Creating Trauma-informed Sports Programming for Traumatized Youth: Core Principles for an Adjunctive Therapeutic Approach

ABSTRACT

Youth who have experienced trauma may find opportunities for recovery in community settings, such as team sports. Sports and other community settings may provide an important structure, a venue for persevering toward goals, and a place to connect with mentors and friends. However, the symptoms with which such youth present, such as hyperarousal and aggression, may serve as a barrier to the potentially supportive environment that sports may provide. The typical means of coaching in such environments may be adapted to increase accessibility to youth. In this article, we describe principles of trauma-informed sports programming, including adaptations to play structures, that draw from gold-standard trauma-informed psychotherapy approaches. These techniques may help youth workers adapt their settings to meet a broader range of needs and aspire to provide clinicians with tools for collateral work with trauma-exposed clients.     

A System of Axioms for Minkowski Spacetime

Journal of Philosophical Logic - We present an elementary system of axioms for the geometry of Minkowski spacetime. It strikes a balance between a simple and streamlined set of axioms and the...     

The Relationship of Appetitive, Reproductive and Posterior Pituitary Hormones to Alcoholism and Craving in Humans

A significant challenge for understanding alcoholism lies in discovering why some, but not other individuals, become dependent on alcohol. Genetic, environmental, cultural, developmental, and neurobiological influences are recognized as essential factors underlying a person's risk for becoming alcohol dependent (AD); however, the neurobiological processes that trigger this vulnerability are still poorly understood. Hormones are important in the regulation of many functions and several hormones are strongly associated with alcohol use. While medical consequences are important, the primary focus of this review is on the underlying confluence of appetitive/feeding, reproductive and posterior pituitary hormones associated with distinct phases of alcoholism or assessed by alcohol craving in humans. While these hormones are of diverse origin, the involvement with alcoholism by these hormone systems is unmistakable, and demonstrates the complexity of interactions with alcohol and the difficulty of successfully pursuing effective treatments. Whether alcohol associated changes in the activity of certain hormones are the result of alcohol use or are the result of an underlying predisposition for alcoholism, or a combination of both, is currently of great scientific interest. The evidence we present in this review suggests that appetitive hormones may be markers as they appear involved in alcohol dependence and craving, that reproductive hormones provide an example of the consequences of drinking and are affected by alcohol, and that posterior pituitary hormones have potential for being targets for treatment. A better understanding of the nature of these associations may contribute to diagnosing and more comprehensively treating alcoholism. Pharmacotherapies that take advantage of our new understanding of hormones, their receptors, or their potential relationship to craving may shed light on the treatment of this disorder.     

Mathematical Models of Central Pattern Generators in Locomotion

Possible neural connective patterns and functions with respect to interlimb coordination are studied theoretically with a mathematical model of the central pattern generating system for cat locomotion. Activities in populations of neurons controlling limb joint flexors and extensors in all four limbs are represented by a system of nonlinear differential equations. Solutions of the system for various parameter values simulate various gaits of the cat. The model is shown to be capable of generating all gaits of the cat and accounting for corresponding phase changes in interlimb coordination. The model also exhibits smooth changes of gait, and smooth initiation and termination of stepping. Further, within each limb, muscle sequencing, step cycle phases, and flexor-extensor interactions can be studied. The model suggests that one of the simplest mechanisms for a central command system to change the gait is via inhibition of specific interlimb propriospinal pathways. In a final section, properties of both proposed single limb and interlimb models are reviewed with specific reference to planning future experimental and theoretical studies.     

Piéron's Law holds during stroop conflict: insights into the architecture of decision making

Piéron's Law describes the relationship between stimulus intensity and reaction time. Previously (Stafford & Gurney, 2004), we have shown that Piéron's Law is a necessary consequence of rise-to-threshold decision making and thus will arise from optimal simple decision-making algorithms (e.g., Bogacz, Brown, Moehlis, Holmes, & Cohen, 2006). Here, we manipulate the color saturation of a Stroop stimulus. Our results show that Piéron's Law holds for color intensity and color-naming reaction time, extending the domain of this law, in line with our suggestion of the generality of the processes that can give rise to Piéron's Law. In addition, we find that Stroop condition does not interact with the effect of color saturation; Stroop interference and facilitation remain constant at all levels of color saturation. An analysis demonstrates that this result cannot be accounted for by single-stage decision-making algorithms which combine all the evidence pertaining to a decision into a common metric. This shows that human decision making is not information-optimal and suggests that the generalization of current models of simple perceptual decision making to more complex decisions is not straightforward.