Giving everything for athletic success! – Sports-specific risk acceptance of elite adolescent athletes

ObjectivesGood health is the basic foundation for peak performance in elite sports, yet athletes are often conflicted between protecting their health for the sake of being able to compete and risking their health in the form of potential injuries to achieve even higher levels of performance. Adolescent athletes, who are in a sensitive phase of development, are especially prone to negative consequences like injuries or illnesses due to risky behaviors. In an effort to prevent lasting damage, the present study aims to identify groups of athletes who are particularly willing to take risks and the possible determinants of athletes' risk acceptance.Design and methodIn our German Young Olympic Athletes' Lifestyle and Health Management (GOAL) Study, we examined 1138 German national squad members, aged 14–18, representing all Olympic sports. Classification tree analyses enabled us to detect determinants of high and low risk groups concerning sports-specific psychosocial and physical risk acceptance.ResultsWe found several high risk groups. In general, the degree of inclusion in the elite sports system correlates positively with risk acceptance. Athletes who are extremely willing to take physical risks attached high importance to their sports environment and minor importance to their non-sports environment (n = 94; 8%). Athletes who are perfectionists and very focused on their performance were particularly willing to accept physical (n = 142; 13%) and social risks (n = 75; 7%).ConclusionBy identifying extreme groups with an especially high or low willingness to take risks and the determinants of these groups, we can give a more precise picture of elite adolescent athletes' risk acceptance.     

Experimental Tests of Risk Ladders in the Elicitation of Perceived Likelihood

Risk ladders have the potential to improve numeric judgments of low‐likelihood events by providing information about the likelihoods of comparison risks, thereby letting respondents make risk estimates “in context.” However, to date this tool has been studied systematically only in communication of risk, not in elicitation of perceived likelihoods. In three studies, we evaluated the benefits of risk ladders on the consistency, validity, and mean‐level accuracy of elicited likelihood judgments. When estimates for low‐likelihood hazards were elicited using different numeric response scales (e.g., “1 in x” and “x in 100,000”), scale type had a strong effect on the magnitudes of the elicited estimates, and viewing a risk ladder (Experiment 1) or comparison risks (Experiments 2 and 3) did not attenuate this effect of scale type. Similarly, we found no evidence that risk ladders or comparison risks improved the convergent validity of numeric estimates, as measured using correlations with risk ratings made on alternative scale types. Finally, viewing comparison risks tended to reduce gross overestimation of rare events, with relatively less change in estimates for mid‐likelihood and high‐likelihood hazards. This suggests that comparison risks can spread responses to cover a wider range of values but do not ameliorate scale effects. In the elicitation of numeric risk estimates, how you ask matters, even if you let people make estimates “in context” through the use of comparative risk information. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Involvement in Sport and Intention to Consume Alcohol: An Exploratory Study of UK Adolescents1

We tested the hypothesis that school “athletes” and “non‐athletes” differ in intentions to consume alcohol and get drunk, attitudes toward alcohol, and perceptions of subjective norms. We also investigated, using the theory of reasoned action, whether athletic involvement is a factor in predicting alcohol‐related intentions. Data were obtained from students in a stratified sample of schools in a major Welsh city. Male athletes were significantly more likely than male non‐athletes to intend to get drunk and to believe friends would approve of their alcohol consumption. For males, sporting involvement was a significant predictor of likelihood of getting drunk. In contrast, female athletes showed significantly more negative attitudes than did female non‐athletes toward drinking alcohol. Differences in intentions were nonsignificant.     

