Sports psychology in the English Premier League: ‘It feels precarious and is precarious’

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.This article gives a rare account of the working life of a sports psychologist in the English Premier League (EPL), the elite division in English professional football. It shows how members of emerging professions such as sports psychology are a new precariat. Martin is more successful than many sports psychologists, but his job security is dependent on his continued ability to navigate managerial change: using his skills as a psychologist in the defence of his own employment but simultaneously keeping the (potentially sensitive) ‘psychology’ label of the work he does hidden until circumstances are propitious

Physiological Correlates of Volunteering

We review research on physiological correlates of volunteering, a neglected but promising research field. Some of these correlates seem to be causal factors influencing volunteering. Volunteers tend to have better physical health, both self-reported and expert-assessed, better mental health, and perform better on cognitive tasks. Research thus far has rarely examined neurological, neurochemical, hormonal, and genetic correlates of volunteering to any significant extent, especially controlling for other factors as potential confounds. Evolutionary theory and behavioral genetic research suggest the importance of such physiological factors in humans. Basically, many aspects of social relationships and social activities have effects on health (e.g., Newman and Roberts 2013; Uchino 2004), as the widely used biopsychosocial (BPS) model suggests (Institute of Medicine 2001). Studies of formal volunteering (FV), charitable giving, and altruistic behavior suggest that physiological characteristics are related to volunteering, including specific genes (such as oxytocin receptor [OXTR] genes, Arginine vasopressin receptor [AVPR] genes, dopamine D4 receptor [DRD4] genes, and 5-HTTLPR). We recommend that future research on physiological factors be extended to non-Western populations, focusing specifically on volunteering, and differentiating between different forms and types of volunteering and civic participation

Volunteer Engagement in Housing Co-Operatives – Civil Society “en miniature”

Housing co‐operatives host miniature versions of civil society. They vitalise a social system that is shaped by formal regulations, economic functions, and a population of private housing units. The study examines factors that influence a person’s willingness to volunteer in civic society using a multilevel analysis based on survey data from 32 co‐operatives and 1263 members. To do so, the social exchange theory is extended to include the member value approach, which connects social engagement with the fulfillment of a range of needs, thus going beyond a narrow economic cost benefit analysis. Study results show that volunteer engagement largely depends on the degree to which members can expect to experience their own achievement. This finding provides an explanation for significant differences in the engagement levels beyond factors that have already been determined (age, level of education). On an organizational level, the study reveals that the age of an organization influences volunteer engagement, but that the size and the degree of professionalization do not have an effect on it

Are they the adventurers? Comparing the risk attitudes of internationally mobile and non-mobile Germans

Moving–particularly to a new country–is fraught with risks as migrants leave familiar legal frameworks and cultural institutions behind them. To date, little is known about the psychological determinants of international migration. This chapter helps to fill this gap by analysing data from the first wave of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) in combination with data on non-mobile individuals from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). The analyses presented examine whether the risk attitudes of internationally mobile Germans (‘movers’) differ from those of their non-mobile counterparts (‘stayers’). The results show that–with control for key socio-demographic and socio-economic determinants of risk affinity–both emigrants and remigrants report a significantly higher willingness to take risks than stayers. Risk affinity differs within the group of internationally mobile individuals: Emigrants moving to geographically and culturally distant non-European countries report higher risk affinity than those moving to Germany’s neighbouring countries. Emigrants with multiple previous emigration periods are also more willing to take risks. These findings suggest that voluntary emigration from wealthy countries like Germany is only partly a matter of living conditions. Rather, (repeated) emigration seems to be a matter of personality and an expression of a more adventurous lifestyle

