An adolescent perspective on injury recovery and the return to sport

ObjectivesThe purpose of this investigation was to examine adolescent athletes' injury recovery and return-to-sport experiences. Given previous research highlighting competence, autonomy, and relatedness concerns among returning athletes (Podlog & Eklund, 2006), we sought to examine the extent to which basic psychological needs theory (BPNT: Ryan & Deci, 2007) could be used as framework for interpreting the research findings.DesignA qualitative design was employed in the present investigation.MethodEleven Australian athletes (M age = 15.3) who had incurred a range of severe injuries (e.g., anterior cruciate ligament tears, shoulder dislocations) were interviewed on 2–3 occasions (n = 27 interviews) spanning an 11-month period.ResultsAnalysis of the data revealed the following four key themes: (a) injury stress, (b) coping strategies, (c) experiences with social support, and (d) recovery outcomes. Injury stress provides insights into a range of stressors and strain responses reported by the adolescents across the recovery phases, while the theme on coping highlights the specific strategies used to maintain motivation, reduce uncertainties associated with the injury experience, and to keep focused on future athletic attainment. The third theme, experiences with social support, considers the transactions the adolescents held with members of their social network throughout their recovery. The final theme, recovery outcomes, describes participant perceptions of a successful/unsuccessful recovery and stress-related growth.ConclusionsResults suggest that competence and relatedness issues highlighted in BPNT may be relevant in exploring adolescent athletes' injury experience. Somewhat less evidence for the autonomy dimension of BPNT was apparent in adolescent comments.     

The notion of happiness in early Wittgenstein: towards a non-contentful account of happiness

This paper examines the notion of ‘happiness’ in the writings of the early Wittgenstein as a notion that does not involve any particular content or states of mind. The main question that the paper addresses is how we can retain a non-contentful account of happiness without turning happiness into an abstract notion, isolated from our concrete lives in language. The paper examines two pivotal components of the Wittgensteinian account of happiness: the ‘good exercise of the will’ and the ‘artistic way of seeing’. In both cases, I try to stress their non-contentful dimension, while simultaneously trying to understand them through language. The central concept for such a non-contentful aspect of language is the notion of ‘meaningfulness’. Thus the paper examines the pivotal components of the Wittgensteinian account of happiness in relation to the notion of ‘meaningfulness’: happiness is then explained as seeing a world against the background of possibilities of meaning.     

Reflective team in caring for people living with dementia: a base for care improvement

A reflective team (RT) is a team of professional carers who reflect on a specific caring issue under the direction of an RT leader. The goal for the reflective process is to accomplish care improvement based on research and proven experience, and the first step is to reflect upon the competence that already exists in the context in which RT takes place. This study aims to bring previous unarticulated competence in caring for people living with dementia to the surface after it has been reflected during RT sessions. Ten assistant nurses who work closely with patients who have dementia and attend RT sessions on a regular basis were interviewed about their competence for caring for people living with dementia. Using a phenomenographic analysis, two qualitatively separate categories emerged: general caring skills and dementia-specific caring skills. It was concluded that specific skills in caring for people living with dementia build in caring skills and that tacit knowledge can be explicit and be expressed when it has been reflected in RT.     

Brain bases of morphological processing in Chinese‐English bilingual children

Can bilingual exposure impact children's neural circuitry for learning to read? To answer this question, we investigated the brain bases of morphological awareness, one of the key spoken language abilities for learning to read in English and Chinese. Bilingual Chinese‐English and monolingual English children (N = 22, ages 7–12) completed morphological tasks that best characterize each of their languages: compound morphology in Chinese (e.g. basket + ball = basketball) and derivational morphology in English (e.g. re + do = redo). In contrast to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left middle temporal region, suggesting that bilingual exposure to Chinese impacts the functionality of brain regions supporting semantic abilities. Similar to monolinguals, bilinguals showed greater activation in the left inferior frontal region [BA 45] in English than Chinese, suggesting that young bilinguals form language‐specific neural representations. The findings offer new insights to inform bilingual and cross‐linguistic models of language and literacy acquisition.     

