Connecting Personal History and Organizational Context: Suggestions for Developing Educational Programs for Youth Soccer Coaches

Literature underscores the complex role of coaches in sport organizations, especially in youth sectors. Their need for support, not only on the technical level, is emerging. In recent years an interesting international debate has evolved regarding what education is most suitable to support coach development. The article intends to enter this debate by proposing an educational model for youth soccer coaches. This educational proposal is the outcome of reflection that originated from various experiences with about 110 Italian youth soccer coaches over the past six years. The first part is dedicated to a review of the literature on coaching education, and the second to the educational model presented (e.g., theoretical background, characteristics, setting, outcomes, and considerations regarding the management of this educational process). The strength of this model was precisely to have put some recurrent issues in dialogue with the specific organizational contexts in which the educational programs were implemented.     

Effects of a REBT Based Training on Children and Teachers in Primary School

Rational Emotive Education (REE) is a psychological educational program offering a preventative psycho-educational curriculum to children in order to teach them emotional literacy skills. REE helps children by teaching them to challenge irrational thinking, to minimize their reactions to disappointment and frustrations, to cope more effectively with problems, and to more fully accept themselves. The efficacy of REE training for children and teachers was examined in a sample of 211 third grade students from nine different classes and 26 teachers. Each class was randomly assigned to one of three different groups, two experimental groups and a control group, each receiving different training. First objective of our study was to evaluate the efficacy of a REE training based on storytelling in changing children’s irrational beliefs. Second objective of our study was to observe the efficacy of a teachers’ training similar to that applied in REBT-focused school consultation groups in enhancing their self-efficacy. Results show an improved tendency in children to think rationally and an enhanced perception of self-efficacy in teachers for those groups that underwent the training compared to the control group. Our results suggest that REBT based trainings for children and teachers should be integrated into the classroom curriculum in order to prevent mental health problems and encourage positive social and emotional well-being.     

A Cross-cultural Study of Biological,Psychological, and Social Antecedents of Self-objectification in Italy and Romania

Although there is extensive documentation of the damaging psychological consequences of self-objectification, more research is needed to explain its antecedents. With the present study we (a) investigated the correlates of self-objectification by analyzing biological (age and body-mass index), psychological (self-esteem), and sociocultural dimensions (influence of mass media and significant others) in women and men; (b) examined the role of culture in self-objectification processes; and (c) tested the effect of gender as a moderator in the relationship between both psychological and sociocultural dimensions and self-objectification. A total of 770 heterosexual adults residing in Italy and Romania completed a self-reported questionnaire. Self-objectification was operationalized as Body Surveillance (BS) and Body Shame (BSH); however, because the the BS subscale was not satisfactorily reliable, our focus was restricted to BSH. The correlates of self-objectification for BSH were analyzed separately by nationality in regression models. Overall, BSH emerged as a process influenced by agents rooted in biological and psychological domains, as well as in social and cultural domains. High educational level and high self-esteem (this last particularly in men) correlated with reduced body shame for the Romanian sample, whereas within the Italian sample, the internalization of media standards and influence of significant others emerged as risk factors for body shame. Taken together, these findings underline the need to identify cross-cultural constants of self-objectification, as well as differences across contexts, in order to better understand self-objectification and to promote protective factors in specific culturally situated interventions.     

Exploring and integrating discrete and dimensional approaches while inducing negative emotional states

Selecting visual stimuli for inducing specific emotional states is very challenging, since the choice relies on specific conceptualization of emotions. In this work, we present a set of 55 stimuli, realized integrating discrete and dimensional theories of emotions, and specifically selected to investigate anger, fear, and disgust reactions in non-clinical and clinical contexts. Our set of stimuli presents several aspects of novelty since (1) a large and heterogeneous sample of subjects from the general population was involved in the labelling task, and (2) bivariate and multivariate statistical techniques were applied to integrate emotion models. The proposed set of stimuli could be useful for researchers and other professionals in the affective sciences to address negative emotion recognition issues within a broader perspective both in general population and in psychiatric samples. The obtained comprehensive characterization of the stimuli allowed us to confirm the sexual dimorphism in emotional processing.     

Dual commitment profiles and job satisfaction among temporary agency workers

Temporary agency workers (TAWs) are an ever-increasing type of employees which establish a double work relationship with both the agency and the client organization. Within this context, the concept of dual commitment has received considerable attention in the last years. The present contribution integrates dual commitment line of research with the one adopting a person-centered approach to the study of commitment configurations, to investigate commitment profiles on a large sample of TAWs. According to Sinclair et al.'s framework, we aimed to identify TAWs' commitment profiles based on their levels of dual affective commitment (to the agency and to the client organization) and on their general continuance commitment and to investigate differences in job satisfaction among profiles. Latent profile analyses on 7225 TAWs revealed 5 distinct profiles, namely Dually Free Agents, Dually Involved, Dually Allied, (Unilaterally) Client Allied and (Unilaterally) Agency Invested. The Dually Involved profile, followed by the Dually Allied profile, had the highest level of job satisfaction, whereas the Dually Free Agent profile and the (Unilaterally) Agency Invested had the lowest. Furthermore, the (Unilaterally) Client Allied group had a higher level of job satisfaction as compared to the (Unilaterally) Agency Invested profile. Implications are discussed.     

The practice of speleology: What is its relationship with spatial abilities?

Cognitive Processing - Given the evidence of motor and exploring activities being related to spatial abilities on different scales, the present study considers the case of speleology, a peculiar...     

Uncertainties

In contemporary science uncertainty is often represented as an intrinsic feature of natural and of human phenomena. As an example we need only think of two important conceptual revolutions that occurred in physics and logic during the first half of the twentieth century: (1) the discovery of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics; (2) the emergence of many-valued logical reasoning, which gave rise to so-called ‘fuzzy thinking’. I discuss the possibility of applying the notions of uncertainty, developed in the framework of quantum mechanics, quantum information and fuzzy logics, to some problems of political and social sciences.     

Classroom justice and psychological engagement: students’ and teachers’ representations

This article presents the results of a study carried out with the aim to: (1) analyze secondary school students’ and their teachers’ ideal representations of classroom justice, (2) deepen the topic of students’ sense of injustice, and (3) explore the links between students’ perceived injustice and their psychological engagement in school, measured on different aspects (identification with one’s own class, learning motivation, dialogue with teachers). A questionnaire was distributed to 400 Italian secondary school students and their 79 teachers. Results show that the representations of ideal classroom justice refer to communication, principle of equality and principles of effort/need, and that the positions of teachers and students on these representations differ. Moreover, students report a rather diffuse and shared feeling of being treated in an unjust manner by their teachers, and this affects their psychological engagement in school. Results are commented on their theoretical, methodological and applicative implications.