Is there a danger for myopia in anti-doping education? Comparative analysis of substance use and misuse in Olympic racket sports calls for a broader approach

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Racket sports are typically not associated with doping. Despite the common characteristics of being non-contact and mostly individual, racket sports differ in their physiological demands, which might be reflected in substance use and misuse (SUM). The aim of this study was to investigate SUM among Slovenian Olympic racket sport players in the context of educational, sociodemographic and sport-specific factors.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Elite athletes (N = 187; mean age = 22 ± 2.3; 64% male) representing one of the three racket sports, table tennis, badminton, and tennis, completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire on substance use habits. Athletes in this sample had participated in at least one of the two most recent competitions at the highest national level and had no significant difference in competitive achievement or status within their sport.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A significant proportion of athletes (46% for both sexes) reported using nutritional supplements. Between 10% and 24% of the studied males would use doping if the practice would help them achieve better results in competition and if it had no negative health consequences; a further 5% to 10% indicated potential doping behaviour regardless of potential health hazards. Females were generally less oriented toward SUM than their male counterparts with no significant differences between sports, except for badminton players. Substances that have no direct effect on sport performance (if timed carefully to avoid detrimental effects) are more commonly consumed (20% binge drink at least once a week and 18% report using opioids), whereas athletes avoid substances that can impair and threaten athletic achievement by decreasing physical capacities (e.g. cigarettes), violating anti-doping codes or potentially transgressing substance control laws (e.g. opiates and cannabinoids). Regarding doping issues, athletes' trust in their coaches and physicians is low.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>SUM in sports spreads beyond doping-prone sports and drugs that enhance athletic performance. Current anti-doping education, focusing exclusively on rules and fair play, creates an increasingly widening gap between sports and the athletes' lives outside of sports. To avoid myopia, anti-doping programmes should adopt a holistic approach to prevent substance use in sports for the sake of the athletes' health as much as for the integrity of sports.</p

MEDICAL HODEGETICS - ALMOST FORGOTTEN ART AND SCIENCE OF UPBRINGING MEDICAL DOCTORS

Introduction: Education in medicine faces a number of challenges and dilemmas and the onus is on Medical hodegetics, an important but almost forgotten discipline, to address them effectively. The task and final goal of education in medicine is to coach students into professionals, effective and ethical practitioners of medicine, giving them the best available knowledge, skills and attitudes and providing them with a professional identity so that they are able to think, speak, act and feel like medical doctors. During the life course human beings organize their experiences into a meaningful narrative that involves their personal, private, public and professional selves. The self can be defined as a distinct principle of identity, as a narrative construction and as an experiential dimension. Aim: The aim of this paper is to address the actuality and vitality of the hodegetic approach in medical education and professionalism. Methods: By cross-sectional study authors of the paper searched on-line scientific data-bases and analyzed references about Medical hodegetics subject. Results: Drawing on the literature on psychology of self, identity formation and personality styles as well as on own experience in medical education, the authors stress the increasing importance of medical hodegetics, very useful, but almost completely forgotten discipline. Medical hodegetics which involves all evidence-based medicine, values-based medicine, narrative medicine and person-centered medicine can significantly improve the quality of medical education. The identity of any person in any moment reflects its three domains: individual identity, relational identity, and collective identity, all relevant to medical education. The concept of professional identity formation has recently emerged and attracted great attention in literature on medical education and professionalism. Hodegetics, as a discipline that trains it, seems to us that the essential part of life and what every person should follow. Concluson: Medical hodegetics is an important pillar of the triad of medical deontology as well as it could be an important discipline in medical education and professional identity formation

How flexible is tool use in Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius)?

Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) do not habitually use tools, yet they can be trained to solve object-dropping tasks, i.e., to insert a tool into an apparatus to release a food reward. Previous research suggests that these jays can learn a preference toward functional tools – objects allowing them to obtain a food reward placed inside an apparatus – according to their density (Cheke et al., 2011). However, it is not yet known whether they can also select functional tools (tool selectivity) according to other physical properties such as size and shape, and use different kinds of tools to solve a similar task. Here we conducted three object-dropping experiments aimed at exploring these abilities in Eurasian jays. In Experiment 1, jays tended to select large stones as tools irrespective of the diameter of the apparatus. However, jays progressively developed a preference for the small tool, which was functional with both the wide and the narrow apparatuses. In Experiment 2, only vertically oriented long stones could fit into the narrow apparatus, whereas both long and round stones were functional with the wide apparatus. Jays showed a preference for the long stone and, with the narrow apparatus, tended to achieve the correct manipulation after one or more unsuccessful attempts. In Experiment 3, jays were able to use sticks and adopt a novel technique on the same object-dropping apparatus, thus providing the first evidence that Eurasian jays can use sticks as tools. Taken together, these results do not support the notion that tool selectivity abilities can be found in Eurasian jays but nonetheless show that these corvids can use different kinds of tools to solve similar tasks.P.A. received financial support by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei

Experimenter Expectancy Bias Does Not Explain Eurasian Jays' (Garrulus glandarius) Performance in a Desire-State Attribution Task

Male Eurasian jays have been found to adjust the type of food they share with their female partner after seeing her eat one type of food to satiety. One interpretation of this behavior is that the male encoded the female’s decreased desire for the food she was sated on, and adjusted his behavior accordingly. However, in these studies, the male’s actions were scored by experimenters who knew on which food the female was sated. Thus, it is possible that the experimenters’ expectations (sub-consciously) affected their behavior during tests that, in turn, inadvertently could have influenced the males’ actions. Here, we repeated the original test with an experimenter who was blind to the food on which the female was sated. This procedure yielded the same results as the original studies: the male shared food with the female that was in line with her current desire. Thus, our results rule out the possibility that the Eurasian jay males’ actions in the food sharing task could be explained by the effects of an experimenter expectancy bias