Social cognitive predictors of well-being in African college students

Lent and Brown's (2006, 2008) social cognitive model of work well-being was tested in two samples of African college students, one from Angola (N = 241) and one from Mozambique (N = 425). Participants completed domain-specific measures of academic self-efficacy, environmental support, goal progress, and satisfaction, along with measures of global positive affect and life satisfaction. Path analyses indicated that the model fit the data well overall, both in the full sample and in separate sub-samples by country and gender. Contrary to expectations, however, self-efficacy predicted academic satisfaction only indirectly, via goal progress; and goal progress predicted life satisfaction only indirectly, via academic satisfaction. The predictors accounted for substantial portions of the variance in both academic domain satisfaction and life satisfaction. Implications for research and practice involving the social cognitive model are considered.     

The mark of adaptive memory in healthy and cognitively impaired older adults and elderly

The survival processing paradigm has recently drawn attention to the functional aspects of memory functioning. The survival effect, characterized by better memory performance when information is processed in a survival context, as compared with a variety of controls, is now well established in healthy populations. The main goal of this study was to test this paradigm in a group of cognitively impaired older adults and elderly; their data were compared to the data obtained in a group of healthy older adults and elderly. Seventeen cognitively impaired and 17 healthy participants performed a typical survival task using a blocked within‐subject design procedure and free recall as the memory test. The healthy older adults and elderly performed better on this memory task as well as on other tests included in a neuropsychological evaluation protocol. Importantly, both groups benefited from survival processing. These results provide further support for the power of survival processing, extending this phenomenon to cognitively impaired aging participants. The data also suggest that the survival effect is not simply a form of deep processing. Potential applied considerations are presented.     

Sleep and dream suppression following a lateral medullary infarct: a first-person account

Consciousness can be studied only if subjective experience is documented and quantified, yet first-person accounts of the effects of brain injury on conscious experience are as rare as they are potentially useful. This report documents the alterations in waking, sleeping, and dreaming caused by a lateral medullary infarct. Total insomnia and the initial suppression of dreaming was followed by the gradual recovery of both functions. A visual hallucinosis during waking that was associated with the initial period of sleep and dream suppression is described in detail. Since the changes in sleep and their recovery are comparable to results of animal experiments, it can be concluded that damage to the medullary brain stem causes extreme but short-lived alterations in conscious state and that substantial recovery occurs even though the damage to the brain stem endures.     

Neural substrates of the ‘low‐level’ system for speech articulation: Evidence from primary opercular syndrome

We describe a patient with progressive disorder of speech, without language impairment (opercular syndrome). Morphometric analysis confirmed asymmetric volume reduction of the precentral areas (>left). Diffusion imaging showed significant white matter changes in the left frontal lobe, with specific involvement of the left corticobulbar tract and connections between supplementary/pre‐supplementary motor areas and the frontal operculum (frontal aslant tract). We suggest that the organization of expressive language includes a ‘low level’ motor system principally distributed in the left hemisphere that shows specific susceptibility to neurodegeneration, distinct from neural systems subtending praxic, and cognitive aspects of language.     

The Implicit Image of God: God as Reality and Psychological Well‐Being

Research has widely demonstrated that religiosity is related to psychological well‐being even in situations of severe illness. To assess religious beliefs, explicit measures have generally been used. In this study, we measured the belief that God is reality as opposed to myth or abstraction by using an implicit technique (the Single Category Implicit Association Test). The study was carried out in Italy, where a large majority of the population is Catholic, and the prevailing image of God is that of a compassionate and supportive father. Participants were cancer patients identifying themselves as believers. As expected, the automatic belief that God is reality (vs. abstraction) was related to beneficial outcomes: lower reported psychophysical anxiety symptoms and a weaker use of avoidance strategies to cope with stress. Thus, also, automatic religious beliefs may affect feelings and behaviors.