Social referencing in the domestic horse

Dogs and cats use human emotional information directed to an unfamiliar situation to guide their behavior, known as social referencing. It is not clear whether other domestic species show similar socio-cognitive abilities in interacting with humans. We investigated whether horses (n = 46) use human emotional information to adjust their behavior to a novel object and whether the behavior of horses differed depending on breed type. Horses were randomly assigned to one of two groups: an experimenter positioned in the middle of a test arena directed gaze and voice towards the novel object with either (a) a positive or (b) a negative emotional expression. The duration of subjects’ position to the experimenter and the object in the arena, frequency of gazing behavior, and physical interactions (with either object or experimenter) were analyzed. Horses in the positive condition spent more time between the experimenter and object compared to horses in the negative condition, indicating less avoidance behavior towards the object. Horses in the negative condition gazed more often towards the object than horses in the positive condition, indicating increased vigilance behavior. Breed types differed in their behavior: thoroughbreds showed less human-directed behavior than warmbloods and ponies. Our results provide evidence that horses use emotional cues from humans to guide their behavior towards novel objects

Non Verbal Communication in Business Life

Everybody communicates on two levels, namely verbally and non-verbally. Verbal communication, or the spoken words we use, represent a very small portion (less than 10%) of our overall message. People can lie, misrepresent or mislead you with their words. Non-verbal language represents over 50% of our total message. Mastering the language of non verbal communication becomes more and more an art and has an impact on our outcomes. The non-verbal message will always be more a more accurate representation of the person's feelings, attitudes or beliefs.

Custom-designed motion-based games for older adults: a review of literature in human-computer interaction

Many older adults, particularly persons living in senior residences and care homes, lead sedentary lifestyles, which reduces their life expectancy. Motion-based video games encourage physical activity and might be an opportunity for these adults to remain active and engaged; however, research efforts in the field have frequently focused on younger audiences and little is known about the requirements and benefits of motion-based games for elderly players. In this paper, we present an overview of motion-based video games and other interactive technologies for older adults. First, we summarize existing approaches towards the definition of motion-based video games – often referred to as exergames – and suggest a categorization of motion-based applications into active video games, exergames, and augmented sports. Second, we use this scheme to classify case studies addressing design efforts particularly directed towards older adults. Third, we analyze these case studies with a focus on potential target audiences, benefits, challenges in their deployment, and future design opportunities to investigate whether motion-based video games can be applied to encourage physical activity among older adults. In this context, special attention is paid to evaluation routines and their implications regarding the deployment of such games in the daily lives of older adults. The results show that many case studies examine isolated aspects of motion-based game design for older adults, and despite the broad range of issues in motion-based interaction for older adults covered by the sum of all research projects, there appears to be a disconnect between laboratory-based research and the deployment of motion-based video games in the daily lives of senior citizens. Our literature review suggests that despite research results suggesting various benefits of motion-based play for older adults, most work in the field of game design for senior citizens has focused on the implementation of accessible user interfaces, and that little is known about the long-term deployment of video games for this audience, which is a crucial step if these games are to be implemented in activity programs of senior residences, care homes, or in therapy

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos Dances Aeschylus: The Politics of Historical Reenactment when Staging the Rites of the Past

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874–1952), along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos, founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the Ancient Greek rites that took place on that spot over 2,500 years before. She invited “overseers of culture” from around the globe to convene in the holy city of Delphi for a reenactment of the performance of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in the ancient amphitheater, an Olympic-styled athletic contest, and an exhibition of Greek crafts. This paper explores Palmer-Sikelianos’s choreography, music and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound in light of her own research on ancient Greek culture and our modern theories of historical reenactment. Based on silent film records of Palmer-Sikelianos’s 1930 festival, her own autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Barney on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary and other contemporary stagings of ancient Greek festivals and sport, I demonstrate how Palmer- Sikelianos blended the oldest sources on ancient Greek ritual music and dance that she could find with what she saw as an authentic “spirit” of Greek culture as observed in modern Greek society. Compared to the Ballets Russes’s reenactment of ancient Greece, Palmer-Sikelianos’s project to reenact “authentic” Greek theater and choreography illustrates that theories of theatrical historical reconstruction in the early twentieth century were heavily influenced by contemporary theatrical, political, and social events. And like the Fokine and Nijinsky models, Palmer-Sikelianos’s staging redefines ancient dance through the prisms of ancient sources and modern aesthetics

Neuropsychological functions of nonverbal hand movements and gestures during sports

