On Versus Off the Pitch: The Transiency of Body Satisfaction Among Female Rugby Players, Cricketers, and Netballers

In this study I investigated the development of body satisfaction among women rugby players, cricketers, and netballers. I also sought to assess the impact of sport participation on both athletic and “feminin” identity. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 rugby players, 10 cricketers, and 10 netballers. The interviews focused on the experience of playing sport and the impact sport had made on respondents' perceptions of their bodies. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to explore the interview data it was found that, although sport participation did lead to positive perceptions of their bodies, this effect was transient. Once placed in a social environment body satisfaction decreased, and women's perceptions of their bodies changed because of a perceived demand to conform to socially accepted and expected norms of (heterosexual) physical attractiveness. Fear of being perceived as lesbian and the perceived naturalness of body concern were also identified.     

An examination of the "hot hand" in professional golfers

A study investigated the "hot hand" among professional golfers. Hole-to-hole scores within 747 tournaments from a randomly chosen group of 35 players on the 1997 PGA Tour were analyzed. Contingency analyses gave no evidence for the "hot hand". Players were just as likely to score a birdie or better following a par or worse hole as make a birdie or better following a birdie or better hole. These results are consistent with those found for individual players in baseball and basketball.     

Treating Hypochondriasis with Interpersonal Psychotherapy

The treatment of hypochondriacal patients can be conceptualized as taking one of three approaches. These typically address one of the following questions: 1) “Should the patient be preoccupied?” 2) “Why is the patient preoccupied?” 3) “What are the interpersonal consequences of being preoccupied?” Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) is specifically designed to address the last of these questions. IPT focuses on understanding the patient’s real distress, exploring the patient’s maladaptive communications, and modifying those communications so that others are more able to meet the patient’s attachment needs. With a focus on communication in a time-limited frame, fostered by a strong collaborative relationship, IPT appears to be an effective method of reducing hypochondriacal behavior.     

Do wild New Caledonian crows (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Corvus moneduloides</Emphasis>) attend to the functional properties of their tools?

New Caledonian crows are the most proficient non-hominin tool manufacturers but the cognition behind their remarkable skills remains largely unknown. Here we investigate if they attend to the functional properties of the tools that they routinely use in the wild. Pandanus tools have natural barbs along one edge that enable them to function as hooking implements when the barbs face backwards from the working tip. In experiment 1 we presented eight crows with either a non-functional (‘upside-down’) or a functional pandanus tool in a baited hole. Four of the crows never flipped the tools. The behaviour of the four flipping birds suggested that they had a strategy of flipping a tool when it was not working. Observations of two of the eight crows picking up pandanus tools at feeding tables in the wild supported the lack of attention to barb direction. In experiment 2 we gave six of the eight crows a choice of either a barbed or a barbless pandanus tool. Five of the crows chose tools at random, which further supported the findings in experiment 1 that the crows paid little or no attention to the barbs. In contrast, a third experiment found that seven out of eight crows flipped non-functional stick tools significantly more than functional ones. Our findings indicate that the crows do not consistently attend to the presence or orientation of barbs on pandanus tools. Successful pandanus tool use in the wild seems to rely on behavioural strategies formed through associative learning, including procedural knowledge about the sequence of operations required to make a successful pandanus tool. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Smooth pursuit in schizophrenia: a meta-analytic review of research since 1993

Abnormal smooth pursuit eye-tracking is one of the most replicated deficits in the psychophysiological literature in schizophrenia [Levy, D. L., Holzman, P. S., Matthysse, S., &; Mendell, N. R. (1993). Eye tracking dysfunction and schizophrenia: A critical perspective. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 19, 461–505]. We used meta-analytic procedures to quantify patient-control differences in eye-tracking and to evaluate potential moderators of effect size including patient and target characteristics and characteristics of the control population (matched or not). The magnitude of patient-control differences in pursuit depended on the measure. Global measures had large effect sizes. Among specific measures, maintenance gain and leading saccades yielded large effect sizes, with gain also yielding the narrowest confidence interval. Effect sizes associated with specific measures of smooth pursuit vs. specific measures of intrusive saccades did not clearly implicate one system over the other. Patient demographics and target characteristics generally had little influence on effect sizes. However, studies that failed to sex-match patients and controls tended to have smaller effect sizes for maintenance gain and catch-up saccade rate. Average effect sizes and confidence limits for global measures of pursuit and for maintenance gain place these measures alongside the very strongest neurocognitive measures in the literature [Heinrichs, R. W. (2004). Meta-analysis, and the science of schizophrenia: Variant evidence or evidence of variants? Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 28, 379–394] for distinguishing between patients with schizophrenia and controls.     

Parity of match play: an LPGA replication

This study investigated whether the slight advantage of higher seeded players to win in match play on the men's Professional Golfers' Association Tour generalizes to the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour. Analysis showed no significant advantage for the higher seeded player in match play. The highly restricted range of skill of tour players makes it mainly a matter of chance who will win any match-play event or who will have the better or worse scores on any given day.     

Minimally-effective interpolated stimuli in weight discrimination

The question of minimally effective weights was investigated by using an interpolated anchor paradigm. The weight series of 100 to 300 g,at 50-g-step intervals, was shown to be significantly affected by an interpolated anchor of 0.5 g, thus demonstrating a reduction in the region of ineffectiveness. The results were discussed in terms of procedural artifacts in the weight-judging methods reported in previous literature.