Eating tasty foods to cope, enhance reward, socialize or conform: What other psychological characteristics describe each of these motives?

Psychological characteristics associated with eating motives of the Palatable Eating Motives Scale (PEMS) were identified in 192 undergraduates. Coping was characterized by greater BMI, emotion-triggered eating, and eating concern and also by binge-eating and perceived stress reactivity in females. Reward Enhancement was characterized by greater BMI, anxiety- and depression-eating in females and by anger/frustration-eating in males. Conformity was strongly characterized by binge-eating and by failure-based stress and all eating disorder traits in females and by anger/frustration- and anxiety-eating in males. The sex-divergent patterns of these traits across PEMS motives highlight the heterogeneity of hedonic eating. The traits may also be maintaining the motives, hence adresseing them should improve treatments for obesity, binge-eating, and foster healthier coping, reward, and psychosocial interactions.

The Kids-Palatable Eating Motives Scale: relation to BMI and binge eating traits.

INTRODUCTION: Despite high rates of obesity in adolescents, little is known about their individual motives for eating caloric foods for reasons unrelated to hunger. The goal of this study was to provide a preliminary validation of the "Kids Palatable Eating Motives Scale" (K-PEMS), a self-report survey designed to identify individual motives for eating tasty foods in adolescents. The study also sought to determine if any specific motive(s) can account for variance in BMI and binge-eating disorder (BED) traits which can exacerbate obesity. METHODS: BMIz and responses to the K-PEMS and the Children's Binge Eating Disorder Scale (C-BEDS) were obtained from inner-city low-income African American adolescents. Linear and logistic regressions were used to identify K-PEMS motives that were associated with greater BMIz and binge-eating traits. RESULTS: The K-PEMS identified eating tasty foods for Social, Conformity, Reward Enhancement, and Coping motives. Higher frequency of eating tasty foods for Social and Conformity motives and lower frequency of eating these foods for Reward Enhancement accounted for 39% of the variance in BMIz among the overweight and obese adolescents. In contrast, eating for Coping motives was related to a 3-fold increase in the amended provisional criteria for BED in children which occurred in 7% of this young minority sample. DISCUSSION: The K-PEMS can be used to identify adolescents' primary motives for eating tasty foods. These motives may provide early identification of obesity and binge-eating risk but more importantly, can be tailor-targeted to affect specific behavioral and/or cognitive changes to prevent these conditions in adulthood.

Real-time sampling of reasons for hedonic food consumption: further validation of the Palatable Eating Motives Scale.

Highly palatable foods play a salient role in obesity and binge-eating, and if habitually eaten to deal with intrinsic and extrinsic factors unrelated to metabolic need, may compromise adaptive coping and interpersonal skills. This study used event sampling methodology (ESM) to examine whether individuals who report eating palatable foods primarily to cope, to enhance reward, to be social, or to conform, as measured by the Palatable Eating Motives Scale (PEMS), actually eat these foods primarily for the motive(s) they report on the PEMS. Secondly this study examined if the previously reported ability of the PEMS Coping motive to predict BMI would replicate if the real-time (ESM-reported) coping motive was used to predict BMI. A total of 1691 palatable eating events were collected from 169 college students over 4 days. Each event included the day, time, and types of tasty foods or drinks consumed followed by a survey that included an abbreviated version of the PEMS, hunger as an additional possible motive, and a question assessing general perceived stress during the eating event. Two-levels mixed modeling confirmed that ESM-reported motives correlated most strongly with their respective PEMS motives and that all were negatively associated with eating for hunger. While stress surrounding the eating event was strongly associated with the ESM-coping motive, its inclusion in the model as a predictor of this motive did not abolish the significant association between ESM and PEMS Coping scores. Regression models confirmed that scores on the ESM-coping motive predicted BMI. These findings provide ecological validity for the PEMS to identify true-to-life motives for consuming palatable foods. This further adds to the utility of the PEMS in individualizing, and hence improving, treatment strategies for obesity, binge-eating, dietary nutrition, coping, reward acquisition, and psychosocial skills.

Pressure-induced superconductivity in Ba0.5Sr0.5Fe2As2.

High-pressure electrical resistance measurements have been performed on single crystal Ba(0.5)Sr(0.5)Fe(2)As(2) platelets to pressures of 16 GPa and temperatures down to 10 K using designer diamond anvils under quasi-hydrostatic conditions with an insulating steatite pressure medium. The resistance measurements show evidence of pressure-induced superconductivity with an onset transition temperature at ∼31 K and zero resistance at ∼22 K for a pressure of 3.3 GPa. The transition temperature decreases gradually with increasing pressure before completely disappearing for pressures above 12 GPa. The present results provide experimental evidence that a solid solution of two 122-type materials, i.e., Ba(1-x)Sr(x)Fe(2)As(2) (0 < x < 1), can also exhibit superconductivity under high pressure.

