Gratitude Enhances Change in Athletes’ Self-Esteem: The Moderating Role of Trust in Coach

Self-esteem is a positive evaluation of oneself that can facilitate optimal functioning. However, little research has focused on its antecedents in sport. Accordingly, we adopted an interactionism perspective and proposed that gratitude, a dispositional factor, will enhance an athlete's self-esteem and affective trust in coach, a situational factor, will strengthen such a positive effect. Athletes completed measures of gratitude, affective trust in coach, and self-esteem at Time 1 and self-esteem at Time 2 after 6 months. Results showed that athletes with higher levels of gratitude increased their self-esteem over time when they had higher affective trust in their coaches.     

Increasing Students' Scientific Creativity: The “Learn to Think” Intervention Program

The “Learn to Think” (LTT) Intervention Program was developed for raising thinking abilities of primary and secondary school students. It has been implemented in more than 300 schools, and more than 200,000 students took part in the experiment over a 10‐year span. Several longitudinal intervention studies showed that LTT could promote the development of students' thinking ability, learning motivation, and learning strategy as well as raise academic performance in primary schools. This article describes a study of the influence and the delayed effects of LTT on the scientific creativity of secondary school students. One hundred and seven students were selected from a secondary school, 54 of them participated in the LTT every 2 weeks and the rest had not. The intervention lasted 2 years, and the delayed effect was explored half a year after terminating the intervention. The Scientific Creativity Test for Secondary School Students was used four times from pre‐test to delayed post‐test. The results indicated that the LTT did promote the development of scientific creativity of secondary school students, and the effects on the scientific creativity were not necessarily immediate, but tended to be long‐lasting.     

Do knee concentric and eccentric strength and sagittal-plane knee joint biomechanics differ between jumpers and non-jumpers in landing?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences of knee concentric and eccentric strength and impact related knee biomechanics between jumpers and non-jumpers during step-off landing tasks. Ten male college swimming athletes (non-jumpers) and 10 track and volleyball athletes (jumpers) were recruited to participate in two test sessions: a muscle strength testing session of concentric and eccentric extension for dominant knee joint at 60 °/s and 180 °/s and a landing testing session. The participants performed five trials of step-off landing in each of four conditions: soft and stiff landing from 0.4 m and 0.6 m landing heights. The three-dimensional kinematics and ground reaction force were recorded simultaneously during step-off landing conditions. The results showed that the jumpers had significantly greater peak knee eccentric extension and concentric flexion torques compared to the non-jumpers. No significant group effects were found for peak vertical ground reaction force and knee range of motion during landing. The jumpers had significantly greater knee contact flexion angle, maximum knee flexion angle and initial knee extension moment compared to the non-jumpers. These results suggest that these athletes adopted a favorable impact attenuation strategy that is related to the greater knee eccentric muscle strength and training.     

A Computationally Efficient State Space Approach to Estimating Multilevel Regression Models and Multilevel Confirmatory Factor Models

Although the state space approach for estimating multilevel regression models has been well established for decades in the time series literature, it does not receive much attention from educational and psychological researchers. In this article, we (a) introduce the state space approach for estimating multilevel regression models and (b) extend the state space approach for estimating multilevel factor models. A brief outline of the state space formulation is provided and then state space forms for univariate and multivariate multilevel regression models, and a multilevel confirmatory factor model, are illustrated. The utility of the state space approach is demonstrated with either a simulated or real example for each multilevel model. It is concluded that the results from the state space approach are essentially identical to those from specialized multilevel regression modeling and structural equation modeling software. More importantly, the state space approach offers researchers a computationally more efficient alternative to fit multilevel regression models with a large number of Level 1 units within each Level 2 unit or a large number of observations on each subject in a longitudinal study.     

High-pressure phase transition and lattice dynamics of rock-salt and FeSi-type phases of MgS

A phase transition of MgS under high pressure is investigated using a first-principles method. It is found from energy-volume calculations that the rock-salt (B1) phase of MgS transforms into a FeSi-type (B28) phase at 143?GPa. The calculated ground-state parameters in the B1 phase are in excellent agreement with available experimental and theoretical data. Ab initio phonon calculations are also performed to investigate the structural behaviour of MgS under high pressure. An unstable transverse acoustic mode and a phase transition from B1 to B28 phase at ~143.7?GPa driven by this soft mode are predicted. The B28 structure of MgS is stable up to 350?GPa according to lattice dynamics calculations.     

