“The Team Behind the Team”: Exploring the Organizational Stressor Experiences of Sport Science and Management Staff in Elite Sport

This study explored the organizational stressors encountered by the “team behind the team” (viz., those operating in sport science and management roles) in elite sport and the consequences these can have. Forty support personnel working in elite sport were interviewed. Thematic analyses unveiled 36 lower and 6 higher order themes, which were separated into stressors encountered (e.g., relationship and interpersonal, physical resource, contractual and performance development, organizational structure and logistical) and their consequences (e.g., emotions and outcomes). Building on extant work, this study moves the focus beyond athletes' stress experiences to provide novel insight into those operating in sport science and management roles. The findings offer original insight into the educational needs of sport science and management staff, which can inform practitioners who face increasing demands to work with such personnel, and raise sports organizations' awareness of their duty of care to employees and the factors that need to be managed.     

A case study investigating the role of the anterior temporal lobes in general semantics and semantics specific to persons,emotions and social conceptual knowledge

The role of the anterior temporal lobes (ATLs) in semantic representation remains still much debated. Long thought to support domain-general semantic processing, recent accounts have alternatively suggested that they may be preferentially involved in the processing of person-related semantic knowledge. Several studies have supported such a distinction, but few have either examined both types of semantic processing together, or considered the role of potentially important confounding variables. Here, we address these issues by investigating both domain-general and person-specific semantic processing in a patient with focal ATL damage. The patient presents with dense anterograde and retrograde amnesia. Performance was impaired on tests of general semantic knowledge, but most striking deficits were for person-related semantics, including recognition and identification, knowledge of emotions and social conceptual knowledge. This unique case provides compelling evidence that, in addition to the role in general semantic knowledge, the ATLs are critical for person-related semantics.     

Overlapping Mechanisms in Implying and Inferring

Prior psychological work on Gricean implicature has revealed much about how listeners infer (comprehension) but little about how speakers imply (production). This is surprising given the inherent link between the two. This study aimed to obtain a more integral understanding of implicatures by investigating the processes that are shared between inference and implication. In two experiments, a participant and a confederate engaged in a dialogue game that invited the use of implicatures. In each there was a global priming manipulation, in which a confederate predominantly used implicit or explicit utterances, and a local priming manipulation, in which the utterance structure varied from trial to trial. Participants could choose whether to imply or use an explicit expression. Our results revealed that speaker and listener align on their use of implicatures. We interpret the local priming results as providing evidence of shared implicature representations between speaker and listener, and the global priming results as a form of audience design. We also present a model of implicature production that explains our findings.