Emotional body-distant gestures are a prominent feature of winning athletes. Because negative emotions have been associated to increased self-touch behaviour, we investigated the hypothesis that athletes change from a more body-distant nonverbal hand movement behaviour when winning to a body-focused behaviour when losing. Nonverbal hand movements of professional right-handed tennis athletes were videotaped during competition and analyzed by certified raters using the NEUROpsychological GESture(NEUROGES)System. The results showed that losing athletes increase their irregular, on body, and phasic on body hand movements, particularly with the left hand. Emotion / attitude rise gestures with the right hand characterised winning athletes. The data suggest that the nonverbal hand movements of athletes serve different neuropsychological functions. Winners nonverbally express their positive feelings by body-distant gestures but change towards their own body to regulate stress when losing

Coaches, sexual harassment and education

Sexual harassment in sport has become an active research field within the past decade yet we know relatively little about the characteristics of the harassing coach. How are harassing coaches characterized by their victims, that is, the athletes themselves? Do they demonstrate specific kinds of behaviours? One purpose of this article is to address these types of questions. Another is to assess the usefulness of general classifications of perpetrators of sexual harassment. This is done by examining whether qualitative data from sexually harassed elite female athletes support the various conceptual frameworks for sexual harassment that are presented. Results from interviews with 19 female elite athletes who were sexually harassed by their coaches produced a sport typology that consists of three main types: 1) The Flirting-Charming Coach, 2) The Seductive Coach and 3) The Authoritarian Coach. These types are discussed in relation to the previous classifications to test the degree of fit. The limitations of monolithic classifications are exposed by this exercise: the data suggest that, rather than being one-type only, sexually harassing coaches select from a repertoire that may include several different harassment scripts. They vary these according to situational conditions. The wider limitation of social science classifications, that their categories are not discrete, also applies here. This need not be a practical limitation, however, if the typologies are used as heuristic devices rather than to determine, for example, specific disciplinary outcomes or treatment regimes. Sexual harassment prevention is often either missing from coach education programmes altogether or subsumed within broader themes such as (gender) equity or diversity management. One of the educational values of typologies is that they focus attention on the range of potential sexually harassing behaviours in ways which might otherwise escape attention. Communication styles, postures, gestures and group management techniques are just some of the elements of coaching that can be improved with an understanding of sexual harassment scripts. It is difficult to assess whether feminization of the coaching profession would lead to a less harassing environment. But, since this environment is so closely linked to hegemonic masculinity, and what are often described as traditional male values, we hypothesize that a transformation of the coaching culture, and associated re-scripting of coach behaviour, might be easier if more female coaches were involved in sport

Playing with tension:national charisma and disgrace at Euro 2012

By the time of Euro 2012, deepening tensions of nationalism and internal social struggles were developing across Europe in worsening conditions of systemic crisis. The official football ideology of UEFA conceives Euro 2012 as a civilizing platform for mutual respect and brotherhood between competing nations. In contrast, what I call Hyper-Critical Theory conceives of football competitions like Euro 2012 as part of a de-civilising ‘sports mode of production’ that necessarily produces crisis conditions, alienation and violence on a mass scale, fostering nationalism, militarism and racism. Between these polar perspectives, the figurational sociology of sport associated with Norbert Elias proposes that major international football competitions like Euro 2012 creates and dissipates contingent tensions of ‘group charisma’ and ‘group disgrace’. Study of Euronews ‘post-national’ coverage of Euro 2012 allows their explanatory adequacy to be compared. In a competition structure like the Euros no social group – players, officials, media or fans – is able to disregard entirely the field capabilities of the ‘best minority of 11’ in the serious game of exemplifying the group charisma of nations

Self-talk and self-regulation of high-performance young tennis players in training and competition

