Injury Representations,Coping, Emotions,and Functional Outcomes in Athletes With Sports‐Related Injuries: A Test of Self‐Regulation Theory1

This study examined the influence of injury representations on emotions and outcomes of athletes with sports‐related musculoskeletal injuries using self‐regulation theory. Participants were athletes (N= 220; M age = 23.44 years, SD= 8.42) with a current sports‐related musculoskeletal injury. Participants self‐reported their cognitive and emotional injury representations, emotions coping procedures, physical and sports functioning, attendance at treatment centers, and 3‐week follow‐up attendance. Participants’ negative and positive affect were influenced by emotional representations. Identity, causal attributions, and emotional representations influenced physical functioning; and identity, serious consequences, causal attributions, and emotional representations predicted sports functioning. Injury severity, identity, and personal control predicted attendance at treatment centers, but the effect of personal control was mediated by problem‐focused coping. Problem‐focused coping predicted 3‐week follow‐up attendance. Results support self‐regulation theory for examining injury representations in athletes.     

Self-determination: a buffer against suicide ideation

Self-determination was examined as a protective factor against the detrimental impact of negative life events on suicide ideation in adolescents. It is postulated that for highly self-determined adolescents, negative life events have a weaker impact on both hopelessness and suicide ideation than for non-self-determined adolescents. In turn, hopelessness is hypothesized to generate less suicide ideation for highly self-determined individuals. Results from multigroup analyses confirm that both the direct and indirect links between negative life events and suicide ideation were significantly weaker among participants high in self-determination. The protective role of self-determination against negative life events is discussed.     

Multicultural Women's Experience of Household Labor, Conflicts, and Equity

This study examines a group of 419 multicultural women (64 African Americans, 136 Asian Americans, 171 Hispanic Americans, and 48 Middle Eastern Americans) from Southern California. It examines Chafetz's thesis that women with macrolevel power (high socioeconomic status, SES) will show higher levels of conflict with their spouses over household labor. Such conflict is expected to relate to dissatisfaction with the division of household labor as well as time or task differences with spouses over housework. The multicultural women in this study differed among themselves by SES (proportional income, job status, and education) as well as by the household time and tasks with their spouses, but such factors did not influence conflict. Results indicate that regardless of ethnicity or macrolevel power, multicultural women who perform more household tasks than other women are more dissatisfied with the division of labor. These variables alone influence the number of conflicts per week reported by racial and ethnic couples. When reasons for conflict are compared, the equity issue of unfair share is cited more frequently than any others. In general, comparisons with one's spouse on traditional woman's tasks and time on women's work are not salient to the experience of household labor conflicts among multicultural women even when macrolevel power is attained. The majority of our respondents earn 39% of the household income and work for pay 30 hr/week, yet perform the majority of necessary household labor. The proportional income and overall education levels of this sample are similar to Census Bureau statistics for their respective U.S. groups in 1995–1996.     

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: self-esteem differences in the experience and anticipation of success

Successes--defined broadly as meeting important standards or receiving positive evaluations--are widely assumed to be enjoyed equally by people with high self-esteem (HSEs) and low self-esteem (LSEs). Three studies examined the contradictory hypothesis that HSEs react more favorably to success than do LSEs and that success brings about certain unfavorable consequences for LSEs. Undergraduate participants reacted to a laboratory-manipulated success (Studies 1 and 2) or imagined highly positive events in the future (Study 3). Self-esteem differences emerged in anxiety, thoughts about the self, and (in Study 3) thoughts about non-self-related aspects of the event. LSEs were more anxious than HSEs after succeeding, success improved HSEs' self-relevant thoughts but not LSEs', and LSEs focused more on success's negative aspects.     

Responses to interpersonal transgressions in families: forgivingness, forgivability, and relationship-specific effects

Social relations analyses examined the relative importance of forgivingness (disposition to forgive others), forgivability (tendency to obtain forgiveness from others), and relationship effects in determining family members' transgression-related interpersonal motivations (TRIMs) and their perceptions of others' TRIMs toward them (PTRIMs). In 2 studies, the individual and dyadic predictors of these components and their relative importance differed by family role (father, mother, or early adolescent child). Dispositional tendencies accounted for the most variance in father and child forgiveness, whereas mothers' TRIMs and PTRIMs were more strongly determined by relationship and partner effects. Personality correlates of forgivingness and forgivability were moderated by family role. The findings point to the need to embed the study of forgiveness in more complex psychosocial contexts. The theoretical, methodological, and applied implications of this conclusion are discussed.     

The input to verb learning in Mandarin Chinese: a role for syntactic bootstrapping

The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in multiple frames? Over 6,000 child-directed utterances were parsed. Analyses revealed that transitive verbs, motion verbs, and internal/communication verbs were distinguished syntactically; moreover, the 60 target verbs were used in multiple sentence frames. These findings support a role for syntactic bootstrapping in Mandarin verb learning.     

Depression After Traumatic Brain Injury: A Review of Evidence for Clinical Heterogeneity

Depression represents a major source of disability among individuals who have suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI), with estimates of prevalence in this population ranging over 50%. In comparison with other sequelae of TBI, depression is often poorly conceptualized and treated among acute care and rehabilitation professionals. One reason for this is the lack of clear etiological models for the development of depression following TBI. This paper argues that post-TBI depression actually represents a heterogeneous category, with multiple etiologic pathways and clinical implications. The literature in this area is reviewed, with an emphasis on an appreciation of the diversity within this clinical population. Conclusions focus on suggestions for differential diagnosis and treatment options.     

Do dogs (Canis familiaris) understand invisible displacement?

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) perform above chance on invisible displacement tasks despite showing few other signs of possessing the necessary representational abilities. Four experiments investigated how dogs find an object that has been hidden in 1 of 3 opaque boxes. Dogs passed the task under a variety of control conditions, but only if the device used to displace the object ended up adjacent to the target box after the displacement. These results suggest that the search behavior of dogs was guided by simple associative rules rather than mental representation of the object's past trajectory. In contrast, Experiment 5 found that on the same task, 18- and 24-month-old children showed no disparity between trials in which the displacement device was adjacent or nonadjacent to the target box.