A comparison of ultra-endurance cyclists in a qualifying ultra-cycling race for Paris-Brest-Paris and Race Across America-Swiss cycling marathon

Ultra-endurance events test the adaptation of human physiology to extreme physical and mental demands, high levels of training, motivation, and physical conditioning among participants. To understand basic differences among participants according to the severity of the race, participants in qualifying events for two ultra-endurance cycling races, differing in length and intensity, were compared on measures of anthropometry, training, and support. One race was four times longer, required supporting teams, and racers typically had little sleep, which should lead to the qualifiers being substantially more highly trained than those from the shorter race. The qualifiers in the longer race had greater intensity in training while the qualifiers in the shorter race relied more on training volume. Different strategies and types of training reflected the different demands of the races. Future studies should evaluate personality and motivational differences in ultra-endurance events and between these athletes and athletes in other sports.     

The measurement of executive function at age 5: psychometric properties and relationship to academic achievement

This study examined the psychometric properties and criterion validity of a newly developed battery of executive function (EF) tasks for use in early childhood. The battery was included in the Family Life Project (FLP), a prospective longitudinal study of families who were oversampled from low-income and African American families at the birth of a new child (N = 1,292). Ninety-nine percent (N = 1,036) of children who participated in the age 5 home visit completed 1 or more (M = 5.8, Mdn = 6) of the 6 EF tasks. Results indicated that tasks worked equally well for children residing in low-income and not low-income homes, that task scores were most informative about the ability level of children in the low-average range, that performance on EF tasks was best characterized by a single factor, and that individual differences on the EF battery were strongly related to a latent variable measuring overall academic achievement, as well as to individual standardized tests that measured phonological awareness, letter-word identification, and early math skills.     

An optimal construction of Hanf sentences

We give a new construction of formulas in Hanf normal form that are equivalent to first-order formulas over structures of bounded degree. This is the first algorithm whose running time is shown to be elementary. The triply exponential upper bound is complemented by a matching lower bound.     

Counting Stages

This paper defends stage theory against the argument from diachronic counting. It argues that stage theorists can appeal to quantifier domain restriction in order to accommodate intuitions about diachronic counting sentences. Two approaches involving domain restriction are discussed. According to the first, domains of counting are usually restricted to stages at the time of utterance. This approach explains intuitions in many cases, but is theoretically costly and delivers wrong counts if diachronic counting is combined with fission or fusion. On the second approach, domains of counting are usually restricted in an indeterminate way, so as to include at most one member of any maximal class of counterpart-interrelated stages (with respect to a certain utterance). This view can accommodate all the relevant intuitions about counting sentences, and it fits well with a new stage-theoretic view of reference that allows speakers to refer to both present and past stages.     

Abstracts

The demand for therapy groups for child sexual assault victims has risen as detection of abuse has increased, but little has been published about conducting and evaluating such groups. The authors present a comprehensive review of the literature and describe their sixteen-week therapy group with seven eleven- and twelve-year-old girls. Treatment themes, activities, group process issues, and psychometric findings on the Piers-Harris Children's Self Concept Scale and the Child Behavior Checklist are discussed. Suggestions for future groups and research are offered.     

‘Tied together feelings’ Group psychotherapy with latency children: the process of forming a cohesive group

In this paper we describe our experience of running a psychoanalytic psychotherapy group for six children, ranging in age from 4-8 years old. The group ran for a year, with sessions held weekly for an hour. The rationale for group work, selection criteria and the treatment setting are discussed. The paper charts the evolution within the children of the concept of an internal 'work group' (Bion, 1961), as opposed to a 'gang', as their self-awareness and capacity to relate to each other improved. This reflected a corresponding shift in their relationship to the two group leaders, moving from their initial perception of us as neglectful and in conflict with each other, towards recognizing us as a therapist couple who could work together thoughtfully for their benefit. The children's relationship to the group leaders, representing a 'parental couple' in the transference, was the focus of much of the work group. The positive outcomes for most of the children, resulting from this treatment, are reported.     

The Effect of Mindfulness-based Programs on Cognitive Function in Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Neuropsychology Review - Mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) are increasingly utilized to improve mental health. Interest in the putative effects of MBPs on cognitive function is also growing. This...     

Affective priming in the valent/neutral categorisation task is due to affective matching,not encoding facilitation: Reply to Spruyt

Spruyt obtained an affective congruency effect in a valent/neutral categorisation task, which contrasts with the absence of such an effect in the same task that was reported by Werner and Rothermund. The crucial difference between the two studies is that Spruyt presented only valent primes, whereas Werner and Rothermund presented equal amounts of valent and neutral primes and targets in their experiments. Removing the neutral primes introduces a confound of affective matches with the required response. Affective congruency effects in Spruyt's study can be explained straightforwardly in terms of such an affective matching strategy. To demonstrate the influence of matching strategies in the valent/neutral task without neutral primes, we conducted an experiment in which we induced an affective mismatching strategy. In support of our reasoning, this study revealed an affective incongruency effect in the valent/neutral categorisation task. We conclude that affective congruency as well as incongruency effects in the valent/neutral categorisation task reflect post-lexical affective (mis-)matching strategies rather than encoding facilitation.     

Attentional bias towards angry faces is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode in the general population

ABSTRACT

Dot-probe studies usually find an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli only in anxious participants, but not in non-anxious participants. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to investigate whether attentional bias towards angry faces in unselected samples is moderated by the extent to which the current task requires social processing. In Experiment 1, participants performed a dot-probe task involving classification of either socially meaningful targets (schematic faces) or meaningless targets (scrambled schematic faces). Targets were preceded by two photographic face cues, one angry and one neutral. Angry face cues only produced significant cueing scores (i.e. faster target responses if the target replaced the angry face compared to the neutral face) with socially meaningful targets, not with meaningless targets. In Experiment 2, participants classified only meaningful targets, which were either socially meaningful (schematic faces) or not (schematic houses). Again, mean cueing scores were significantly moderated by the social character of the targets. However, cueing scores in this experiment were non-significant in the social target condition and significantly negative in the non-social target condition. These results suggest that attentional bias towards angry faces in the dot-probe task is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode in unselected samples.