Injury Representations,Coping, Emotions,and Functional Outcomes in Athletes With Sports‐Related Injuries: A Test of Self‐Regulation Theory1

This study examined the influence of injury representations on emotions and outcomes of athletes with sports‐related musculoskeletal injuries using self‐regulation theory. Participants were athletes (N= 220; M age = 23.44 years, SD= 8.42) with a current sports‐related musculoskeletal injury. Participants self‐reported their cognitive and emotional injury representations, emotions coping procedures, physical and sports functioning, attendance at treatment centers, and 3‐week follow‐up attendance. Participants’ negative and positive affect were influenced by emotional representations. Identity, causal attributions, and emotional representations influenced physical functioning; and identity, serious consequences, causal attributions, and emotional representations predicted sports functioning. Injury severity, identity, and personal control predicted attendance at treatment centers, but the effect of personal control was mediated by problem‐focused coping. Problem‐focused coping predicted 3‐week follow‐up attendance. Results support self‐regulation theory for examining injury representations in athletes.     

CHRIST's AUTONOMOUS HAND: SIMULATIONS ON THE MADNESS OF GIVING

In Matthew 6:3–4 Jesus counsels: “when you do some act of charity, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing; your good deed must be in secret”. In the following essay we will use this passage as our conceptual touchstone to explore Jacques Derrida's reflections on the “madness” of giving, and how the gift (of Levinasian “hospitality”, for example) hinges on a certain vulnerability and the manifold risks of narcissism. In order to negotiate these themes, we will also draw on Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty, Martin Heidegger's reflections on the “hand”, and the psychological‐neurological literature on “phantom limbs”.     

Emotion,Decision, and Risk: Betting on Gambles versus Betting on People

We examined the effects of two emotions, fear and anger, on risk‐taking behavior in two types of tasks: Those in which uncertainty is generated by a randomizing device (“lottery risk”) and those in which it is generated by the uncertain behavior of another person (“person‐based risk”). Participants first completed a writing task to induce fear or anger. They then made choices either between lotteries (Experiment 1) or between actions in risky two‐person decisions (Experiments 2 and 3). The experiments involved substantial real‐money payoffs. Replicating earlier studies (which used hypothetical rewards), Experiment 1 showed that fearful participants were more risk‐averse than angry participants in lottery‐risk tasks. However—the key result of this study—fearful participants were substantially less risk‐averse than angry participants in a two‐person task involving person‐based risk (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 offered options and payoffs identical to those of Experiment 2 but with lottery‐type risk. Risk‐taking returned to the pattern of Experiment 1. The impact of incidental emotions on risk‐taking appears to be contingent on the class of uncertainty involved. For lottery risk, fear increased the frequency of risk‐averse choices and anger reduced it. The reverse pattern was found when uncertainty in the decision was person‐based. Further, the effect was specifically on differences in willingness to take risks rather than on differences in judgments of how much risk was present. The impact of different emotions on risk‐taking or risk‐avoiding behavior is thus contingent on the type, as well as the degree, of uncertainty the decision maker faces. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Well Do We Know Our Inner Daredevil? Probing the Relationship Between Self‐Report and Behavioral Measures of Risk Taking

To measure a person's risk‐taking tendency, research has relied interchangeably on self‐report scales (e.g., “Indicate your likelihood of engaging in the risky behavior”) and more direct measures, such as behavioral tasks (e.g., “Do you accept or reject the risky option?”). It is currently unclear, however, how the two approaches map upon each other. We examined the relationship between self‐report likelihood ratings for risky choice in a monetary gamble task and actual choice, and tested how the relationship is affected by task ambiguity (i.e., when part of the information about risks and benefits is missing) and age. Five hundred participants (aged 19–85 years) were presented with 27 gambles, either in an unambiguous or an ambiguous condition. In a likelihood rating task, participants rated for each gamble the likelihood that they would accept it. In a separate choice task, they were asked to either accept or reject each gamble. Analyses using a signal‐detection approach showed that people's likelihood ratings discriminated between accept and reject cases in their choices rather well. However, task ambiguity weakened the association between likelihood ratings and choice. Further, older adults' likelihood ratings anticipated their choices more poorly than younger adults'. We discuss implications of these findings for existing approaches to the study of risk‐taking propensity, which have often relied on self‐reported risk tendency for ambiguous activities. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The “Second Place” Problem: Assistive Technology in Sports and (Re) Constructing Normal

