Gaming magazines and the drive for muscularity in preadolescent boys: a longitudinal examination

The development of a drive for muscularity among boys has been linked to various cultural influences, one of which is exposure to mass media depicting the muscular male body ideal. We sought to determine whether self-reported exposure to four ideal-body magazine genres (health/fitness, fashion, sports, and gaming) predicted an increased drive for muscularity 1 year later. A sample of 104 Black and 77 White preadolescent boys (mean age 8.77) participated in a 2-wave longitudinal panel study. Controlling Wave 1 grade, perceived thinness/adiposity, and drive for muscularity, exposure to video gaming magazines predicted a significant increase in Wave 2 drive for muscularity, but only for White boys. Discussion calls for the inclusion of video gaming magazine exposure measures in future research on print media and male body ideals, along with empirical exploration of racial themes in gaming magazines.     

亲社会性视频游戏对内隐攻击性认知抑制效应的实验

利用亲社会性视频游戏和IAT测验,从内隐社会认知的角度研究亲社会性视频游戏对高中生内隐攻击性认知的影响,并分析影响是否具有性别差异和攻击特质差异。结果表明:(1)亲社会性视频游戏对高中生内隐攻击性认知的抑制效应显著;(2)游戏类型和性别对内隐攻击性认知的交互作用显著,亲社会性视频游戏更容易对女生的内隐攻击性认知产生抑制效应;(3)攻击特质对高中生的内隐攻击性认知的主效应显著,并且游戏类型和攻击特质对高中生内隐攻击性认知的交互作用显著,亲社会性视频游戏更容易对低攻击特质学生产生抑制效应。由此可见,亲社会性视频游戏能够有效抑制高中生的内隐攻击性认知水平。     

An evaluation of speed management measures in Bangladesh based upon alternative accident recording,speed measurements,and DOCTOR traffic conflict observations

With 21,000 people annually killed in road traffic (estimated figure by World Health Organization), Bangladesh has one of the highest fatality rates in the world. Vulnerable road users (VRUs) account for over 50% of road traffic casualties, and 70% of casualties occur in rural areas. As in many Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), the official road accident statistics are incomplete and biased.Safe Crossings (Netherlands) and the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research Bangladesh (CIPRB) (Bangladesh) received permission from the Bangladesh government in 2014 to design and implement an integrated speed management program (consisting of a combination of small-scale infrastructural measures, active community involvement and road user education) at three locations where a national highway intersects small communities. The infrastructural countermeasures to improve road safety consisted of speed humps, rumble strips, signs and road markings and were designed following the Dutch road design guidelines. In a Before–After study design, we used a combination of three research methods to monitor and evaluate the road safety interventions. We created our own traffic accident recording system with trained local record keepers, we conducted laser-gun speed measurements of motorized traffic (both at intervention and control locations), and we applied the Dutch Objective Conflict Technique for Operation and Research (DOCTOR) for observing serious traffic conflicts at the intervention locations. The latter was based upon DOCTOR scores from video recordings of the behaviour at the three experimental locations Before and After the interventions.Prior to installing the intervention program, the three locations combined had, on average, about 100 serious accidents, 10 deaths, and 200 injured people on a yearly basis. In April 2015, all infrastructural measures were completed. In the after period (till the end of January 2016), the alternative accident recording system showed a 66% reduction in the number of serious accidents, a 73% reduction in the number of injured people, and a 67% reduction in the number of people killed.The unobtrusive laser-gun speed measurements resulted in a net reduction of 13.3 km/h (or 20% in relative terms) on average at the intervention locations by taking the general speed development at the control locations into account. According to Nilsson’s power law this would result in a 59% reduction of the number of people killed, well in line with the actual accident figures.The total number of serious conflicts (only DOCTOR scores 3, 4, and 5) was significantly reduced from 64 serious conflicts per location in a 4.5 h period Before to 29 serious conflicts in the After period, on average (Poisson distributed variable, p < 0.01), or a 55% reduction in relative terms. By including the traffic volumes, the reduction in conflict risk overall is 54%. Moreover, the severity of conflicts was reduced in the After period with only one most severe conflict (DOCTOR score 5) left. Buses represent the largest portion of road users involved in serious conflicts at all three locations, followed by cars and CNGs (Compressed Natural Gas vehicle). By far, the most frequently occurring conflict is of the type head-on conflict between an overtaking bus or car that is encountering a road user in opposite direction (for the greater part a CNG).All three evaluation measures point to a similar impact of the intervention program and unveil an improvement in road safety between 54% and 60%. The speed-reducing measures indeed considerably reduce the speed of motorized traffic, both the mean speed and 85th percentile values, both the number and severity of serious conflicts are reduced, and the actual number of accidents has decreased. It appears that Nilsson’s power law for the relation between a difference in mean speed and the change in the number of accidents also applies to LMICs.Speed management measures as common in high-income countries appear to be also effective in LMICs. For evaluation purposes of road safety impacts, a Traffic Conflicts Technique approach (also developed in high-income countries) seems valid and effective as well for application in LMICs.As there are thousands of traffic black spots with similar characteristics as the three intervention locations in Bangladesh, this integrated approach may well offer similar road safety improvements elsewhere.     

