Influence of perceived and preferred coach feedback on youth athletes' perceptions of team motivational climate

ObjectivesThis study examined youth ice hockey players' perceptions of individual feedback received from their coach, and the agreement and discrepancies between preferred and perceived coach feedback patterns, on athletes' perceptions of team motivational climate. The following research questions were answered: How does agreement in perceived and preferred coach feedback relate to task- and ego-involving motivational climate? How does the degree of discrepancy between perceived and preferred coach feedback relate to motivational climate? How does the direction of the discrepancy between perceived and preferred coach feedback relate to motivational climate?DesignThis study used non-probability based sampling within a cross-sectional (survey) design.MethodAthletes (n = 70) completed a self-report survey comprised of measures of coaching feedback and motivational climate. The data were examined using polynomial regression and response surface analysis.ResultsLinear associations were observed between coaching feedback and motivational climate, and unique associations between the perceived and preferred coach feedback discrepancies were distinctly related to increased perceptions of both task- and ego-involved motivational climates.ConclusionsThe type of feedback, purpose of the feedback, and agreement or discrepancy in perceptions and preferences for different feedback styles are important to understanding task- and ego-involved motivational climate in youth sport. Coaching programs should assist coaches in learning their athletes' preferences for positive and negative feedback in sport and matching these preferences with their individual feedback styles.     

Smiling virtual agent in social context

A smile may communicate different communicative intentions depending on subtle characteristics of the facial expression. In this article, we propose an algorithm to determine the morphological and dynamic characteristics of virtual agent's smiles of amusement, politeness, and embarrassment. The algorithm has been defined based on a virtual agent's smiles corpus constructed by users and analyzed with a decision tree classification technique. An evaluation, in different contexts, of the resulting smiles has enabled us to validate the proposed algorithm.     

Addressing Challenges in Individual Psychotherapy with Delusional Patients: A Case Study

Although cognitive-behavioral treatments for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders demonstrate strong results in clinical trials, not all patients respond to these treatments. Common challenges in psychotherapy with delusional patients include a mismatch between the therapist’s and the patient’s expectations about the purpose of therapy, the patient’s lack of motivation to reduce delusional beliefs in service of other goals, and the patient’s dependence on the delusions in order to preserve an intact sense of self. This case highlights the value of integrating a psychodynamic perspective with cognitive-behavioral interventions to address challenges in psychotherapy with chronically delusional patients.     

Working Memory Effects of Gap-Predictions in Normal Adults: An Event-Related Potentials Study

The current study examined the relationship between verbal memory span and the latency with which a filler-gap dependency is constructed. A previous behavioral study found that low span listeners did not exhibit antecedent reactivation at gap sites in relative clauses, in comparison to high verbal memory span subjects (Roberts et?al. in J Psycholinguist Res 36(2):175-188, 2007), which suggests that low span subjects are delayed at gap filling. This possibility was examined in the current study. Using an event-related potentials paradigm, it was found that low span subjects have an onset latency delay of about 200?ms in brain responses to violations of syntactic expectancies after the gap site, thus providing a time course measure of the delay hypothesized by previous literature.     

Global and local pitch perception in children with developmental dyslexia

This study investigated global versus local pitch pattern perception in children with dyslexia aged between 8 and 11 years. Children listened to two consecutive 4-tone pitch sequences while performing a same/different task. On the different trials, sequences either preserved the contour (local condition) or they violated the contour (global condition). Compared to normally developing children, dyslexics showed robust pitch perception deficits in the local but not the global condition. This finding was replicated in a simple pitch direction task, which minimizes sequencing and short term memory. Results are consistent with a left-hemisphere deficit in dyslexia because local pitch changes are supposedly processed by the left hemisphere, whereas global pitch changes are processed by the right hemisphere. The present data suggest a link between impaired pitch processing and abnormal phonological development in children with dyslexia, which makes pitch pattern processing a potent tool for early diagnosis and remediation of dyslexia.     

Birth order, sex of child, and perceptions of parental favoritism

Many studies have examined factors that influence discriminative parental solicitude. Sex, birth order, and age of the mother are a few factors demonstrated to influence levels of parental investment (especially as measured by offspring self-report). One indicator of a high level of parental investment is being a parental favorite. Using self-reports from a sample of several hundred young adults, we secured support for two hypotheses related to the influence of birth order and sex on parental favoritism. Fathers are not perceived as having a favorite child more often than are mothers, but are more likely to favor female children than are mothers. Mothers are perceived to be more likely to favor female children in blended sibships. Both mothers and fathers are perceived as favoring genetically-related children. The results also suggest that the birth order of the parental favorite varies with the birth order of the participant. Firstborns and lastborns report a pattern of favoritism that suggests parents favor firstborn and lastborn children. The discussion addresses limitations of the methodology and presents directions for future research.