Objections to the use of assistive technologies (such as prostheses) in elite sports are generally raised when the technology in question is perceived to afford the user a potentially “unfair advantage,” when it is perceived as a threat to the purity of the sport, and/or when it is perceived as a precursor to a slippery slope toward undesirable changes in the sport. These objections rely on being able to quantify standards of “normal” within a sport so that changes attributed to the use of assistive technology can be judged as causing a significant deviation from some baseline standard. This holds athletes using assistive technologies accountable to standards that restrict their opportunities to achieve greatness, while athletes who do not use assistive technologies are able to push beyond the boundaries of these standards without moral scrutiny. This paper explores how constructions of fairness and “normality” impact athletes who use assistive technology to compete in a sporting venue traditionally populated with “able-bodied” competitors. It argues that the dynamic and obfuscated construction of “normal” standards in elite sports should move away from using body performance as the measuring stick of “normal,” toward alternate forms of constructing norms such as defining, quantifying, and regulating the mechanical actions that constitute the critical components of a sport. Though framed within the context of elite sports, this paper can be interpreted more broadly to consider problems with defining “normal” bodies in a society in which technologies are constantly changing our abilities and expectations of what normal means.     

Perceived aggression in sports and its relation to willingness to participate and perceived risk of injury

The purpose of this study was three-fold: assess relationships among perceived hostile aggression, instrumental aggression, and assertion for a set of collegiate sports, categorize the sports by rated aggression, and present relationships of aggression with ratings of likelihood of career-ending injuries, personal willingness to participate, and the perceived desirability of participation in the sports by others. The sports were rated on the variables by 285 undergraduates enrolled in psychology courses in a large private university in the western USA. Mean age for men was 23.7 yr. (SD = 2.3) and for women 21.3 yr. (SD = 2.7). A 4 (rating category) x 16 (sport) repeated-measures analysis of variance showed significant main and interaction effects. The sports were classified according to level of aggression in post hoc analysis. Perceived risk of a career-ending injury was linearly related to aggregate aggression, whereas willingness to participate and desirability of the sport for others had quadratic relationships to both aggregate aggression and risk of career-ending injury.     

Distinctive Preferences Toward Risk in the Substantive Domain of Sociality*

As with standard models of rationality, theorists generally treat prospect theory's demonstration of risk aversion in gains but risk tolerance in losses as domain‐general. Yet evolutionary psychology suggests that natural selection has designed a domain specific cognitive architecture—with systems specialized for some substantive domains but not others. Here we address risky choices through that lens asking whether humans' risk responses dispose them to enter social relationships even when doing so is counter to normative rationality and regardless of whether the “enter” versus “not enter” choice is framed as between gains and losses. Laboratory findings in five sites across three countries provide a positive answer to both possibilities. Participants could enter or not enter inherently risky social relationships. They were more willing to enter such relationships than rational choice models would predict and were equally so willing regardless of whether equivalent alternatives were framed as gains and as losses. With the “social context” extracted in otherwise identical games, participants' risk responses were consistent with prospect theory. The present findings suggest the possibility of adaptations designed to facilitate sociality—despite its risks and how those risks are framed.     

Sport-Related Concussions: A Review of Epidemiology, Challenges in Diagnosis, and Potential Risk Factors

Sport-related concussion (SRC) is a common mild traumatic brain injury among young, active individuals, affecting approximately 300,000 young American adults annually. In this review of the epidemiology of SRC, we describe the challenges in identifying concussion occurrence and review the studies describing concussion incidence in various sports. In high risk contact sports, American football, soccer (European football), hockey, lacrosse, and basketball athletes experience concussion unintentionally during the course of play. Among these, football concussion incidence is reviewed in greatest detail because it has the highest incidence among the contact sports, and some studies have shown long-term neurophysiologic and neurodegenerative outcomes. Mechanisms of injury differ significantly by sport and can be potential targets for concussion risk mitigation. Despite the apparent high incidence of SRC, risk factors determining initial concussion, recovery periods, recurrence, and long-term outcomes remain poorly understood and warrant further study exploring the influence of age, sex, genetics, and athletic factors.     

