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.     

Research Misconduct in the Age of Open Science: The Case of STAP Stem Cells

In early 2014, Dr Haruko Obokata and her co-authors caused a global media storm by publishing two scientific papers in Nature on stem cells. The papers proposed a surprisingly simple new method called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) to generate pluripotent stem cells for research purposes in a fast and inexpensive way. To the dismay of many, both papers were retracted within six months of their release due to data fabrication and falsification. The rise and fall of the STAP research illustrates the impacts of open science practices of quality control and validation on new scientific claims. In the STAP case, collective action generated through two online forums—the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog and PubPeer—exposed not only data manipulation in the two papers but also the irreproducibility of the purported new cellular reprogramming method. The case brings to the fore the tentative possibilities as well as potential pitfalls of ‘accelerated virtual witnessing’ through crowdsourced post-publication peer reviews that value accessibility and inclusiveness. Indeed, it calls for empirically grounded discussion on the ongoing reconfiguration of the shared system of values and norms or the moral economy of science.     

Attitude toward Christianity,sexual orientation,and parental religiosity in a sample of Italian adolescents

Literature suggests that several demographic variables are linked with religiosity in adolescence, such as gender, age and parental religiosity. The sample consisted of 910 young people (53% female) between 14 and 19 years of age, attending secular secondary schools in Rome, Italy. They self-identified as heterosexual adolescents (91.6%), and lesbian/gay (LG) adolescents (8.4%). High scores of positive attitudes toward God, Jesus, the Bible, prayer and church were associated with female gender, higher father’s religiosity, and higher mother’s religiosity, but not with age of the participants. As expected, heterosexual orientation was associated with a more positive attitude toward Christianity, controlling for sex, age, and parental religiosity.     

Multiplex Conflict: Examining the Effects of Overlapping Task and Relationship Conflict on Advice Seeking in Organizations

This study examines the extent to which multiplex conflict relationships, or those infused with both relationship and task conflict, are related to employee decisions regarding from whom to seek advice at work. Data were gathered from 75 employees in a medium-sized life sciences firm in the US Midwest and analyzed using social network analysis. Findings demonstrate that although employees were less likely to seek advice from someone with whom they experienced relationship conflict, employees were more likely to seek advice from those with whom they experienced task conflict. Moreover, advice was still sought from those with whom both forms of conflict were present simultaneously. The current study demonstrates that employees are willing to seek advice from those with whom there is task conflict despite the simultaneous presence of relationship conflict. Compared to relationships free of relationship conflict (e.g., friendships), those characterized by multiplex conflicts provide greater access to others with divergent perspectives while also reducing the need for advice seekers to invest resources towards the protection and maintenance of the positive affective portion of the relationship. Although much of the focus of conflict research has been directed towards intragroup task and relationship conflict, our multiplex social network approach provides a unique opportunity to explore the effects on advice seeking stemming from the co-occurrence of these distinct types of conflict within the same employee dyad. In doing so, we contribute to the continuing debate regarding the primacy of affective or cognitive concerns in judgment and behavior.     

The Method of Dialogue: Transaction Through Interaction

The text aims to give a contribution to the discussion raised by Grossen on two relevant issues: the way the dialogical construction of meaning overlaps with the interactional format of the human experience and the degree of congruence between the theoretical asset of dialogism and the whole of techniques which could be adopted within human sciences. Till now dialogism appears to be more a seductive theoretical perspective rather than a convincing methodological apparel. Diatextualism may be viewed as the conceptual and procedural framework able to fruitfully posit psychology into the realm of the “dialogical sciences”, because it is focussed on the “dialogical rationality” coming out from the relationship between transaction of meanings and interaction of actors.     

Mathematical Intuition and the Cognitive Roots of Mathematical Concepts

The foundation of Mathematics is both a logico-formal issue and an epistemological one. By the first, we mean the explicitation and analysis of formal proof principles, which, largely a posteriori, ground proof on general deduction rules and schemata. By the second, we mean the investigation of the constitutive genesis of concepts and structures, the aim of this paper. This “genealogy of concepts”, so dear to Riemann, Poincaré and Enriques among others, is necessary both in order to enrich the foundational analysis with an often disregarded aspect (the cognitive and historical constitution of mathematical structures) and because of the provable incompleteness of proof principles also in the analysis of deduction. For the purposes of our investigation, we will hint here to a philosophical frame as well as to some recent experimental studies on numerical cognition that support our claim on the cognitive origin and the constitutive role of mathematical intuition.     

Personality functioning in patients with a progressive course of multiple sclerosis

This study intended to describe general personality functioning in patients with a progressive course of multiple sclerosis. 55 consecutive rehabilitation inpatients with progressive course of multiple sclerosis were assessed with a multimethod test battery: the Expanded Disability Status Scale, the Beck Depression Inventory, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale, and the Rorschach Test administered and scored with Comprehensive System. The control group comprised 55 healthy participants with similar sociodemographic characteristics. Specific differences were found for both cognitive and affective aspects, as the patients with progressive course of multiple sclerosis had less positive self-image, less effective mediation processing, and an affective approach to reality. Present data illustrated the usefulness of examining patients with a progressive course of multiple sclerosis to identify abilities and difficulties in cognitive and affective patterns, and support better adaptation to relationships and the environment.     

The Purpose-in-Life Scale (PILS): internal consistency reliability,concurrent validity and construct validity among Catholic priests in Italy

ABSTRACT

The Purpose in Life Scale was designed to provide a 12-item unidimensional measure of purpose in life employing a five-point Likert rating for each item. The present study supports the psychometric properties of the Italian translation of this instrument among 155 Catholic priests (mean age?=?46 years, SD?=?12.16). Internal consistency reliability generated an alpha coefficient of .90. The first factor generated by principal component analysis accounted for 49.5% of variance. Concurrent validity against the Purpose in Life Test was supported by a correlation of .63. Construct validity was supported by a correlation of .54 with the Satisfaction in Ministry Scale and by a correlation of ?.51 with the Scale of Emotional Exhaustion in Ministry. These properties commend the scale for future use among Catholic priests.