Factors Underpinning Football Officiating Excellence: Perceptions of English Premier League Referees

The purpose of the present study was to identify factors perceived to underpin football officiating excellence. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect data from 15 English Premier League referees. Through inductive content analysis, emerging themes were identified and comprised a variety of physical, environmental, and psychological factors: (a) mental toughness attributes, (b) support networks and services, (c) effective game management qualities, (d) multifaceted pre-match preparation, (e) performance-level enhancement, (f) opportunities to thrive, (g) personal characteristics, and (h) superior physical components. Findings acknowledge theoretical and applied implications for sport psychology professionals operating in elite football officiating.     

Anxiety Responses and Psychological Skill Use During the Time Leading up to Competition: Theory to Practice I

This study investigated temporal responses associated with competitive anxiety in athletes with facilitative and debilitative interpretations of their anxiety symptoms. Qualitative interviews assessed the intensity, frequency, and direction of cognitive and somatic symptoms experienced during a 7-day competitive cycle and the psychological strategies used to attain/maintain a positive psychological state. Analysis indicated three distinct temporal phases within the competitive cycle during which the intensity and frequency of cognitive and somatic symptoms increased. The facilitators utilized a refined repertoire of psychological skills to internally control and re-interpret the cognitive and somatic symptoms experienced. The debilitators did not possess this refined repertoire of psychological skills and relied on external strategies to stabilize the negative symptoms experienced. The findings emphasize the dynamic properties of the stress response and provide a framework for the structure, timing, and content of psychological skills interventions for use with performers who interpret anxiety symptoms as debilitative.     

General Belongingness,Workplace Belongingness,and Depressive Symptoms

Research has shown that a strong relationship exists between belongingness and depressive symptoms; however, the contribution of specific types of belongingness remains unknown. Participants (N=369) completed the sense of belonging instrument, psychological sense of organizational membership, and the depression scale of the depression anxiety stress scales. Factor analysis demonstrated that workplace and general belongingness are distinct constructs. When regressed onto depressive symptoms, these belongingness types made independent contributions, together accounting for 45% of variance, with no moderation effects evident. Hence, general belongingness and specific workplace belongingness appear to have strong additive links to depressive symptoms. These results add support to the belongingness hypothesis and sociometer theory and have significant implication for depression prevention and treatment. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unconscious and out of control: Subliminal priming is insensitive to observer expectations

We asked whether the influence of an invisible prime on movement is dependent on conscious movement expectations. Participants reached to a central target, which triggered a directional prime–mask arrow sequence. Participants were instructed that the visible arrows (masks) would most often signal a movement modification in a specific (biased) direction. Kinematic analyses revealed that responses to the visible mask were influenced by participants’ intentional bias, as movements were fastest when the more probable mask was displayed. In addition, responses were influenced by the invisible prime without regard to its relationship to the more probable mask. Analysis of the time of initial trajectory modifications revealed that both primes influenced responses in a similar manner after accounting for participants’ bias. These results imply that invisible stimuli automatically activate their associated responses and that unconscious priming of the motor system is insensitive to the conscious expectations of the participant making the pointing movements.     

Overall Freedom and Constraint

McDowell's contributions to epistemology and philosophy of mind turn centrally on his defense of the Aristotelian concept of a “rational animal”. I argue here that a clarification of how McDowell uses this concept can make more explicit his distance from Davidson regarding the nature of the minds of non-rational animals. Close examination of his responses to Davidson and to Dennett shows that McDowell is implicitly committed to avoiding the following “false trichotomy”: that animals are not bearers of semantic content at all, that they are bearers of content in the same sense we are, and that they are bearer of “as if” content. Avoiding the false trichotomy requires that we understand non-rational animals as having concepts but not as making judgments. Furthermore, we need to supplement McDowell's distinction between the logical spaces of reasons and of the realm of law with what Finkelstein calls “the logical space of animate life”. Though McDowell has taken some recent steps to embrace a view like this, I urge a more demanding conception than what McDowell has thus far suggested.     

Assessing Self-Critical Perfectionism in Clinical Depression

The Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI) is a multidimensional measure of narcissistic pathology. This study examined the factor structure and psychometric properties of the PNI in a sample of Chinese university students in Hong Kong. Eight hundred and thirty-one students completed an online battery of questionnaires assessing narcissistic pathology, self-esteem, unstable sense of self, and maladaptive self-defense strategies. Results replicated the 7 first-order factors and the 2 second-order factors of the PNI. Each of the 7 first-order factors and the 2 second-order factors had good internal consistency. Preliminary findings also supported the concurrent validity of the PNI. The PNI appeared to be a valid measure of narcissistic pathology among Chinese. Findings of this study suggest that the core pathology of pathological narcissism might involve an inflated sense of self-importance that is not substantiated by actual achievement, and bearing this unsubstantiated sense of self-importance renders narcissists highly susceptible to self-deflation when their narcissistic needs are not met.     

Media reviews

Abstract

Dr. H. James Lurie, reviewer of the videotape “Sybil's Plight” is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, in Seattle. His expertise in the development of training and educational audio-visual materials, as well as his long teaching experience with both primary care physicians and family therapists, makes his assessment especially valuable. The importance of family concepts in the treatment and management of patients and families who must cope with chronically disabling medical illnesses has reached a new level of concern, and has resulted in renewed interest in the fields of consultation-liaison and family medicine.

—I.A.

Sibyl's Plight, black and white videotape, Library, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, 3811 O'Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.     

Memory for emotional faces in major depression following judgement of physical facial characteristics at encoding

The aim of the present study was to establish if patients with major depression (MD) exhibit a memory bias for sad faces, relative to happy and neutral, when the affective element of the faces is not explicitly processed at encoding. To this end, 16 psychiatric out-patients with MD and 18 healthy, never-depressed controls (HC) were presented with a series of emotional faces and were required to identify the gender of the individuals featured in the photographs. Participants were subsequently given a recognition memory test for these faces. At encoding, patients with MD exhibited a non-significant tendency towards slower gender identification (GI) times, relative to HC, for happy faces. However, the GI times of the two groups did not differ for sad or neutral faces. At memory testing, patients with MD did not exhibit the expected memory bias for sad faces. Similarly, HC did not demonstrate enhanced memory for happy faces. Overall, patients with MD were impaired in their memory for the faces relative to the HC. The current findings are consistent with the proposal that mood-congruent memory biases are contingent upon explicit processing of the emotional element of the to-be-remembered material at encoding.     

Memory for affectively valenced and neutral stimuli in depression: Evidence from a novel matching task

Depressed persons have better memory for affectively negative than positive stimuli, a pattern generally not exhibited by non-depressed individuals. The mechanisms underlying this differential memory are not clear. In this study we examined memory for valenced and neutral stimuli in depressed and non-depressed individuals under conditions of relatively unconstrained encoding. We developed a novel task based on the game, Concentration, in which participants tried to match pairs of positive and negative words, and pairs of neutral words, hidden under squares in as few turns as possible. Whereas non-depressed participants selected and turned over positive squares more frequently than they did negative squares, depressed participants selected and turned over positive and negative squares equally often. Depressed participants also matched fewer positive word pairs within the first five minutes of the task than did non-depressed participants, and they exhibited poorer learning of positive words. Depressed and non-depressed participants did not differ in their matching of neutral words. These findings add to a growing literature indicating that depression is characterised by difficulties in the processing of positive stimuli.