Can Emotional Disclosure Promote Sport Injury-Related Growth?

This study makes an original and rigorous contribution to the psychology of sport injury literature by examining the efficacy of emotional disclosure to promote sport-injury-related growth (SIRG). Participants (N = 45) were assigned to one of three groups (i.e., written disclosure [WD], verbal disclosure [VD], or control), 30 of whom took part in social validation interviews (>45 hr) and member reflections to evidence methodological rigor. The VD group experienced SIRG. There was no significant difference between the WD and control groups. Practical implications are considered at intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural levels. Future research on emotional disclosure should proceed with caution and diversify.     

Savvy or Haphazard? Comparing Preschoolers’ Performance Across Selective Learning Tasks Based on Different Epistemic Indicators

Children frequently select learning sources based on epistemic cues, or cues pertaining to informants’ knowledge. Previous research has shown that preschoolers preferentially learn from informants who have been accurate in the past, appear confident, or have had visual access to relevant information. The present series of studies aimed to investigate the relation between these 3 types of epistemic selective learning abilities in 176 children ages 3 years to 6 years. Results indicated that children’s performance was mostly uncorrelated across the different selective learning tasks and tasks measuring theory of mind and executive function were not found to predict any selective learning skills. Implications for the reliability and current conceptual understanding of these selective learning tasks are discussed.     

Examining Hardiness,Coping and Stress-Related Growth Following Sport Injury

This study aimed to explain how injured athletes high in hardiness experienced stress-related growth and why athletes low in hardiness are less likely to derive such benefits. Twenty participants were theoretically sampled into high (n = 10) and low (n = 10) hardiness groups. Semistructured interviews were used for data collection. Findings revealed that athletes high in hardiness experienced stress-related growth from having an emotional outlet, which enabled them to reframe their injury and experience positive affect. In contrast, athletes low in hardiness had no emotional outlet, which led to suboptimal outcomes. These findings have important implications for practitioners working with injured athletes.     

INTERRESPONSE TIME STRUCTURES IN VARIABLE-RATIO AND VARIABLE-INTERVAL SCHEDULES

The interresponse-time structures of pigeon key pecking were examined under variable-ratio, variable-interval, and variable-interval plus linear feedback schedules. Whereas the variable-ratio and variable-interval plus linear feedback schedules generally resulted in a distinct group of short interresponse times and a broad distribution of longer interresponse times, the variable-interval schedules generally showed a much more continuous distribution of interresponse times. The results were taken to indicate that a log survivor analysis or double exponential fit of interresponse times may not be universally applicable to the task of demonstrating that operant behavior can be dichotomized into bouts of engagement and periods of disengagement.     

Parents’ Perception of the Effects of Church Involvement on Adolescent Substance Use

The study utilized qualitative methods to study protective factors among middle school students who were at risk for substance use. Three focus groups (consisting of 6–7 parents each) were conducted to learn more about parent’s perceptions of protective factors within the neighborhood, school, family, and the individual. In terms of spirituality, parents stressed the importance of church involvement in preventing high-risk behaviors. These findings will be highlighted to provide information that may serve as a basis for further examining church involvement and spirituality as protective factors in adolescent substance use.     

Immunity to proactive interference is not a property of the focus of attention in working memory

The Focus of Attention (FOA) is the latest incarnation of a limited capacity store in which a small number of items, in this case four, are deemed to be readily accessible and do not need to be retrieved. Thus a corollary of these ideas is that those items in the FOA are always immune to proactive interference. While there is empirical support for instances of immunity to PI in short-term retention tasks that involve memory for four-item lists, there are also many instances in which PI is observed with four-item lists as well as instances where PI and immunity to PI can be shown in the same experiment. In contrast to the FOA assumptions, an alternative cue-based account predicts both the presence of PI and immunity to PI as a function of the relation between the cues available and the particular test. Three experiments contrasted the FOA assumptions and the cue-based approach in a short-term cued recall task in which PI is manipulated by testing whether the presentation of previous, similar items would interfere with immediate recall of three list items. The results indicated that even with very short lists, both PI and immunity to PI could be observed. The PI effects observed in our experiment are at odds with the FOA approach and are more readily explained using the cueing account.