Conceptualizations of Fair Play: A Factorial Survey Study of Moral Judgments by Badminton Players

There is much discussion in sports on whether certain behavior should be considered Fair Play. This moral judgment on Fair Play is influenced by the conceptualization of the term Fair Play as either “respect for the rules” or “respect for the spirit of the game,” as well as by other determinants. To uncover the moral judgment of athletes and which conceptualization of Fair Play dominates in practice, a factorial survey approach is used. The act and the level of the match played a role in the judgment, as well as the gender of the athlete. Our results showed that both conceptualizations “respect for the rules” and “respect for the spirit of the game” were important in this judgment, with the spirit conceptualization being more dominant.     

Presidential Leadership Style and the Political Use of Force

A growing body of work seeks to explain the lack of clear evidence for the diversionary use of force by casting doubt on such strategies' attractiveness for policy makers: while domestic political and economic problems may provide incentives for diversion, such strategies involve political and military risks that frequently outweigh these incentives. Such theories correctly identify the objective risks involved in diversion but do not account for variation in leaders' risk‐taking propensities. We develop a “first image” theory of diversion that suggests a key psychological variable (locus of control) shapes leaders' willingness to engage in risky diversionary strategies. A statistical analysis of the American use of force, 1953–2000, finds strong support for this model. We conclude that the lack of clear evidence for diversion in general is a reflection of the contingent nature of the phenomenon and call for greater attention to how agents and structures interact to produce policy behavior.     

Ethics,Brain Injuries,and Sports: Prohibition,Reform, and Prudence

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the issue of the elimination of sports, or elements of sports, that present a high risk of brain injury. In particular, we critically examine two elements of Angelo Corlett’s and Pam Sailors’ arguments for the prohibition of football and Nicholas Dixon’s claim for the reformation of boxing to eliminate blows to the head based on (a) the empirical assumption of an essential or causal connection between brain injuries incurred in football and the development of a degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); and (b) John Stuart Mill’s rejection of consensual domination (ie voluntary enslavement). We present four arguments to contest the validity of Corlett, Dixon’s and Sailor’s positions. Specifically, we argue that (i) certain autonomy-based arguments undermine paternalist arguments for reform; (ii) the nature of the goods people pursue in their lives might justify their foregoing (degrees of) future autonomy; (iii) Mill’s argument against consensual domination draws on ambiguous and arbitrary distinctions; (iv) the lack of consensus and empirical evidence regarding CTE arising from brain injuries in sport underdetermines calls for reform. We conclude that these proposals for reforming or eliminating sports with high risks of brain injuries are not well founded.     

Understanding injuries in sports: Self-reported injury and perceived risk of injury among adolescents

IntroductionAlthough exposure and perceived risk of injury in sports among adolescents is a well-known phenomenon today, their understanding remains poorly explored.ObjectiveThis study examines the relationships between demographics, sport motives, and sport-related characteristics in a sample of French adolescents involved in sports.MethodsThe sample included 394 adolescents involved in sports, between 13 and 19 years old. The adolescents filled out a questionnaire requesting information about their age, sex, sport motives, sport-related characteristics, the number of injuries, and perceived risk of injury in their preferred sport.ResultsThe findings showed that the number of injuries was related to age, sex, type of sport and the participant's motives. The will to play to the limit increased with the exposure to injury. Participation in risky sports and the will to play to the limit were predictors of the adolescents’ risk of exposure to sports injuries. Time devoted to sports appears to be a confounding factor. Moreover, boys exhibited higher number of injuries than girls, and they perceived their preferred sport as riskier.ConclusionExposure to the risk of injury in sports and the exacerbated perception of that risk may provide a means of enhancing one's self-image, procuring an emotional experience, and constructing one's masculinity.     

