Coping with the effects of fear of failure in young elite athletes

Coping with stress is an important element in effective functioning at the elite level in sports, and fear of failure (FF) is an example of a stressor that athletes experience. Three issues underpin the present preliminary study. First, the prevalence of problems attributed to FF in achievement settings. Second, sport is a popular and significant achievement domain for children and adolescents. Third, there is a lack of research on FF in sport among this population. Therefore, the objectives of the study were to examine the effects of FF on young athletes and to find out their coping responses to the effects of FF. Interviews were conducted individually with nine young elite ath­letes (5 males, 4 females; ages 14-17 years). It was inferred from the data that FF affected the athletes' well-being, interpersonal behavior, sport performance, and schoolwork. The athletes employed a combination of problem-focused, emotion-fo­cused, and avoidance-focused coping strategies, with avoidance strategies being the most frequently reported

Drinking alcohol at home and in public places and the time framing of risks

The United Kingdom has witnessed a steady rise in per capita consumption of alcohol in the three decades leading up to 2004 since when there has been a decline. Much of this increase can be accounted for by increased drinking away from licensed premises. In this article, we analyse the ways in which people who drink in such settings think about the temporal dimension of risks which they associate with alcohol consumption. We present findings from a qualitative study which explored accounts of drinking away from licensed premises, either at home or in public places such as parks, given by adults and young people of age 13 and over. We found that research participants associated drinking away from licensed premises with immediate risks. Those risks they identified included fights breaking out at home or in a public place, drinking to excess, falling over and becoming ill when intoxicated. Respondents mostly did not express concerns about longer-term health risks. However, some research participants did bring in a more extended time frame in relation to ‘setting boundaries’ so as to prevent gradual escalation of consumption, and avoiding ways in which ‘alcohol can change one’s life’ for the worse. We will argue that the predominance of mostly short-term thinking about alcohol consumption in the face of public health messages about the accumulation of health risks may be accounted for by the contradictory nature of such advice, and/or by the positive cultural and personal value placed on drinking

Does negative affect prime alcohol in alcohol-dependent inpatients? A large-scale clinical investigation of the moderating role of depression and executive control

Item does not contain fulltextThe present study tested to what extent alcohol-related concepts are automatically activated by negative affective words. Participants were alcohol-dependent inpatients (n = 847) and an inpatient control group (n = 130). An affective priming task was used to assess the automatic activation of alcohol-related memory associations. Executive control was assessed with an adapted Stroop task. We expected alcohol-dependent inpatients to show enhanced alcohol activation after negative primes. In addition, we predicted that this enhanced negative priming effect would be further qualified by participants’ levels of depressive symptoms. Finally, we expected the interaction between executive control and priming effect as well as the interaction between executive control, priming effect and depressive symptoms to be predictive for group membership. Results showed that alcohol-dependent inpatients did not show an priming effect by negative words, and this effect was not moderated by levels of depressive symptoms. Moreover, group membership was not predicted by the interaction between priming effect and executive control, nor by the interaction between priming effect, executive control and depressive symptoms. We conclude that these results are most likely due to the particular population we studied (i.e., in12 p