Sport psychologists' perceptions of sport and mental health practitioners

Abstract

This study surveys recently graduated sport psychology (SP) doctoral students' (N = 34) educational backgrounds, work experiences, and perceptions of the professional field of SP inside and outside the realm of academia. Special attention was given to subjects' perceptions and expectations with regard to applied work in SP, actual work experiences, and income. Findings indicate that almost all graduates are spending their time in a variety of work activities, i.e., some combination of teaching, research, consulting, administration, and coaching, with a strong emphasis on teaching in an academic institution. Gender analysis revealed that, in general, females earned 74% of what males earned; females earned 53% of what males earned outside academia. Graduates' personal comments suggest a concern about consumer demand and financial support offered applied professionals in SP as well as the adequacy of their own training to provide applied services. Implications for AAASP and SP program directors are provided.     

All Against All: How Beliefs about Human Nature Shape Foreign Policy Opinions

Although the American public's increasingly cynical views about human nature have drawn considerable attention from scholars, existing research says little about how interpersonal trust shapes mass foreign policy opinions. This study analyzes survey data to test the claim that citizens use their beliefs about human nature to reason about international affairs. The results indicate that cynical citizens are more likely than trusting citizens to endorse the principle of isolationism and to oppose cooperative forms of intervention in other nations' problems. Citizens' use of interpersonal trust as an information shortcut helps them to make inferences regarding a topic about which they typically know little, but such inferences are not necessarily realistic ones.     

Assessing Conventional Wisdom about Religion and Politics: A Preliminary View from the Pews

Given religious leaders’ frequent opportunities to communicate to a large and receptive audience, political messages delivered during religious services have the potential to make a considerable impact on American politics—with particular significance for political education and mobilization. Social scientists routinely conclude that such messages are indeed disseminated, a claim we test in this study. Is it in fact true that church– and temple–going Americans regularly receive political messages from their ministers, priests, and rabbis during worship services? If so, what forms do these pronouncements take? How intense are they? Is this communication limited to messages from the service leader or does it come from other parts of the service, either informal or ritualistic? Existing empirical assessments of this topic depend heavily on survey research, asking congregants (or, less often, members of the clergy) about the frequency and content of political messages. Although such studies are certainly valuable, we approach religious political communications in a more immediate way: by observing them directly. Our conclusions are based on two waves of attendance at weekly services during 1998–1999, varying by religious tradition and denomination, region, and other dimensions. We find that “political” messages, broadly defined, are indeed delivered quite often. However, content analysis of these messages reveals that they typically address matters of social justice and rarely other types of political activity or belief, such as specific public policies or civic involvement (including voting). Political references during services only very occasionally constituted calls to direct political action on the part of the worshiper. Ultimately, our findings suggest that political content does occur relatively frequently during U.S. religious services, supporting the accounts of other social scientists. Our analysis offers new insight as to the content and nature of the political messages Americans are exposed to during religious services.     

Mental Models of the Day/Night Cycle

This article presents the results of an experiment which investigated elementary school children's explanations of the day/night cycle. First, third, and fifth grade children were asked to explain certain phenomena, such as the disappearance of the sun during the night, the disappearance of stars during the day, the apparent movement of the moon, and the alteration of day and night. The results showed that the majority of the children in our sample used in a consistent fashion a small number of relatively well-defined mental models of the earth, the sun, and the moon to explain the day/night cycle. These mental models of the day/night cycle were empirically accurate, logically consistent and revealed some sensitivity on the part of the children to issues of simplicity of explanation. The younger children formed Initial mental models which provided explanations of the day/night cycle based on everyday experience (e.g., the sun goes down behind mountains, clouds cover up the sun). The older children constructed synthetic mental models (e.g., the sun and the moon revolve around the stationary earth every 24 hours; the earth rotates in an up/down direction and the sun and moon are fixed on opposite sides) which represented attempts to synthesize the culturally accepted view with aspects of their Initial models. A few of the older children appeared to have constructed a mental model of the day/night cycle similar to the scientific one. A theoretical framework is outlined which explains the formation of initial, synthetic, and scientific models of the day/night cycle in terms of the reinterpretation of a hierarchy of constraints, some of which are present early in the child's life, and others which emerge later out of the structure of the acquired knowledge.     

