The Relationship between Binge Drinking and Binge Eating in Adolescence and Youth: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Adolescence and youth are critical periods in which alcohol consumption is usually initiated, especially in the form of binge drinking. In recent years, it is increasingly common to find adolescents and young people who also present binge behaviors towards unhealthy food with the aim of alleviating their anxiety (emotional eating) and/or because of impulsive personality. Despite the social and health relevance of this issue, it remains scarcely studied and more preventive research needs to be developed. Our meta-analysis study aimed to evaluate the relationship and co-occurrence of both binge behaviors during adolescence and young adulthood to clarify the link between binge drinking and eating. Selective literature search on different online databases was performed. We identified discrete but significant results regarding the direct association between binge drinking and binge eating in correlation coefficients and odds ratio. Future research should focus on the common psychological background and motives behind these problematic behaviors owing to their clinical implications for effective prevention and treatment.

Age and gender differences in spatial perspective taking.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: It is often necessary in daily experience to change one's point of view to adopt mentally the spatial perspective of other persons, learn the position of different objects in a new environment or even describe an environment to other persons. Hence, the ability to link spatial information from different perspectives seems to be necessary to orient ourselves in the space. Several studies have found gender-related differences in spatial reasoning in younger adults, but little is known about such effects in middle-aged and older adults. METHODS: This research was designed to study how spatial perspective taking is affected by gender and age along the lifespan. The Perspective Taking/Spatial Orientation Test (PPT; Kozhevnikov and Hegarty [1]) was administered to groups of younger, middle-aged, and older adults, with females and males represented in each age group. RESULTS: The performance in the PPT decreased across age groups. All age groups had more errors in items that involved perspective changes of greater than 90º. Males performed better than females on most of the variables; however, no significant differences appeared in the interaction gender × age. CONCLUSION: The present findings showed the relevance of the degree perspective change in visuo-spatial abilities, especially in the older group. In relation with the gender, males outperformed females; however, the interaction gender × age did not show significant differences.