Flow, leisure, and positive youth development

Leisure has been associated with several developmental opportunities that foster adolescents’ optimal growth. Considering leisure as a context, activity or experience, researchers have focused on its role in the study of flow experience. Both leisure and flow experiences, and the way they interrelate, emerge as relevant to promoting positive youth development, daily and along life trajectories. This chapter aims to present and analyze conceptual and empirical evidence about the connection between positive youth development, leisure, and flow experience. Among the empirical evidence, we highlight studies from our Portuguese research team, the Research Group on Optimal Functioning - GIFOp, aimed at studying adolescents’ optimal functioning. Specifically, we illustrate results according to different aims and methodologies. In this sense, we discuss adolescents’ daily life perceptions of activities and quality of experiences, and future life goals, measured by retrospective self-report questionnaires; and flow, optimal experience and motivational aspects of subjective experience, by real-time measures, specifically the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). The conclusion sheds light on the importance of a psycho-social-ecological approach when studying adolescents’ flow and leisure experiences and how these enhance positive youth development. Future research directions will consider the importance of merging school and leisure contexts, highlighting the role of leisure structured activities to promote flow and optimal experiences, when considered as different components of subjective experience. In addition, the use of different methodologies based on both retrospective and realtime measures, are addressed as being equally important and relevant to continue the main conceptual discussion around flow and optimal experiences in adolescence.(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Road towards development of new antimalarial: organelle associated metabolic pathways in Plasmodium as drug targets and discovery of lead drug candidates

Malaria remains a global threat with millions of deaths annually. Emergence of parasite strains resistant to widely used antimalarials, including the artemisinin combination therapy (ACT), and the absence of an effective vaccine makes treatment of malaria difficult than ever before. The need of the hour is to re-evaluate the chemotherapeutic approach and to identify new drug targets and develop new pharmacophores against the parasite. An important approach for antimalarial drug discovery is to understand critical metabolic pathways in the parasite which may help us to identify critical targets in the parasites and design specific inhibitors for these targets. Here, we have discussed proteins and pathways in different parasite organelles, i.e. apicoplast, mitochondrial and food vacuole, which have been suggested as potential drug targets; these unique parasite proteins can be targeted to develop new and novel antimalarials. In addition, we have also discussed several antimalarial projects currently under different stages of drug development pipeline. These promising antimalarial compounds have the potential to overcome multidrug resistance. Ongoing global efforts to develop new antimalarials and to identify drug targets suggest a promising future on malaria elimination and eradication