The present study aimed to examine body image attitude in Chinese college students and related psychological consequences. A silhouette-matching test was administered to 425 college students in mainland China. Self-esteem, negative emotions, subjective well-being, and eating-disorder-related weight-controlling behaviors were also measured. Only 12.9% of the participants were satisfied with their figure and the extent of body image dissatisfaction was comparable for both sexes. The majority of the female participants indicated a preference to be more slender. Their ideal figure was underweight and was far smaller than the most attractive female figure chosen by male participants. For male participants, the proportion wanting a fuller figure was comparable to that wanting a slimmer figure. Among female participants, body image dissatisfaction negatively correlated with self-esteem and subjective well-being, and positively correlated with negative emotions. Drive for thinness correlated with eating-disorder-related weight-controlling behaviors not only for females, but also for males. Body image dissatisfaction, as a diagnostic feature for major subtypes of eating disorders, may signal serious concern among Chinese college students.

BackgroundTheoretically semantic processing can be separated into early automatic semantic activation and late contextualization. Semantic processing deficits have been suggested in patients with schizophrenia, however it is not clear which stage of semantic processing is impaired. We attempted to clarify this issue by conducting a meta-analysis of the N400 component.MethodsTwenty-one studies met the inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis procedure. The Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software package was used to compute pooled effect sizes and homogeneity.ResultsStudies favoring early automatic activation produced a significant effect size of −0.41 for the N400 effect. Studies favoring late contextualization generated a significant effect size of −0.36 for the N400 effect, a significant effect size of −0.52 for N400 for congruent/related target words, and a significant effect size of 0.82 for the N400 peak latency.ConclusionThese findings suggest the automatic spreading activation process in patients with schizophrenia is very similar for closely related concepts and weakly or remotely related concepts, while late contextualization may be associated with impairments in processing semantically congruent context accompanied by slow processing speed.

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Clinical observations and research suggest a female preponderance in major depressive disorder. However, it is unclear whether a similar gender difference is found for the reporting of depressive symptoms in non-clinical populations. The present meta-analysis was conducted to address this issue. We searched for published papers targeting non-clinical populations in which the 21-item Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used. Eighty-four papers (91 studies) published between 1977 and 2014 were included in the final meta-analysis, which comprised 23,579 males and 29,470 females. Females in the general population reported higher level of depressive symptoms than males (d = -0.187, corresponding to 1.159 points in the 21-item BDI). This pattern was not found to influence by years of publication, socioeconomic status, or version of the BDI used. Using age group as a moderator, studies with adolescents and young adults were found to show a smaller effect size than studies with older participants. Our results appear to confirm the “female preponderance” in the level of self-report depressive symptoms in the general population, and support the social gender role theory in explaining gender difference over biological susceptibility theory and evolutionary theory.