Currently, self-talk is one of the self-regulation strategies in Sports Psychology that has been more widely recognized and used by athletes and coaches. The present study has the general objective of describing the observable and unobservable (self-reported) self-talk and gestures of young high-performance tennis players in training and competition settings. Specifically, the present investigation has as main objectives: (1) Identify and compare observable self-talk used by tennis players in training and competition settings; (2) Describe and compare the perceptions that tennis players have about their self-talk (self-reported self-talk) in training and competition settings; (3) Categorize the perceptions that tennis players have about their self-talk and gestures in both contexts; and (4) Verify how much awareness tennis players have about their self-talk by comparing data collected from observations and interviews. It should be noted that an objective that had not been established and that emerged from the data collection with the tennis players was to evaluate the relationship between tennis players' self-reported selftalk and their affective processes. A mixed method approach was carried out in four stages: pilot study, data collection in an international tennis tournament, data collection in training sessions of the participants and semi-structured interview with each of the tennis players. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and cluster analysis. Qualitative data were analyzed using a Thematic Analysis. In Study I, mixed research was developed to compare tennis players’ self-talk in competition and practice sessions and the tennis players’ self-reported self-talk in interviews, with the main focus being the age-related and context-related aspects of selftalk. In Study II, a deductive Thematic Analysis was proposed based on the speeches of the participants in the interviews, with the aim of identifying patterns in the self-talk and gestures of young tennis players in training and competition. We conclude that, although the literature on self-talk already presents empirical investigations in different sports and some possible theoretical models, there is still a vast field to be covered by research, such as the characteristics of self-talk across childhood and adolescence and the level of awareness that the individuals, especially young, have of their self-talk. We present initial data and hypotheses about the nuances of self-talk and awareness of tennis players aged 11 to 17 and we advance in the description of how these participants talk to themselves in training and competitions. Through Study I, we concluded that tennis players have a significant difference in their self-talk in training and competition, mainly in the quantitative aspect, but also in the qualitative, and that younger tennis players have less awareness about how they talk to themselves in these contexts. From Study II, we expanded the result that had already been described in Study I from the categorization of the most used self-talk categories in competition and training, emphasizing, again, that tennis players largely use this self-regulation strategy in the first context. Finally, we reinforce the importance of carrying out investigations into the self-talk of child and adolescent tennis players in other cultures, as well as investigations into the self-talk of coaches in training and interventions that develop the metacognitive capacity of young athletes.Atualmente, a autofala é uma das estratégias de autorregulação mais amplamente reconhecida e utilizada por atletas e treinadores no campo da Psicologia do Esporte. O presente estudo tem como objetivo geral descrever a autofala e os gestos observáveis e não-observáveis (autorrelatados) de jovens tenistas de alto rendimento nos contextos de treino e competição. Especificamente, a presente investigação tem como objetivos principais: (1) Identificar e comparar a autofala observável utilizada por tenistas em contextos de treino e competição; (2) Descrever e comparar as percepções que os tenistas têm sobre a sua autofala (autorrelatada) em contextos de treino e competição; (3) Categorizar as perceções que os tenistas têm sobre a sua autofala e os seus gestos em ambos os contextos; e (4) Verificar o nível de autopercepção que os tenistas têm sobre a sua autofala, comparando dados coletados de observações e entrevistas. Ressalta-se que um objetivo que não havia sido estabelecido e que emergiu a partir da coleta de dados com os tenistas foi avaliar a relação entre a autofala autorreferida dos tenistas e seus processos afetivos. Uma abordagem de método misto foi realizada em quatro etapas: estudo piloto, coleta de dados em um torneio internacional de tênis, coleta de dados em sessões de treinamento dos participantes e entrevista semiestruturada com cada um dos tenistas. Os dados quantitativos foram analisados por meio de estatística descritiva, análise de variância (ANOVA) e análise de cluster. Os dados qualitativos foram analisados por meio da Análise Temática. No Estudo I, uma pesquisa mista foi desenvolvida para comparar a autofala dos tenistas em uma competição e em sessões de treinamento e a autofala dos tenistas em entrevistas, com foco principal na relação entre a autofala e a idade dos participantes e o contexto em que é utilizada. No Estudo II, foi proposta uma Análise Temática dedutiva a partir das falas dos participantes das entrevistas, com o objetivo de identificar padrões na autofala e nos gestos de jovens tenistas em treinamento e competição. Concluímos que, embora a literatura sobre a autofala já apresente investigações empíricas em diferentes modalidades esportivas e alguns possíveis modelos teóricos, ainda há um vasto campo a ser percorrido pela pesquisa, tal como as características da autofala na infância e adolescência e os diferentes níveis de percepção que os indivíduos, principalmente os jovens, têm de seu diálogo interno. Apresentamos dados e hipóteses iniciais sobre as nuances da autofala e da autopercepção de tenistas de 11 a 17 anos e avançamos na descrição de como esses participantes conversam consigo mesmos em treinos e competições. Através do Estudo I, concluímos que os tenistas têm uma diferença significativa em sua autofala nos treinos e competições, principalmente no aspecto quantitativo, mas também no qualitativo, e que os tenistas mais jovens têm menos consciência sobre como falam consigo mesmos em esses contextos. A partir do Estudo II, ampliamos o resultado que já havia sido descrito no Estudo I em relação à categorização das categorias de autofala mais utilizadas em competição e treinamento, ressaltando, novamente, que os tenistas utilizam de forma mais significativa essa estratégia de autorregulação no primeiro contexto. Por fim, reforçamos a importância de realizar investigações sobre a autofala de crianças e adolescentes tenistas em outras culturas, bem como investigações sobre o diálogo interno de treinadores em treinamentos e intervenções que desenvolvam a capacidade metacognitiva de jovens atletas

More than a Match: The Role of Football in Britain’s Deaf Community

The University of Central Lancashire has undertaken a major research project into the role of football within the deaf community in Britain. As well as reconstructing the long history of deaf involvement in football for the first time, the project has also focused on the way in which football has provided deaf people with a means of developing and maintaining social contacts within the community, and of expressing the community’s cultural values. This article will draw on primary data gathered from interviews conducted with people involved in deaf football in a variety of capacities. During the course of these interviews, a number of themes and issues emerged relating to the values and benefits those involved with deaf football place on the game, and it is these which are explored here