The evolution of social cognition: the case of animal cooperative problem solving

A major research area in non-human social cognition is the investigation of cooperative problem solving, i.e. the cognition involved in situations when animals cooperate with each other. Social cognition is thought to have evolved due to the demands of social living, and is often thought to present an adaptive specialisation for living in groups. A previous analysis of social learning, another area of social cognition, has highlighted how this has consequently led to two overarching biases in the literature: firstly, a bias towards testing only social species, and secondly, an a priori assumption that social learning is qualitatively different from learning involved in non-social situations. The problem of these biases may not restricted to social learning but be present also in other areas of social cognition research. Applying an equivalent analysis to cooperative problem solving shows that here too both biases are present. Firstly, empirical studies on cooperative problem solving primarily conducted with social species and species that exhibit cooperative behaviours in the wild. Secondly, the assumption that cooperative problem solving relies on a distinctly social cognitive ability can, at least implicitly, be observed throughout the literature. This may be the result of confounding different components of the cognitive process involved in cooperation: what information is required to successfully cooperate and how this information is acquired. While the former needs to involve information about another individual, there is no indication that the latter is required to differ from any known, domain-general cognitive mechanism. These two biases make it difficult to systematically test whether and how cooperation differs between species, and as such impede investigations into the evolution of cooperative problem solving

The illusion of science in comparative cognition

A prominent vein of comparative cognition research asks which cognitive abilities may be ascribed to different species. Here, we argue that the current structure of comparative cognition makes it near impossible to evaluate the accuracy of many of the claims produced by the field’s empirical research. We base this argument on six observations: i) the field is biased towards confirming more exceptional abilities in animals, ii) a likely high rate of false positive discovery, iii) the persistence of the bias towards more exceptional abilities, even in the presence of strong methodological criticism, iv) the absence of a formal method to assess evidence of absence of a cognitive ability, v) the ambiguity in definitions used to make claims, and vi) the small size of the research field. We then highlight how the widespread methodological and conceptual criticism in the comparative cognition literature does not facilitate scientific progress, rather it can impede it by creating an illusion of scientific rigour. Finally, we call for a reform of our research field that draws on recent developments in related fields and the Open Science movement

Substance abuse prevalence and its relation to scholastic achievement and sport factors: an analysis among adolescents of the Herzegovina–Neretva Canton in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract Background Substance abuse among adolescents is a major public health and social problem. However, studies rarely investigate the relationships between substance abuse, educational achievement and sport factors. Substance abuse is an even more significant problem in societies that have experienced trauma, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have had recent wars. The aims of this study were to investigate substance abuse among adolescents in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to study the potential gender-specific relationships between a) sport factors (physical activity/exercise/athletic participation) and substance abuse and b) scholastic achievement and substance abuse. Methods Our sample consisted of 1,032 adolescents who were 17 to 18 years old (435 boys and 597 girls) and who were in the final grade of high school. These subjects were randomly selected from the territory of Herzegovina-Neretva Canton of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Retrospective testing was performed using an extensive self-administered questionnaire. The questionnaire included questions involving topics such as sociodemographic variables, scholastic variables, sport factors, and substance abuse data (smoking habits, drugs consumption and alcohol consumption using the AUDIT questionnaire). Descriptive statistics, frequencies, analyses of the differences and correlational analyses were performed. Results Our results found that greater than one-third of the boys and one-fourth of the girls were daily smokers, and almost half of the boys and one-fifth of the girls practiced harmful drinking; other drugs (i.e. heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, etc.) were rarely consumed. Boys dominated in sport factors, whereas girls were more successful in scholastic achievement. Approximately 23% of the boys and 6% of the girls reported that they practiced harmful drinking and smoked simultaneously. Educational failure, which was defined as having one or more negative grades at the end of the last two school years, was identified in 20% of the boys and 9% of the girls. In both genders, substance abuse was negatively correlated with educational achievement, and half of those students who failed educationally reported daily smoking. Among the girls who experienced education failure, 33% were smokers, and 22% practiced harmful drinking. Sport factors were weakly correlated with substance abuse in boys; thus, we could not support the hypothesis that sports are a protective factor against substance abuse among male adolescents. In girls, participation in team sports was related with a higher incidence of smoking, but there was no evidence of sport factors having an influence on the consumption of alcohol. Conclusion In this study, the incidence of smoking and the consumption of alcohol were alarmingly high. These findings demonstrate the need for intervention programs to address these issues. These problems are particularly important, considering that substance abuse has a negative impact on educational achievement among boys and girls, and sport factors have not been found to be protective factors against substance abuse.</p

No evidence found for anticipatory looking responses to specific satiety in adult humans.

Recent research has uncovered a developmental paradox within theory of mind. While spontaneous response measures indicate sensitivity to false beliefs in infants before their first birthday, tasks involving elicited response measures of false belief are only passed consistently from 4 years of age. In adults, it has been suggested that these spontaneous responses may result from a minimal theory of mind system, which allows rapid and automatic attribution of mental states to others. It has been proposed that the limitations of the minimal system in adults may resemble the limitations demonstrated by non-human animals in tasks thought to involve mental state attribution. Here we have adapted the specific satiety paradigm used with Eurasian jays to investigate adult humans’ anticipatory looking responses based on another individual’s specific satiety. Although no clear evidence was found for spontaneous desire attribution in this study, it is difficult to draw conclusions from these results given the small sample sizes available and the current replication failures of studies demonstrating spontaneous responses to false belief