Three factors came to define the Coalition's performance and record in this area: ambivalence about the rationales for the two areas
of early education and childcare; a disconnect between early years and other social welfare policy approaches; and the dominant influence on policy of a political belief in market operations as the favoured delivery model for early years services. Successive early years policy documents also
reflected the Coalition's shifting position on young children's rights and interests in relation to early childhood education and care (ECEC).
The US National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (NIMH RDoC) advocates the study of features common to psychiatric conditions. This transdiagnostic approach has recently been adopted into the study of anorexia nervosa (AN), an illness that can be considered compulsive in nature. This has led to the development of an account of AN that identifies key roles for the heightened reinforcement of starvation, leading to its excessive repetition, and goal-directed system dysfunction. Considering models of illness in other compulsive disorders, we extend the existing account to explain the emergence of reinforcement and goal-directed system abnormalities in AN, proposing that anxiety is central to both processes. As such we emphasise the particular importance of the anxiolytic effects of starvation, over other reinforcing outcomes, in encouraging the continuation of starvation within a model that proposes a number of mechanisms by which anxiety operates in the development and maintenance of AN. We suggest the psychopathology of AN mediates the relationship between the anxiolytic effects of starvation and excessive repetition of starvation, and that compulsive starvation has reciprocal effects on its determinants. We thus account for the emergence of symptoms of AN other than compulsive starvation, and for the relationship between different features of the disorder. By extending and adapting an existing explanation of AN, we provide a richer aetiological model that invites new research questions and could inform novel approaches to prevention and treatment.
Public support provided for European early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems varies considerably. European ECEC systems tend to form part of a mixed economy, in which the state, private-for-profit and private-notfor-profit providers all play a role in ECEC's provision, funding and regulation, representing a market model. ECEC privatisation and marketisation in the UK has gone further than in other EU member states and there is growing evidence that these developments, including corporatisation, risk deepening, consolidating or widening inequalities of access to quality early childhood provision. The Norwegian and French systems illustrate how direct public funding and stringent regulation may counter childcare markets' potentially negative impacts. As economic austerity makes its mark on Europe, childcare market challenges are growing and the need to rethink the appropriateness of delivering UK ECEC under market conditions becomes more acute.
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