Developing Anticipation Skills in Tennis Using On-Court Instruction: Perception versus Perception and Action

On-court instruction involving either Perception–action training or Perception-only training was used to improve anticipation skill in novice tennis players. A technical instruction group acted as a control. Participants' ability to anticipate an opponent's serve was assessed pre- and posttest using established on-court measures involving frame-by-frame video analysis. The perception–action and perception-only groups significantly improved their anticipatory performance from pretest to posttest. No pretest-to-posttest differences in anticipation skill were reported for the technical instruction group. The ability to anticipate an opponent's serve can be improved through on-court instruction where the relationship between key postural cues and subsequent performance is highlighted, and both practice and feedback are provided. No significant differences were observed between the perception–action and perception-only training groups, implying that either mode of training may be effective in enhancing perceptual skill in sport.     

IN DEFENCE OF NATURAL DAYLIGHT

Objects appear different as the illumination under which they are perceived varies. This fact is sometimes thought to pose a problem for the view that colours are mind‐independent properties: if a coloured object appears different under different illuminations, then under which illumination does the object appear the colour it really is? I argue that given the nature of natural daylight, and certain plausible assumptions about the nature of the colours it illuminates, there is a non‐arbitrary reason to suppose that it is under natural daylight that we are able to perceive the real colours of objects.     

The Impact of Disputants’ Expectations on Mediation Testing an Interventionist Model

This investigation extends previous work in mediation by developing and testing an interventionist mediation model using 91 mediated roommate disputes. A key assumption of the interventionist model is that effective mediators assume active, highly participatory roles in the mediation process. This control based model for mediation presumes that a critical function of a mediator is to orchestrate the interaction by developing and extending the information resources, enforcing the rules for the session, and encouraging disputants to make constructive proposals to reach an agreement collabora lively. The theoretical model examined the impact of expectations for reaching agreement on the mediation process using both mediators’ and disputants assessments of their sessions. The data were not inconsistent with the hypothesized model. The level of participants expectations, however, added little predictive power to the model.     

MECHANISMS LINKING REALISTIC JOB PREVIEWS WITH TURNOVER: A META‐ANALYTIC PATH ANALYSIS

A meta‐analytic path analysis with k = 52 studies and sample size of roughly 17,000 showed that enhanced perceptions of organizational honesty is the primary mechanism by which realistic job previews (RJPs) influence voluntary turnover. This suggests revisions to RJP theory to incorporate social exchange and the way RJPs lead individuals to feel about the organization. Results assessing several new potential moderators of relationships between RJPs and turnover found that the most effective RJP design may be an oral or written RJP delivered posthire and designed to signal organizational honesty. We discuss several key theoretical and practical implications of the results based on a novel signaling theory perspective on RJPs.     

The Poetry of Genetics: On the Pitfalls of Popularizing Science

The role genetic inheritance plays in the way human beings look and behave is a question about the biology of human sexual reproduction, one that scientists connected with the Human Genome Project dashed to answer before the close of the twentieth century. This is also a question about politics, and, it turns out, poetry, because, as the example of Lucretius shows, poetry is an ancient tool for the popularization of science. “Popularization” is a good word for successful efforts to communicate elite science to non‐scientists in non‐technical languages and media. According to prominent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, “sexual dominance is a human universal.” He meant, of course, that men dominate women. Like sociobiology, genetic science is freighted with politics, including gender politics. Scientists have gender perspectives that may color what they “see” in nature. As the late Susan Okin Miller suggested in an unpublished paper tracing the detrimental impact of Aristotle's teleology on Western thought, scientists accustomed to thinking that men naturally dominate women might interpret genetic discoveries accordingly. Biologists have good, scientific reasons to fight the effects of bias. One must be critical of how scientists and popularizers of science, like Genome author Matt Ridley, frame truth and theory. Ridley's “battle of the sexes” metaphor and others have a doubtful place in serious explanations of science.     

Religious Life-Styles and Mental Health: A Follow-Up Study

This study is part of a longitudinal research project designed to discover more about the relations between religious involvement and mental health. It represents a 3-year follow-up on a group of religious young adults. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and by means of a psychological test battery. The results are discussed.