Benefits and Usefulness of a Personal Motivation Video: A Case Study of a Professional Mountain Bike Racer

Video has been incorporated into coaching and sport performance for skill development and as a feedback instrument. The purpose of the study was to examine the perceived usefulness and benefits such as enhanced motivation, concentration, and anxiety management of using a personal motivation video (PMV). A PMV is a video with music personally created for the athlete. The participant was a 23-year-old male professional mountain bike racer. Data from open-ended interviews and evaluation forms were examined. Results indicated the PMV to be particularly useful for motivation, mental imagery, confidence and emotional management, and concentration. PMVs can be a creative and useful tool for sport psychology researchers and practitioners to apply imagery in a unique way. Recommendations for improvements to the PMV for future use are highlighted, as well as suggestions for future research and applications are presented.     

Jonah's Crisis: Commentary on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

In discussing Zornberg's paper, Jonah's Flight, the author uses Zornberg's multifaceted midrashic analysis as a portal to offer an alternative reading of the Jonah text. Using Relational and British Object Relations psychoanalytic theories, the author explores Jonah's state of mind, focusing on his profound despair. Most notably she finds that his despair is indicative of traumatic disappointment stemming from the sense of not being recognized by God, experiencing an acute disconnection. Jonah is then seen as being in crisis: incapable of self-reflection, caught in a dissociated self-state, and unable to inhabit and struggle with his own feelings. The result is alienation from himself, incapacity to feel concern for others and estrangement from God. Using the spiritual writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who believes that God is in search of man, the author suggests that it is the need for an intersubjective relationship with God that is at the core of this Biblical story.     

Time is of the essence

Timing is essential to human behaviour, but the neural mechanisms underlying time perception are still unclear. New findings from a brain-imaging study by Coull et al. show that activity in a network of motor-related areas varies parametrically with attention to time. Given that a system in which timing is important (but not the primary function) is recruited when temporal judgements are required, we should perhaps reassess the notion of a dedicated timing system in the brain.     

Evidence for a detrimental relationship between hypertension history, prospective memory, and prefrontal cortex white matter in cognitively normal older adults

Hypertension affects many older adults and is associated with impaired neural and cognitive functioning. We investigated whether a history of hypertension was associated with impairments to prospective memory, which refers to the ability to remember to perform delayed intentions, such as remembering to take medication. Thirty-two cognitively normal older adult participants with or without a history of hypertension (self-reported) performed two laboratory prospective memory tasks, one that relied more strongly on executive control (nonfocal prospective memory) and one that relied more strongly on spontaneous memory retrieval processes (focal prospective memory). We observed hypertension-related impairments for nonfocal, but not focal, prospective memory. To complement our behavioral approach, we conducted a retrospective analysis of available structural magnetic resonance imaging data. Lower white matter volume estimates in the anterior prefrontal cortex were associated with lower nonfocal prospective memory and with a history of hypertension. A history of hypertension may be associated with worsened executive control and lower prefrontal white matter volume. The translational implication is that individuals who must remember to take antihypertensive medications and to monitor their blood pressure at home may be impaired in the executive control process that helps to support these prospective memory behaviors.     

Performance and interaction anxiety: specific relationships with other- and self-evaluation concerns

This study examines whether performance anxiety (PA) is specifically associated with other-evaluation concerns and interaction anxiety (IA) with self-evaluation concerns. Individuals with public speaking fears and high levels of PA or IA were distinguishable from nonanxious controls on measures taken during a public speaking challenge. In addition, high PA individuals exhibited more observer-rated negative speech characteristics in an Other-Evaluation condition compared to a Self-Evaluation condition, but high IA individuals and nonanxious individuals did not. These results provide some evidence for the distinctiveness of these dimensions of social anxiety.     

Relationships between Teachers' Occupational Stress and Their Burnout and Distress: Roles of Coping and Negative Mood Regulation Expectancies

Teaching school is a highly stressful occupation. Consequences of this stress are burnout, physical and emotional distress, and choosing to leave the profession. Research on teacher stress and burnout has largely focused on environmental and contextual factors while ignoring personality characteristics of teachers that may have an impact on relationships between job stress and its consequences. The current study has a cross-sectional self-report design, focusing on teachers' negative mood regulation (NMR) expectancies as predictors of their coping, burnout and distress, in response to occupational stress. NMR expectancies are people's beliefs that they can control the negative moods they experience. Participants were 86 primary and secondary school teachers, who filled out questionnaire measures of teacher stress, NMR expectancies, coping, burnout, and distress. Simultaneous regression analyses showed that higher stress on the job did indeed predict greater burnout and distress. Additionally, stronger NMR expectancies predicted more active coping. NMR expectancies also predicted less burnout and distress, independent of stress level and coping. Believing one could control one's negative moods was associated with more adaptive outcomes for teachers. Results argue for the value of examining individual difference variables in research on occupational stress, in particular negative mood regulation expectancies.     

