The relations of cognitive strategies with injury,motivation, and performance among marathon runners: Results from two studies

Abstract

Two studies, one retrospective and the other prospective, investigated the relation of cognitive strategies (association, dissociation) with injury, motivation, and performance variables among marathon runners. Association was found to predict injury in runners at 4 month follow-up. It appears that association is favored by runners who are more competitive, participate in numerous races, and are heavily invested in running. Contrary to early theorizing, findings demonstrated that dissociation was not related to injury but was related to motivation and performance variables suggesting that dissociating runners tend to run slower, be less competitive, and be less invested in running. It is proposed that motivational and physiological factors account for the use of cognitive strategies among marathon runners.     

Are Divided Attention Tasks Useful in the Assessment and Management of Sport-Related Concussion?

This article is a systematic review of the literature on divided attention assessment inclusive of a cognitive and motor task (balance or gait) for use in concussion management. The systematic review drew from published papers listed in PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL databases. The search identified 19 empirical research papers meeting the inclusion criteria. Study results were considered for the psychometric properties of the paradigms, the influence of divided attention on measures of cognition and postural control and the comparison of divided attention task outcomes between individuals with concussion and healthy controls (all samples were age 17 years or older). The review highlights that the reliability of the tasks under a divided attention paradigm presented ranges from low to high (ICC: 0.1–0.9); however, only 3/19 articles included psychometric information. Response times are greater, gait strategies are less efficient, and postural control deficits are greater in concussed participants compared with healthy controls both immediately and for some period following concussive injury, specifically under divided attention conditions. Dual task assessments in some cases were more reliable than single task assessments and may be better able to detect lingering effects following concussion. Few of the studies have been replicated and applied across various age groups. A key limitation of these studies is that many include laboratory and time-intensive measures. Future research is needed to refine a time and cost efficient divided attention assessment paradigm, and more work is needed in younger (pre-teens) populations where the application may be of greatest utility.     

Mechanisms of Corporate Social Responsibility: The Moderating Role of Transformational Leadership

Literature reviews have repeatedly emphasized the need to further investigate relationships between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and micro-organizational variables. The present research attempts to address this call by examining the direct and indirect relationship between individual perceptions of CSR and employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Multiphasic data from 207 workplace supervisor–subordinate dyads recruited from an online panel were analyzed to show that organizational identification mediated the relationship between CSR and OCBs. Furthermore, supervisor transformational leadership style moderated the mediation, such that the indirect effect of the organizational identification on the relationship between CSR and OCBs became nonsignificant under low transformational leadership. Based on these results, we make suggestions for using embeddedness programs to improve perceptions of CSR.     

Spatial limits on the nonvisual self-touch illusion and the visual rubber hand illusion: Subjective experience of the illusion and proprioceptive drift

The nonvisual self-touch rubber hand paradigm elicits the compelling illusion that one is touching one’s own hand even though the two hands are not in contact. In four experiments, we investigated spatial limits of distance (15 cm, 30 cm, 45 cm, 60 cm) and alignment (0°, 90° anti-clockwise) on the nonvisual self-touch illusion and the well-known visual rubber hand illusion. Common procedures (synchronous and asynchronous stimulation administered for 60 s with the prosthetic hand at body midline) and common assessment methods were used. Subjective experience of the illusion was assessed by agreement ratings for statements on a questionnaire and time of illusion onset. The nonvisual self-touch illusion was diminished though never abolished by distance and alignment manipulations, whereas the visual rubber hand illusion was more robust against these manipulations. We assessed proprioceptive drift, and implications of a double dissociation between subjective experience of the illusion and proprioceptive drift are discussed.     

Conscious thoughts from reflex-like processes: A new experimental paradigm for consciousness research

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research.     

The Rosenzweig picture-frustration study as a measure of reaction to personal Evaluation

The P-F Study was given to three groups of incarcerated delinquents categorized as to parole evaluation status. The hypothesis tested was that those Ss who were being evaluated for parole would give significantly fewer extrapunitive (E) responses than matched Ss who were not being evaluated for parole. Statistical analyses of the data supported the hypothesis.

It was suggested that the probability of external reinforcement may be a basic determinant of responses to the P-F Study and perhaps to projective tests generally.