Perspective on “in the wild” movement analysis using machine learning

Recent advances in wearable sensing and machine learning have created ample opportunities for “in the wild” movement analysis in sports, since the combination of both enables real-time feedback to be provided to athletes and coaches, as well as long-term monitoring of movements. The potential for real-time feedback is useful for performance enhancement or technique analysis, and can be achieved by training efficient models and implementing them on dedicated hardware. Long-term monitoring of movement can be used for injury prevention, among others. Such applications are often enabled by training a machine learned model from large datasets that have been collected using wearable sensors. Therefore, in this perspective paper, we provide an overview of approaches for studies that aim to analyze sports movement “in the wild” using wearable sensors and machine learning. First, we discuss how a measurement protocol can be set up by answering six questions. Then, we discuss the benefits and pitfalls and provide recommendations for effective training of machine learning models from movement data, focusing on data pre-processing, feature calculation, and model selection and tuning. Finally, we highlight two application domains where “in the wild” data recording was combined with machine learning for injury prevention and technique analysis, respectively.     

Cognitive antecedents to adolescent health risk: Discriminating between behavioral intention and behavioral willingness

Abstract

A model of adolescent health risk behavior that is both cognitive and social-psychological in orientation is described, and an aspect of the model is tested empirically. The model suggests that health risk behaviors (e.g., smoking or drunk driving), especially among adolescents, are not always intended or premeditated, but instead are often reactions to risk-conducive circumstances. Because they are not entirely premeditated, such behaviors are not accurately predicted by “traditional” behavioral intention measures, but are predicted by a central construct in the model labeled behavioral willingness. Results of two studies indicate that both intention (expectation) and willingness measures predict future risk behaviors, and do so independent of one another. Additional analyses provide further evidence of discriminant validity between the two constructs by indicating that they relate differently to perceptions of personal vulnerability to the health risks associated with these behaviors.     

The illusion of courage in self‐predictions: Mispredicting one's own behavior in embarrassing situations

People exhibit an “illusion of courage” when predicting their own behavior in embarrassing situations. In three experiments, participants overestimated their own willingness to engage in embarrassing public performances in exchange for money when those performances were psychologically distant: Hypothetical or in the relatively distant future. This illusion of courage occurs partly because of cold/hot empathy gaps. That is, people in a relatively “cold” unemotional state underestimate the influence on their own preferences and behaviors of being in a relative “hot” emotional state such as social anxiety evoked by an embarrassing situation. Consistent with this cold/hot empathy gap explanation, putting people “in touch” with negative emotional states by arousing fear (Experiments 1 and 2) and anger (Experiment 2) decreased people's willingness to engage in psychologically distant embarrassing public performances. Conversely, putting people “out of touch” with social anxiety through aerobic exercise, which reduces state anxiety and increases confidence, increased people's willingness to engage in psychologically distance embarrassing public performances (Experiment 3). Implications for self‐predictions, self‐evaluation, and affective forecasting are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Can “you” make a difference? Investigating whether perspective‐taking improves performance on inconsistent mathematical word problems

Pronouns encouraging a second‐person perspective (e.g., “you/your”) affect peoples' mental representations constructed while reading and improve learning. The present study applied these insights to a domain in that such pronoun effects have yet been unexplored: mathematical word problem solving. Specifically, we encouraged a second‐person perspective (using “your”) in an attempt to reduce the consistency effect, that is, the finding that more errors are made on word problems containing a relational keyword inconsistent rather than consistent with the required arithmetic operation. Primary school children solved consistent and inconsistent word problems (containing the relational keywords “less than”) presented in third‐person (i.e., store name) or second‐person (“your store”) perspective. Results demonstrated the consistency effect, but the perspective manipulation did not produce significant differences between conditions, that is, a second‐person perspective did not reduce the consistency effect. These findings suggest that reducing the consistency effect may require a less subtle approach than using personalized pronouns.