The Anxious Musician: Coping Strategies Used to Combat Music Performance Anxiety

Music Performance Anxiety, or MPA, affects over 20% of musicians, regardless of age, experience, or nationality. MPA is a form of social anxiety that causes the performer great distress before and during a performance experience, often causing the performance to have a less favorable outcome. As this is such a common occurrence in the field of music, it is important for teachers and students alike to understand the basis of anxiety as well as how to deal with its effects. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to conquer anxiety, but through the implementation of various coping strategies, musicians can have greater success and more enjoyable performance experiences

Socio-economic aspects of cigarette smoking in Malta and Gozo

Questions on smoking behaviour were included in the Census of Population and Housing taken in November 1985. Information was gathered on the number of cigarettes consumed by smokers, those who had stopped smoking and those who had never smoked. Since the Census, smoking has figured prominently in Maltese newspapers and the Health Education unit has been active in publicising the health hazards associated with tobacco dependence. Nevertheless relatively little research has been done on patterns of cigarette smoking and on the demographic, socio-economic and environmental factors that may go some way towards explaining the sharp variations in cigarette addiction within Malta and Gozo. This paper explores a number of these underlying dimensions and using a simple statistical index identifies those neighbourhoods which have high, about average and low levels of smoking behaviour.peer-reviewe

Conditional limit laws for goodness-of-fit tests

We study the conditional distribution of goodness of fit statistics of the Cram\'{e}r--von Mises type given the complete sufficient statistics in testing for exponential family models. We show that this distribution is close, in large samples, to that given by parametric bootstrapping, namely, the unconditional distribution of the statistic under the value of the parameter given by the maximum likelihood estimate. As part of the proof, we give uniform Edgeworth expansions of Rao--Blackwell estimates in these models.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/11-BEJ366 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

New perspectives in human movement variability

Movement variability is defined as the normal variations that occur in motor performance across multiple repetitions of a task.2 Bernstein1 described movement variability quite eloquently as ‘‘repetition without repetition.’’ Traditionally, movement variability has been linked to noise and error, being considered to be random and independent. This theoretical approach blends well with traditional statistical and assessment methods of movement variability that assume randomness and independence of observations. However, numerous studies have indicated that when movement is observed over time variations are closely related with each other neither being random nor independent. Practically, traditional methods can mask the temporal structure of movement variability and contain little information about how movement changes over time