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High school is a key venue for the development and expression of body image concerns in adolescent girls. Researchers have begun to investigate the role of school-based ‘appearance cultures’ in magnifying the body image concerns of students. To date, however, no research has examined girls’ experience as participants within these cultures, and thus the opportunity to learn how girls account for the development and maintenance of these cultures has been missed. In interviews with nine girls attending an all-girls’ school, the existence of a strong ‘appearance culture’ in the school was identified as a major influence on the body image concerns of students. Girls talked about the ways in which appearance-focused conversations, dieting, and weight monitoring occurred as part of the everyday interaction with friends and peers at school. They also identified many ways in which their school attempted to address body image concerns, although these attempts were often portrayed as ineffective, if not counter-productive. These findings suggest that attempts to address the body image concerns of students will need to be sensitive to the lived reality of appearance cultures within schools.

Peers may influence the body image concerns and disordered eating behaviours of adolescent girls through the creation of appearance cultures within friendship cliques. The present study investigates the role of friendship cliques and school gender composition in impacting upon adolescent girls' body image concern and disordered eating behaviours, using hierarchical linear modelling (HLM), a statistical procedure employed in the analysis of nested data. A sample of 156 girls was drawn from four private schools located in the capital city of Western Australia (one single-sex school and three mixed-sex schools). Eighty students from the single-sex school and 76 female students from the mixed-sex schools, comprising 35 friendship cliques, completed questionnaires assessing body image, disordered eating, and a range of variables that have previously been associated with body image concern and disordered eating, including appearance-based social comparison, frequency of appearancebased conversation, appearance-based criticism, friends' concern with thinness, media influence and media pressure. Hierarchical linear modelling analyses found that friendship cliques in all-girls schools exhibited similar levels of body image concern and dieting behaviours, with various peer and other media influence variables accounting for these similarities. Friendship cliques in mixed-sex schools were not found to be similar with regard to body image concern or disordered eating. These findings support the notion that friendship groups can be an important source of influence on the body image concerns of adolescent girls in single-sex schools, and show that both individual and friendship clique level measures of attitudes and behaviours make independent contributions to the prediction of these body image concerns.

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A method is presented for calibration of a robot to correct position and orientation errors due to manufacturing. The method is based on the shape matrix robot kinematic description. Each joint is individually and successively moved in order to explicitly calculate the shape matrix of each link. In addition, methods to correct for the errors in both the forward and inverse kinematic solutions are presented. The modification of the forward solution is a simple task. The modification of the inverse kinematic solution is a difficult problem and is achieved by an iterative technique which supplements the closed-form solution. An example of the calibration and inverse solution is presented to show the improvement in the accuracy of the robot.

his paper examines the role played by psychology and psychologists in the treatment of infertile people, and T focuses especially on issues where donor gametes or embryos are used. Psychology has argued strongly for a "therapeutic injunction" in which people undergoing treatment are urged to talk to others; are advised that it is better to tell a child of the method of hidher conception and of hidher genetic background; and are advised that it is better for donors, recipients, and children to have access to information about one another and to know one another. We question this for several reasons. First, there are no data to support the claim that full disclosure produces better mental and family health than nondisclosure. Second, donors and recipients overwhelmingly prefer information, especially identifying information, to be kept private and confidential. Third, in making this prescription, psychology is "psychologising" a physical problem, assuming psychological problems must exist in infertile people which must be treated. The paper concludes by suggesting that psychology and psychologists have been attempting to reproduce psychology, perhaps at the expense of developing a better understanding of the psychology of reproduction.The self-proclaimed mission of the Australian Psychological Society is "to represent, promote and advance Psychology and Psychologists, within the context of improving community wellbeing and scientific knowledge" (APS, 1994). In this paper, we argue that the two clauses in this mission statement conflict with one another in the context of psychology's role in the provision of services to people undergoing medical intervention to assist conception, and that this conflict is resolved in this instance in favour of the mission of self-promotion rather than the mission of community wellbeing and scientific knowledge. In making this strong claim, we are not claiming that there is no role for psychology and psychologists in the area of medically assisted reproduction.In this paper we suggest that psychology and other mental health professions have constructed a "therapeutic injunction" which is applied to donors and recipients of sperm, eggs, and embryos, ostensibly to serve the ultimate benefit of the children born through the use of donated material, as well as the donors and recipients themselves. We question the theoretical and empirical basis of this injunction, and point to examples of how the assumptions made by psychologists, often tacitly, appear to direct their thinking about the psychosocial issues involved in the area of medically assisted reproduction. We suggest that these assumptions have no sound basis in theory or research, and then consider how, if they have no basis, they come to be so widely shared. We also note that these assumptions conflict with those of donors and recipients. In questioning the therapeutic injunction, and the corpus of psychological "knowledge" in the area, we are not necessarily claiming that the injunction is wrong. Rather, we contend that it has n...

Because their high levels of emotional engagement with patients are mostly positive, renal nurses are less prepared than other nurses to manage difficult emotional situations. As co-worker support is highly valued, organisations should train renal nurses specifically to support one another.

This paper reviews the methodological adequacy of the psychosocial literature on information access when donated gametes and embryos are used. In all, 10 major flaws were identified: (i) sample sizes were too small, (ii) sample selection procedures were ad hoc, (iii) there were no comparisons between current and past donors and recipients, (iv) there were no comparisons between current donors and recipients in the one study, (v) studies relied on just one partner from a recipient couple, (vi) donor motivation was assessed crudely, (vii) studies failed to clarify what was identifying and non-identifying information, (viii) links between researchers and clinics may have influenced respondents, (ix) response measurement was crude, and (x) data analysis was limited and basic. It is argued that these flaws prohibit any firm conclusions to be drawn either way about whether donors and recipients should disclose information, whether they should have access to information, or even whether donors and recipients want to have access to information about each other or to have information about themselves disclosed to the other party.