Bodies in Nature: Associations between Exposure to Nature, Connectedness to Nature, and Body Image

Here, we sought to replicate previous work showing a relationship between connectedness to nature and body appreciation, and extend it by examining associations between exposure to natural environments and other body image-related variables. An online sample of 399 U.S. women and men (Mage = 34.55 years) completed measures of body appreciation, connectedness to nature, nature exposure, appearance investment, sociocultural attitudes toward appearance, and self-esteem. Path analysis showed that nature exposure and connectedness to nature, respectively, were associated with body appreciation in women and men, both directly and indirectly via self-esteem. Connectedness to nature also mediated the link between nature exposure and body appreciation. In men, but not women, the link between connectedness to nature and body appreciation was also mediated by appearance investment and internalisation of a muscular ideal. These results may point to novel methods for promoting more positive body image in adults through engagement with nature.

A fair day's wage? Perceptions of public sector pay

There is a scarcity of evidence pertaining to the general public's perception of public sector pay. Hence, in the present study, 161 women and 149 men were asked to estimate the wages 35 public sector professions should receive annually in the fictitious nation of Maldoria, based on a comparison value of an annual income of T10,000 for general practitioners. Analysis showed that only pilots were given a higher annual income than general practitioners; miners and local government workers were also provided with relatively high annual incomes. By contrast, newscasters were provided with the lowest annual income. Participants' sex did not affect these evaluations, and other demographic variables and public sector-related information of the participants were poor predictors of their evaluations. The implications of this research on public attitudes toward wage determination are discussed, and avenues for further research highlighted.

'It was as if she had said....': May Sinclair and reading narratives of cure

May Sinclair was one of the most widely read and successful English women novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. She had interests and themes in common with many of those now considered to have been at the heart of English modernism. In terms of formal experimentation too her concerns chime with the aesthetic innovations of, for example, pound, Eliot and Woolf. Her early interest in psychoanalysis and support for the suffrage campaign also mark her out as a modern. Despite some work from feminist literary critics and her partial categorisation as modernist, however, her work still lacks a critical framework within which it can be read. Indeed, some of the work done by feminist critics on her has paradoxically re-marginalised her. In this thesis I aim to provide one critical framework through which Sinclair's work can be read. My contention is that the occluding of one aspect of her work and thought- its movement toward intellectual, emotional and aesthetic wholeness - has marred previous critical readings of her. By paying attention to this through a focus on discourses of cure, this thesis reads Sinclair's work with an awareness of its language, cultural context and intertextual relations. Early twentieth-century medical discourse, psychoanalysis, mysticism, the chivalric and the psychical are all used to read the works. At the same time, my aim is to read Sinclair's work without eliding its difficulties. Rather, I aim to read her in a way that acknowledges the difficulties of and fraught moments in her writing as markers of its significance.

Understanding the Effect of Television Advertising on Women's Attitudes and Purchase Intentions Towards Beer: A Study of Three Major Brands.

Abstract Purpose of Paper: The market for beer in the UK is now mature and sales have been stable at around £16bn for about ten years (Mintel 2014). More recently, there have been changes in the market as consumers have switched from bigger mainstream brands to a growing number of smaller craft beers. However, in order to grow further significantly, the industry needs to explore new market segments and find new consumers for beer. So far, it is estimated that only 1.3m women in the UK drink beer (O'Reilly, 2014; Mail Online, 2015). Women are therefore an underexplored segment and present the main growth opportunity for beer drinking in the UK. However, most beer television advertising has traditionally been aimed at the male audience and there have been suggestions that some of this advertising has been seen as unpopular with or even insulting to women (Jackson, 2013; Zwarun et al., 2006). The Chief Executive of major brewer SAB Miller, which owns the Foster's brand, has recently written that, 'We have to acknowledge that core lager advertising, for many years, was either dismissive of, or insulting to, women.' (Shubber, 2015). If women are to be the new consumers and the future target for beer advertising, there is therefore a significant gap in the knowledge and literature concerned with how women differ from men in responding to the television advertising produced by beer brands and it is important that this gap in knowledge is addressed. The purpose of this paper is therefore to explore the effect of the television advertising of the three top selling UK beer brands on women's attitudes and purchase intentions towards those brands. More specifically, the objectives are: 1) To gain an understanding of how female consumers respond to existing beer television advertising, specifically in terms of the ‘likeability’ of the content of TV commercials produced by the three leading UK beer brands among female consumers. 2) To examine the effect of the rational and emotional content, including the use of humour, in television commercials produced by the three leading UK beer brands on the attitudes of female consumers towards those brands. 3) To explore in-depth female consumer attitudes towards the content (message cues and symbolism) of the television commercials produced by the three leading beer brands in the UK and their effect on subsequent purchase intentions for each brand.