The impact of physical load on duration estimation in sport

We investigated whether physical load has an influence on the accuracy of duration estimation of sporting activities presented in real time and slow motion. 86 participants were studied in two single sessions of 45 min each.Our results showed no general effects for physical load, when comparing physical load versus rest. However, we could replicate findings of past research (Schütz et al., 2021), showing that the duration of sports performance is estimated more accurately when presented in real time compared to slow motion. Further we found, that under physical load, participants perceiving the physical exercise as hard (RPE ≥15) estimated time significantly shorter and more accurately compared to participants perceiving the physical exercise as light or moderate (RPE <15).Thus, our results suggest that using slow motion may worsen the assessment of sports performance. Additionally, we could show that intense physical exertion contributes to reducing the overestimation of time.     

Using perceptual home-training to improve anticipation skills of soccer goalkeepers

ObjectiveThis study aims to test the effectiveness of a perceptual training concerning the anticipatory skills of soccer goalkeepers, by assessing their performances while engaged in predicting the direction of penalty kicks.DesignForty-two skilled goalkeepers were randomly assigned to three training groups: Experimental, placebo, and control. All the groups were tested at the beginning of the experiment and re-tested after a period of eight weeks.MethodThe pre-test consisted of the presentation of temporally occluded videos of penalties recorded from the goalkeeper's perspective, and participants had to predict the direction of the ball. The experimental group practiced with an interactive home-training, based on video analogous to those of the test, with the addition of both positive and negative feedback. The placebo group viewed television footage of penalty kick shoot-outs. Participants of both groups were free to schedule their own training/placebo sessions. Finally, the control group did not receive any treatment.ResultsThe results demonstrated the effectiveness of the home-training protocol, evidencing significant accuracy improvements between pre-test and post-test only for the experimental group.ConclusionsThe outcomes indicate that skilled athletes can benefit from perceptual training, which was not investigated before among soccer goalkeepers. Indeed, all the previous training studies concerning soccer penalty predictions were run on participants with either recreational or no goalkeeping experience at all. Moreover, the present training protocol is innovative because learners can schedule training sessions on their own. Finally, its usability suggests numerous potential applications.     

Remote identification of psychophysiological parameters for a cognitive-emotional conflict

The contradiction between the conscious and emotional assessment of situations often arises when there is a discrepancy between reality and ideal view. The purpose of this study is to identify a system of remotely diagnosed parameters (by video recording using Skype tools), which can objectively indicate the presence of a cognitive-emotional conflict during a dialogue. The current study has become particularly relevant in the COVID-19 environment, where face-to-face communication is limited, and all interactions must occur in a remote online format. In such an environment, the identification of formal signs indicating latent conflicts in online interactions comes to the fore. To stimulate an outburst and fix the cognitive-emotional conflict remotely, various schemes were used: interviews based on the self-attitude technique, discussions based on the transactional analysis model, free reasoning about situations that were selected by the age, and other parameters of participants, as well as watching video clips with an unexpected end. For automatic marking of people's emotional reactions in video data, a computer program was developed using neural network algorithms based on VGG16.Furthermore, the neural network for emotion recognition was pretrained based on open sources by the P. Ekman FACS model. Finally, video recordings were marked according to the expert assessment results regarding the presence of cognitive-emotional conflict. We conducted 27 interviews with the participation of both genders, including ten high school students (from 12 to 17 years old), a total of 338,075 frames were received. As a result, it was found that the two facial expression parameters identified by the program reliably distinguish the presence of a cognitive-emotional conflict. Furthermore, in all the studied schemes of telecommunication dialogue, the «happy» parameter was significantly more pronounced in a situation of conflict.     