Evaluating Turkish university students’ preferences for mental health therapists: A conjoint analysis approach

Due to fast-paced cultural and societal changes in Turkey, Turkish students now accrue both eastern and western cultural motives, which place Turkish students under stress. However, Turkish students have a stigma toward seeking mental health services. The current study aimed to use conjoint analysis to examine Turkish students’ preferences for mental health therapist variables regarding seeking help for adjustment problems to life in college. Students from two universities in Turkey were recruited on a volunteer basis to participate in this study (N = 235). The results indicated that the training institution, age, professional background, geographical region and gender significantly influence students’ formation of preferences for mental health therapists. The training institution had the most predominant effect on preferences. Implications for promoting help-seeking and mental health service utilization in Turkey are discussed.     

Repetition Priming Across the Adult Lifespan—The Long and Short of It

ABSTRACT

Previous reports suggest that repetition priming (i.e., enhanced processing of a stimulus after experience with that stimulus) is long lasting and impervious to the effects of age, in contrast to the pattern found with explicit memory. However, the nature of repetition priming in aged individuals remains unclear, as conflicting findings have also been reported. We used a longitudinal design to examine how repetition priming is affected by multiple stimulus repetitions (three presentations) and different delay intervals (no delay, 1 day, 1 week, and 1 month) in young adults, as well as in two groups of aging adults (young-elderly and old-elderly). Our findings extend previous reports that priming is long lasting, even when 1 month intervenes between the initial experience with an item and the subsequent priming test of that item (Cave, 1997 Cave, C. B. 1997. Very long-lasting priming in picture naming. Psychological Science, 8: 322–325. [CSA][CROSSREF][Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and is relatively impervious to the effects of age (Mitchell, et al., 1990 Mitchell, D. B., Brown, A. S. and Murphy, D. R. 1990. Dissociations between procedural and episodic memory: effects of time and aging. Psychology and Aging, 5: 264–276. [INFOTRIEVE][CSA][CROSSREF] [Google Scholar]). In addition, a more detailed characterization of priming and the effects of aging was revealed. Although priming is long lasting, remaining significant even at the month delay for all groups, it did decline over time and the rate of that decline differed with age. Both young-elderly and old-elderly groups showed a marked drop-off at 1 day, whereas young adults did not show a decline until 1 week. All groups benefited from multiple repetitions; however, this benefit disappeared at the month delay (in contrast to recognition memory, where the benefit remained significant). These findings support the assertion that repetition priming and explicit memory reflect the operation of distinct systems, and that these systems may undergo different rates of change in aging.     

Teaching About Genetic Testing Issues in the Undergraduate Classroom: A Case Study

Educating undergraduates about current genetic testing and genomics can involve novel and creative teaching practices. The higher education literature describes numerous pedagogical approaches in the laboratory designed to engage science and liberal arts students. Often these experiences involve students analyzing their own genes for various polymorphisms, some of which are associated with disease states such as an increased risk for developing cancer. While the literature acknowledges possible ethical ramifications of such laboratory exercises, authors do not present recommendations or rubrics for evaluating whether or not the testing is, in fact, ethical. In response, we developed a laboratory investigation and discussion which allowed undergraduate science students to explore current DNA manipulation techniques to isolate their p53 gene, followed by a dialogue probing the ethical implications of examining their sample for various polymorphisms. Students never conducted genotyping on their samples because of ethical concerns, so the discussion served to replace actual genetic testing in the class. A basic scientist led the laboratory portion of the assignment. A genetic counselor facilitated the discussion, which centered around existing ethical guidelines for clinical genetic testing and possible challenges of human genotyping outside the medical setting. In their final papers, students demonstrated an understanding of the practice guidelines established by the genetics community and acknowledged the ethical considerations inherent in p53 genotyping. Given the burgeoning market for personalized medicine, teaching undergraduates about the psychosocial and ethical dimensions of human gene testing seems important and timely, and introduces an additional role genetic counselors can play in educating consumers about genomics.     

Choke or thrive? The relation between salivary cortisol and math performance depends on individual differences in working memory and math-anxiety

In the current study, we explored how a person's physiological arousal relates to their performance in a challenging math situation as a function of individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity and math-anxiety. Participants completed demanding math problems before and after which salivary cortisol, an index of arousal, was measured. The performance of lower WM individuals did not depend on cortisol concentration or math-anxiety. For higher WM individuals high in math-anxiety, the higher their concentration of salivary cortisol following the math task, the worse their performance. In contrast, for higher WM individuals lower in math-anxiety, the higher their salivary cortisol concentrations, the better their performance. For individuals who have the capacity to perform at a high-level (higher WMs), whether physiological arousal will lead an individual to choke or thrive depends on math-anxiety.