Religious coping,stress, and quality of life of Muslim university students in New Zealand

Most of the research on religious coping has been conducted with Christian participants from Western cultures, although in recent years increasingly more studies have been conducted with Muslim participants. For university students in Muslim countries, religiosity is positively correlated with a variety of indices of mental health and psychological well-being, but only a small number of studies investigated coping in Muslims living and studying in a non-Muslim country. The present study thus explored the relationship between perceived stress, quality of life (QOL), and religious coping in a sample of 114 Muslim university students in New Zealand. International Muslim students had higher levels of spirituality/religiousness than domestic Muslim students, and used more positive and negative religious coping methods. For international students, positive religious coping was positively related to QOL and lack of stress, while, for domestic students, negative religious coping was negatively related to the QOL and increased stress. This different pattern may relate to the ethnic background of the participants, and the results of the present study thus highlight that Muslims studying at universities overseas can certainly not be considered as a homogenous group.     

Establishing Standards for Basketball Elite Referees' Decisions

Basketball referees' decisions in ambiguous situations are supposed to adhere to common standards. We propose that standards can be established by video training-programs. Thirty-three German elite basketball referees participated in an online experiment. Feedback during a learning phase influenced decisions (foul vs. no call) in a subsequent test phase. These results provide a starting point for further investigations into establishing standards for referees. They suggest that establishing standards for referees' decisions in ambiguous situations may be a worthwhile approach for improving the quality of referees' decisions.     

A Video-Based Training Method for Improving Soccer Referees’ Intuitive Decision-Making Skills

The purpose of this study was to investigate coaches’ perceptions on the impact of a coach training program designed to promote youth developmental outcomes. Participants were coaches of youth sport teams. Multiple methods were used to collect data. Coaches reported many benefits for themselves, their athletes, and their teams. They reported an increase in knowledge and a better understanding of their players. Participants perceived that the activities promoted cohesion and communication, while also contributing to the development of athlete competence, confidence, connection, and character/caring. The results provide guidance for creating and delivering coach training programs designed to promote youth developmental outcomes.     

Assessing the Level of Structural Integration Using Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnosis (OPD): Implications for DSM–5

In order to investigate the state-trait anxiety distinction in emotionally disturbed and normal children, the responses of 120 emotionally disturbed children and 126 normal children to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (Spielberger, 1973) were factor analyzed separately. For the emotionally disturbed group two A-State and two A-Trait factors were found with the A-State factors accounting for significantly more of the variance than did A-Trait factors. For the normal group four A-State and two A-Trait factors were found, but there was not a significant difference between the amount of variance accounted for by A-State and A-Trait factors. Results were discussed as supporting the state-trait distinction and as having several implications for future research on anxiety.     

Editorial

This paper discusses contraindications to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training. From Freud onwards, there has been a clear understanding that not all patients are helped by psychoanalysis, but there has been considerable controversy as to who might benefit from treatment, and whether this depends on the diagnosis, the personality or the rather vague concept of “analysability". Increasing emphasis has been placed on the analyst-patient relationship and its characteristics, without this clearly solving the dilemma. Moreover, while psychoanalysis was previously perceived rather uniformly in its classical version, treating mainly neurotics, increasing differentiation between psychoanalytic schools has appeared in the last fifty years, which would seem to give grounds for a widening of indications. This development has increased the need for rational criteria for indications and contraindications. In this article, research findings relating to outcome and process and the therapeutic relationship will be examined in parallel with clinical experience. As the therapeutic relationship is probably decisive for the outcome of the treatment, scrutiny of who is suited to be a psychoanalyst should have been an important focus of research. This has not been the case. Available research on this issue and the experiences of practitioners in the evaluation of candidates will be discussed in the following.     

The Disambiguation Prediction Effect

ABSTRACT

Children tend to select a novel object rather than a familiar object when asked to identify the referent of a novel label. Current accounts of this so-called disambiguation effect do not address whether children have a general metacognitive representation of this way of determining the reference of novel labels. In two experiments (each N = 48), three- and four-year-olds received a prediction task that required such a representation. In the initial phase, children completed four disambiguation test trials that were presented as instances of the same “game.” In the next phase, they received four additional trials. These differed only in that before the label was presented, children were asked to predict which object “was going to be right.” On the first prediction trial, most four-year-olds predicted the novel object, whereas most three-year-olds did not. On subsequent trials, despite having received feedback regarding predictions, three-year-olds showed no tendency to begin to predict the novel object, whereas most four-year-olds continued to make this prediction. These findings add to the evidence that most children develop a general metacognitive representation of their tendency to map novel labels onto novel rather than familiar objects some time around their fourth birthday.