Anxiety symptom interpretation in high-anxious,defensive high-anxious,low-anxious and repressor sport performers

Abstract

For the first time in a sport setting this study examined the intensity and direction of the competitive state anxiety response in collegiate athletes as a function of four different coping styles: high-anxious, defensive high-anxious, low-anxious and repressors. Specifically, the study predicted that repressors would interpret competitive state anxiety symptoms as more facilitative compared to high-anxious, defensive high-anxious, and low-anxious performers. Separate Multivariate Analyses of Variance (MANOVA) were performed on the intensity and direction subscales of the modified Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2). A significant main effect was identified for trait worry revealing that low trait anxious athletes reported lower intensities of cognitive and somatic anxiety and higher self-confidence and interpreted these as more facilitative than high trait anxious athletes. The prediction that performers with a repressive coping style would interpret state anxiety symptoms as more facilitative than performers with non-repressive coping styles was not supported.     

Exploring the psychological underpinnings of the moral mandate effect: motivated reasoning, group differentiation, or anger?

When people have strong moral convictions about outcomes, their judgments of both outcome and procedural fairness become driven more by whether outcomes support or oppose their moral mandates than by whether procedures are proper or improper (the moral mandate effect). Two studies tested 3 explanations for the moral mandate effect. In particular, people with moral mandates may (a) have a greater motivation to seek out procedural flaws when outcomes fail to support their moral point of view (the motivated reasoning hypothesis), (b) be influenced by in-group distributive biases as a result of identifying with parties that share rather than oppose their moral point of view (the group differentiation hypothesis), or (c) react with anger when outcomes are inconsistent with their moral point of view, which, in turn, colors perceptions of both outcomes and procedures (the anger hypothesis). Results support the anger hypothesis.     

Vexatious litigants and unusually persistent complainants and petitioners: from querulous paranoia to querulous behaviour

Querulous paranoia was once of considerable clinical and academic interest in psychiatry. Over the last 40 years, however, it has virtually disappeared from the professional landscape. This decline occurred at the very time that a proliferation of complaint organizations and agencies of accountability were drawing more and more people into asserting their individual rights through the pursuit of claims and grievances. Querulous behaviour, as a result, far from declining, is on the increase, bringing with it suffering for the querulous and disruption to the organizations through which they seek their vision of justice.This article examines querulous behaviour in the vexatious litigant and in abnormally persistent complainants and petitioners. The phenomenological and nosological issues are outlined and the risks of the emergence of threatening and violent behaviour is emphasized. Threats should not be ignored, for a variety of reasons. Approaches to managing querulous behaviour in the courts and the complaint organizations are discussed, together with the utility of individual therapy. Querulous behaviour should once more take its place among the legitimate concerns of mental health professionals. Those caught up in a querulous pursuit of their notion of justice are amenable to management that can ameliorate their suffering and reduce the disruption they create.     

The problem behavior model: the development of a stalkers clinic and a threateners clinic

Traditionally, forensic mental health services have focused on the assessment and treatment of offenders with serious mental disorders. In recent years, there has been growing recognition that forensic clinicians have an important role to play for those offenders who engage in criminal acts driven by psychological or/and social problems, which may, or may not, occur in conjunction with a major mental disorder. This is especially true for specific offenses such as stalking and threatening. This article describes the innovation of the problem behavior model. This model uses a reductionist approach and the nexus between psychiatry and psychology to address the complex phenomena associated with specific problem behaviors that often culminate in offenses. The model is illustrated by describing the development of specialist clinics for the problem behaviors of stalking and threatening.     

Sexually abused children suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder: assessment and treatment strategies

Child sexual abuse is a highly prevalent problem that frequently occasions the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder in the victimized youngster. This selective review addresses recent advances in the assessment and treatment of sexually abused children with post-traumatic stress disorder. Firstly, we outline the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder and significant moderating variables in the development of post-traumatic stress disorder. Secondly, we address the clinical assessment of post-traumatic stress disorder in sexually abused children, recommending a developmentally sensitive, multi-informant approach. Thirdly, we consider a family-wide cognitive-behavioural treatment framework for sexually abused children with post-traumatic stress disorder that involves both child and non-offending caregivers. Fourthly, we examine the results of recent evaluation studies supportive of cognitive-behavioural therapy in the treatment of sexually abused children. Lastly, we consider conclusions for clinical practice and directions for future research.     

Ingroup bias as a function of salience,relevance, and status: An integration

This paper reports the results of a meta-analytic integration of the results of 137 tests of the ingroup bias hypothesis. Overall, the ingroup bias effect was highly significant and of moderate magnitude. Several theoretically informative determinants of the ingroup bias effect were established. This ingroup bias effect was significantly stronger when the ingroup was made salient (by virtue of proportionate size and by virtue of reality of the group categorization). A significant interaction between the reality of the group categorization and the relative status of the ingroup revealed a slight decrease in the ingroup bias effect as a function of status in real groups, and a significant increase in the ingroup bias effect as a function of status in artificial groups. Finally, an interaction between item relevance and ingroup status was observed, such that higher status groups exhibited more ingroup bias on more relevant attributes, whereas lower status groups exhibited more ingroup bias on less relevant attributes. Discussion considers the implications of these results for current theory and future research involving the ingroup bias effect.     

Operationalizing the effect of the group on the individual: A self-attention perspective

The effect of the group on the individual is considered from the perspective of self-attention theory. It is proposed that group members will become more self-attentive, and thus become more concerned with matching to standards of appropriate behavior, as the relative size of their subgroup decreases. A simple algorithm, termed the Other-Total Ratio, is presented which numerically describes this effect of the group on the individual. An analysis of group effects on individuals' self-attention supports this perspective, as do analyses of the results of 42 previous studies in four other areas (conformity, prosocial behavior, social loafing, and antisocial behavior). This orientation to the effect of the group on the individual is linked to recent developments in self-attention theory and compared to Latané's social impact theory.     

Accuracy in perceptions of consensus: Differential tendencies of people with majority and minority positions

When people are interested in how common one or more of their attributes is in a reference population, they must often generate their own comparison information based on a limited sample of acquaintances and experiences. Subjects in the present research were asked to describe themselves in terms of a variety of attributes, and were also asked to estimate the percentage of other college students who would indicate possession of each attribute. For each attribute, subjects were assigned a majority or minority status, depending on whether the majority of the population did or did not share their attribute. The principle findings were (1) the majority subjects generated more accurate comparison information than did the minority; (2) the majority subjects were better than chance and better than minority subjects in distinguishing between attributes for which there was high versus moderate consensus; and (3) the minority subjects tended to overestimate the consensus for their attributes, while the majority subjects tended to err in the direction of underestimation of their Consensus. The discussion focused on possible causes of these tendencies, and on research implications involving attributional biases and intergroup conflict.