Mood profiles of Masters track and field athletes

In several studies attributing positive health benefits to running, the benefits include reduced depression, fatigue, anger, and increased vigor. Until now, little research has focused on Masters track and field athletes. The present study reports on 587 men and women Masters who participated in a mailed survey measuring mood states using the Profile of Mood States. In comparison to other groups of athletes, these Masters tend to be less depressed, less angry, and less fatigued. Attribution to lifestyle and maturity with their sport is discussed.     

Computer games: Paradigms of opportunity

Computer games offer unique opportunities to apply unobtrusive constraints to action that permit meaningful analysis without destroying the integrity of the game itself. To a much greater extent than most traditional laboratory tasks, computer games represent holistic, meaningful, and natural human activity. Considerable concern about the appropriate analysis and interpretation of results, however, remains. One strategy that addresses these concerns involves the adoption of separate but convergent analytic perspectives. This article suggests that three such perspectives (viz., the objective, the subjective, and the empirical) can be combined to provide the necessary logical leverage to allow meaningful research. Alternative analyses of data collected from the playing of a particular arcade-type computer game are used to illustrate this point.     

The capacity for rapid shifts in level of mental concentration

This investigation continues the exploration of a largely neglected topic in the field of attention, levels of mental concentration, by ascertaining under optimal conditions the capacity for shifting quickly from one level to another. Previous research in our laboratory had applied a set of five post-hypnotically cued levels of concentration or “cognitive arousal”, covering a very wide range, to a variety of perceptual and cognitive tasks. In the present study two highly trained undergraduate hypnotic subjects, one male and one female, were given progressively shorter time durations in which to respond to the post-hypnotic cues before viewing tachisto-scopically flashed consonants under cue influence. The results indicate a striking capacity to shift degrees of cognitive arousal very rapidly to one extreme or the other, on the order of 100 ms or less.     

Dopaminergic modulation of incentive motivation in adolescence: age-related changes in signaling, individual differences, and implications for the development of self-regulation

Behavioral activation that is associated with incentive-reward motivation increases in adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood. This quadratic developmental pattern is generally supported by behavioral and experimental neuroscience findings. It is suggested that a focus on changes in dopamine neurotransmission is informative in understanding the mechanism for this adolescent increase in reward-related behavioral activation and subsequent decline into adulthood. Evidence is presented to indicate that incentive-reward motivation is modulated by mesoaccumbens dopamine, and that it increases in adolescence before declining into adulthood because of normative developmental changes at the molecular level. Potential mechanisms of variation in functional mesoaccumbens dopamine transmission are discussed with a focus on the interplay between tonic and phasic modes of dopamine transmission in modulating both general incentive-motivational biases and the efficacy of reward learning during exposure to novel reward experiences. Interactions between individual difference factors and these age-related trends are discussed.