Recall of logical and pragmatic implications in sentences with dichotomous and continuous antonyms

Thirty-six subjects recalled sentences containing dichotomous or continuous antonyms in affirmative or negative form. The subjects made a considerable number of meaning-preserving recall errors for both dichotomous antonyms (not alive recalled asdead) and continuous antonyms (not hot recalled ascold). The negation of a dichotomous antonym logically implies its antonym, whereas the negation of a continuous antonym only pragmatically implies its antonym. Thus, the results suggest that subjects hearing sentences containing a logical or pragmatic implication tend to make the logical or pragmatic inference involved. Then, in recall, they do not remember that this was an inference and make the error of recalling the logical or pragmatic implication in place of the presented sentence.     

Memory for ideas: Synonym substitution

Subjects memorized sentences that contained a word with a synonym in English. There were large numbers of synonym substitution responses in recall (varying from 6.0% in Experiment I to 27.7% in Experiment III). Synonym substitution responses tended to be unidirectional and occurred with roughly equal frequency in abstract and concrete sentences. The results were interpreted as opposed to surface structure theories of sentence memory, since explanation in terms of word associations and sequential dependencies proved unsuccessful. The results were also taken to be opposed to image theories of sentence memory, since image theories predict few ff any synonym substitution responses for abstract sentences, while Experiment III found large numbers of synonym substitutions in both abstract and concrete sentences. The results support the position that memory for sentences is in terms of nonlinguistic, nonimage, abstract representations (ideas).     

Investigating the Effects of Applicant Justice Perceptions on Job Offer Acceptance

Drawing on extant recruitment and organizational justice theory, this research examines the effects of justice perceptions on job acceptance decisions across 2 samples (n = 332 and 2,974) of applicants to jobs within the U.S. military. More specifically, we examine justice–job offer acceptance relations relative to other pertinent recruitment predictors including, organizational image, familiarity, person–organization (P–O) fit perceptions, and recruiter behaviors. Findings from both studies support the importance of justice perceptions in influencing job offer acceptance. Fairness perceptions accounted for 29.37% and 19.22% of the unique variance in job offer acceptance, in Studies 1 and 2, respectively. The results of this research provide much needed empirical evidence to the scant literature on actual job acceptance and highlight important practical implications for employers.     

Investigating the neurodevelopmental mediators of aggression in children with a history of child maltreatment:An exploratory field study

Maltreatment of children is a chronic community problem that increases the risk of future aggression. Despite several decades of research highlighting this relationship, few studies have explored the potential neuropsychological deficits that are likely to mediate it. This exploratory study aimed to examine how child maltreatment may be associated with aggression via impairment in the developing prefrontal-limbic-autonomic pathways that are implicated in neuropsychological models of aggression. Furthermore, it aimed to investigate the relationship between child maltreatment and both reactive and proactive aggression subtypes. To investigate this non-invasively in an at-risk population, children with a documented protective care history (n = 20) and a community control group (n = 30), aged between 6 and 12 years, were compared on measures of cardiovascular functioning, affect regulation and cognitive functioning aligned with this neuropsychological model. Whilst no group differences were found on cardiovascular functioning (i.e., resting heart rate, heart rate reactivity, heart rate variability), the protective care group performed significantly worse on measures of affect regulation and cognitive functioning (i.e., global intelligence, executive functioning, smell identification and social cognition). The relationship between child maltreatment and aggression was mediated by executive dysfunction and affect dysregulation but not global IQ, social cognition or olfactory identification. The results suggest that interventions targeting aggression in maltreated children will benefit from clinical assessment and psychological strategies that address the executive dysfunction and affect dysregulation that has been associated with this clinical outcome.