Neutron diffraction and electrical transport studies on the incommensurate magnetic phase transition in holmium at high pressures.

Neutron diffraction and electrical transport measurements have been made on the heavy rare earth metal holmium at high pressures and low temperatures in order to elucidate its transition from a paramagnetic (PM) to a helical antiferromagnetic (AFM) ordered phase as a function of pressure. The electrical resistance measurements show a change in the resistance slope as the temperature is lowered through the antiferromagnetic Néel temperature. The temperature of this antiferromagnetic transition decreases from approximately 122 K at ambient pressure at a rate of -4.9 K GPa(-1) up to a pressure of 9 GPa, whereupon the PM-to-AFM transition vanishes for higher pressures. Neutron diffraction measurements as a function of pressure at 89 and 110 K confirm the incommensurate nature of the phase transition associated with the antiferromagnetic ordering of the magnetic moments in a helical arrangement and that the ordering occurs at similar pressures as determined from the resistance results for these temperatures.

Solid-state structures and magnetic properties of halide-bridged, face-to-face bis-nickel(II)-macrocyclic ligand complexes: ligand-mediated interchanges of electronic configuration.

Dramatic differences are found between the ambient and 100 K X-ray structures of [L(2)Ni2Br2](ClO4)2 (L(2) = alpha,alpha'-bis{(5,7-dimethyl-1,4,8,11-tetraazacyclotetradeca-6-yl)-o-xylene), in which the bromide-bridged, bimetallic, macrocyclic ligand complexes of nickel(II) are held face-to-face and in which each bimetallic complex has a net triplet spin multiplicity. The ambient structure of this complex consists of very highly ordered, infinite chains of alternating R and S isomers in which the identical Ni(II) coordination spheres are near to the average expected for the high- and low-spin Ni(II) coordination sites, and there is appreciable stereochemical strain in the linkage of the macrocyclic ligands to the phenyl ring. In contrast, every other dinickel complex of the 100 K structure is displaced about 40 pm along the infinite chains to form tetrameric repeat units (pairs of dinickel complexes), in which each dinickel complex has well-defined high-spin and low-spin Ni(II) coordination sites; the high-spin sites are adjacent in the tetramers, and the stereochemical strain in the linkage to the phenyl spacer is relaxed. The molecular magnetic moments and structural contrasts are similar for the 100 K structure and the previously reported ambient structure of [L(2)Ni2Br3](ClO4) complex for which the molecular magnetic moments also correspond to a single triplet state per complex. The halide-bridged, monochloro- and monobromo dinickel complexes also have triplet spin multiplicity, and they crystallize with a coordinated perchlorate completing the axial coordination of the high-spin Ni(II) site, while the other Ni(II) site of these halide-bridged complexes has equatorial Ni-N bond lengths typical of low-spin Ni(II) coordination. The bridging halide is sandwiched between the face-to-face macrocyclic ligand Ni(II) moieties and slightly off the Ni-Ni axis in all of the complexes. The temperature dependence of the magnetic moments of the series of complexes indicates that their singlet-triplet energy gaps are small, with zero point energy differences that are generally less than 10(3) cm(-1). The very weak metal-metal electronic coupling, the triplet state spin multiplicity of each dinickel complex, and the averaged high-spin/low-spin coordination environments of the ambient structure implicate a vibronic mechanism for the electronic configurational exchange in the dibromo and tribromo complexes. The single molecular vibrational mode that correlates with the configurational exchange in these complexes includes the concerted motion of the bridging bromide between the Ni(II) centers. Activation of this vibrational mode is sufficient to effect the configurational exchange. These complexes present especially clear examples of the effects of the coupling of nuclear vibrational motions to the interchange of electronic configuration between two different centers.

Synthesis of MnP nanocrystals by treatment of metal carbonyl complexes with phosphines: a new, versatile route to nanoscale transition metal phosphides.

The reaction of Mn2(CO)10 with P(SiMe3)3 in coordinating solvents at T >/= 220 degrees C yields low polydispersity, highly crystalline MnP nanoparticles for the first time. The effect of dimensional limiting has resulted in the stabilization of a ferromagnetic ground state at low temperatures, rather than the metamagnetic state observed in bulk (microcrystalline) MnP. The synthetic methodology reported here is demonstrated to be general for a number of different metals and phosphine sources.