Determination of the depth distribution of subsurface damage during polishing of alumina

High-resolution grazing-incidence parallel-beam powder diffraction has been used to detect the subsurface damage below alumina surfaces subjected to polishing with cerium oxide or diamond. Despite very significant evolution of the surface morphology, no changes in the subsurface strains were observed over a 20min period of polishing with ceria. For both polishing materials, the variation with angle in the full-width at half-height maximum was successfully modelled by a strain distribution that fell exponentially with increasing depth. Although the surface amplitude and depth dependence parameter are coupled, we have been able to place upper limits on the depth to which the damage extends. Under realistic assumptions, the depth of damage induced by 1µm diamond paste is comparable with that from 3µm ceria polish.     

The orientation and temperature dependences of dislocation velocity in Ni 3 Al single crystals

The average velocities of screw dislocations in Ni 3 Al single crystals have been directly measured as a function of resolved shear stress (RSS) and orientation in the temperature domain of the flow stress anomaly using the etch-pit technique. The velocity was found to be extremely sensitive to the RSS in all cases. In contrast with ordinary metals, the screw dislocation velocities in Ni 3 Al show anomalous behaviour; under a constant RSS, the velocities decrease dramatically with increasing temperature. Furthermore, the velocities and the tension-compression asymmetry of the velocities depend on the orientation of applied stress.     

Prevalence and Predictors of Posttraumatic Growth in Accidentally Injured Patients

This study examined prevalence and predictors of posttraumatic growth in 180 accidentally injured patients of mainland China in their convalescence stage, investigating its relationships with demographic and accidental injury variables, personality, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and coping styles. Our results showed that posttraumatic growth (PTG) presented mostly in the domain of Relating to Others and indicated that PTG was significantly related to marital status, educational level, personality, coping styles, and PTSD symptoms. Avoidance of PTSD symptoms, Openness to experience, and positive coping were significant predictors of PTG. The findings emphasize that when promoting PTG of accidentally injured patients, healthcare providers should facilitate patients utilizing personal resources, understand PTG coexists with PTSD symptoms, and adjust interventions based on the coping styles the patients have adopted.     

Play it again: neural responses to reunion with excluders predicted by attachment patterns

Reunion behavior following stressful separations from caregivers is often considered the single most sensitive clue to infant attachment patterns. Extending these ideas to middle childhood/early adolescence, we examined participants' neural responses to reunion with peers who had previously excluded them. We recorded event‐related potentials among nineteen 11‐ to 15‐year‐old youth previously classified on attachment interviews (11 secure and 8 insecure‐dismissing) while they played a virtual ball‐toss game (Cyberball) with peers that involved fair play, exclusion and reunion phases. Compared to secure participants, dismissing participants displayed a greater increment in the N2 during reunion relative to fair play, a neural marker commonly linked to expectancy violation. These data suggest a greater tendency toward continued expectations of rejection among dismissing children, even after cessation of social exclusion. In turn, the link between self‐reported ostracism distress and neural signs of negative expectancy at reunion was moderated by attachment, such that self‐reports were discordant with the neural index of expectancy violation for dismissing, but not for secure children. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoRel5c-4s .     

Speech recall under heavy load conditions: Age,predictability, and limits on dual-task interference

An experiment is reported in which young and elderly subjects listened to and recalled spoken passages that ranged from highly predictable to low in predictability, under both single-task conditions and dual-task conditions in which passages were presented concurrently with a speeded matching task. Age differences in memory for the passages were shown to vary according to both the predictability of the text, and the level of importance of information. Although the elderly recalled less than the young, they showed similar patterns of recall for major ideas. At the level of details, however, age differences were larger as passages became less predictable. Age differences in memory were not magnified by the requirement to divide attention, regardless of whether an easy or more difficult concurrent task was presented. These findings suggest that although speech-processing ability in old age shows considerable resilience to conditions of heavy load, including divided attention, age-related changes may be observed at lower levels of information.