Human actions recognition in video scenes from multiple camera viewpoints

Internet of Video Things (IoVT) has been proposed and studied as a scenario where video cameras are ubiquitous and continuously acquiring data from their surroundings. In order to enable handling of a large amount of data generated in IoVT architectures, robust autonomous video processing must be performed. An important application is the recognition of different actions performed by humans in the context of security. This research evolves a previously published work, by reducing the input dimensionality to the recognition system, making it more robust to variations in the position of the body in each video frame, and by using a Multilayer Perceptron Artificial Neural Network whose hyperparameters are here optimized by a Genetic Algorithm. Significant improvements in the recognition rate have been obtained, despite the use of a more straightforward pre-processing phase and the increase in the number of viewpoints from the video cameras.     

Movement Control Strategies in a Dynamic Balance Task in Children With and Without Developmental Coordination Disorder

Abstract

Our study aimed to analyze movement control strategies using predefined criteria for amplitude and differences in these strategies between children with and without DCD. Children with (n?=?28) and without DCD (n?=?15) were included. A video-observation-tool was used to score the moving body parts during a Wii Fit slalom task over multiple time points. Two-step cluster analysis was used to extract distinct movement strategies. Two different movement strategies were identified that were independently validated by a measure of task performance and a subjective mark of quality of the movement. Initial differences between groups and changes over time toward the more successful strategy were found in both groups, albeit in a different percentage. This study shows that the more efficient movement strategy is seen in the majority of the TD children and only in a small number of children with DCD, even after practice.     

Psychological and physiological stress in non-competitive and competitive esports settings: A systematic review

ObjectivesCompetition is related to psychophysiological stress responses and is a key aspect of esports. Yet, while competition may indeed have an impact on performance, little is known about competition-related psychophysical stress responses in esports. Accordingly, this review aims to investigate whether playing esports in competitive (and non-competitive) settings is related to psychological and/or physiological stress.DesignA systematic literature review was performed. Study inclusion criteria included: assessment of psychological and/or physiological stress in esports, study of healthy individuals over 12 years of age, and published in peer-reviewed journals in English or German.MethodThe literature search comprised EBSCOhost, PubMed, and Web of Science up until August 2019. An additional search was performed on Science Direct, Google Scholar, and Sponet.ResultsSeventeen studies met inclusion criteria. In publications investigating the non-competitive setting, it can be assumed that merely playing esports games is unrelated to psychophysiological stress reactions. While three out of five studies on stress in competitive settings demonstrated no hormonal reaction, one study reported an increase in anxiety levels in winners as well as an increase cortisol levels from baseline to postgame conditions, and two studies found an activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Overall, the studies revealed theoretical and methodological limitations, which are discussed in the present review.ConclusionsAlthough the existing literature contributes to an initial understanding of psychophysiological stress in esports, further in-depth studies of stress responses in actual competition are needed.     

Video game preferences and their relation to career interests

The current study used an mTURK sample to determine if there is a relation between video game preferences and career interests. Previous research has found that individual (e.g., personality) differences influence gaming preferences (Zammitto, 2001) and we sought to extend these findings to the domain of career interests. In addition, we examined the potential moderating role of gender. Since researchers have found that gender disparities in spatial attention can be reduced by playing certain types of video games (Feng, Spence, & Pratt, 2007), and it has been demonstrated that spatial ability is an important predictor of success in careers where women are typically underrepresented (Blickenstaff, 2005), we predicted that women with a preference for these types of games (versus a general preference) may have more interest in these careers. We found that gaming motivations were differentially associated with career interests. In addition, gender was found to significantly moderate a number of these relations, such that the association between gaming tendencies and career interests was stronger for women than for men. Findings from the current study should help guide future research that aims to increase the representation of women in STEM careers.