Mrs. Aristotele’s teeth: How SOEP transformed life satisfaction research

Aristotle thought that women were inferior to men, and cited the well-known »fact« that they have fewer teeth as evidence to support his belief. Bertrand Russell pointed out that all he had to do to check this »fact« was ask Mrs. Aristotle to open her mouth. SOEP has played the same role in research on LS that Mrs. Aristotle’s teeth should have played for Aristotle. Evidence from SOEP played a major role in overturning the previously dominant theory of LS – set-point theory – and has contributed substantially towards new lines of research directed towards explaining medium and long-term change. Our aim in this paper is to review some of the contributions that SOEP has made to research on Life Satisfaction (LS) under Gert Wagner’s leadership. We then attempt to make a further contribution by analysing SOEP data for the last 25 years (1990–2014) on the somewhat different factors which affect (1) LS change and (2) LS volatility. In doing this, we assume that the reasons why many people have fairly stable levels of LS are already well understood (Sheldon/Lucas 2014). SOEP’s contribution has primarily been to provide evidence about change. In this paper, we introduce what may be quite an important distinction between LS change and LS volatility. The point of this distinction is that many individuals whose long-term mean levels of LS show no net change nevertheless record high degrees of volatility, with periods in which their LS is well above their long-term mean, and other periods in which it is well below. There is now general agreement among LS researchers that our main current task is to develop a theory of LS which accounts for change – or, we would say, both change and volatility – as well as stability (Sheldon/Lucas, 2014). Clearly, set-point theory is purely a theory of stability and it is certainly correct to claim that there are some factors which tend to stabilise LS. But what are the variables that account for change and volatility? In seeking to explain change and volatility, we have found that conscious values/life priorities and behavioural choices play significant roles. It is likely that we have only scratched the surface in accounting for change. Future researchers will presumably find more individual choices – and perhaps public policy choices – which make a significant difference. Hedonic treadmills can then be sent to the junkyard of discarded academic metaphors

Cultivating mindfuness within the primary school system of a whole town—a reference project of the state of Northrhine Westphalia

© 2018, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature. Mindfulness-based interventions have been shown internationally to strengthen health promoting ressources in adults and children. Based on these findings, the Northrhine Westphalia state-funded reference project “Health, Integration and Concentration—Mindfulness in Primary Schools” designs and evaluates mindfulness-based 20-hour-interventinons within the primary school system of the town Solingen. First all 21 school principals were addressed and then the teams of teachers in each school. Based on these experiences interventions with the children were then developed together with and implimented by the teachers. In this paper the interventions are scetched out and first qualitative results on different systemic levels within the schools. Of particular interest are possible links between individual developments in attitude, self regulation and behavior, styles of communication and interaction among colleagues and with the children as well as developments in school organisation and culture towards mindful schools. Finally the paper summarizes dos and don’ts for similar projects

Pharmacokinetics and pharmacogenetics of capecitabine and its metabolites following replicate administration of two 500 mg tablet formulations

Item does not contain fulltextPURPOSE: To describe concentration versus time profiles of capecitabine and its metabolites 5'-DFUR, 5'-DFCR and 5-FU, depending on tablet formulation and on frequent and/or relevant genetic polymorphisms of cytidine deaminase, dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase, thymidylate synthase and methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR). METHODS: In 46 cancer patients on chronic capecitabine treatment, who voluntarily participated in the study, individual therapeutic doses were replaced on four consecutive mornings by the study medication. The appropriate number of 500 mg test (T) or reference (R) capecitabine tablets was given in randomly allocated sequences TRTR or RTRT (replicate design). Average bioavailability was assessed by ANOVA. Results : Thirty female and 16 male patients suffering from gastrointestinal or breast cancer (mean age 53.4 years; mean dose 1739 mg) were included. The T/R ratios for AUC0-t(last) and C max were 96.7 % (98 % CI 90.7-103.2 %) and 87.2 % (98 % CI 74.9-101.5 %), respectively. Within-subject variability for AUC0-t(last) and C max (coefficient of variation for R) was 16.5 and 30.2 %, respectively. Similar results were seen for all metabolites. No serious adverse events occurred. For the MTHFR C677T (rs1801133) genotype, an increasing number of 677C alleles showed borderline correlation with an increasing elimination half-life of capecitabine (p = 0.043). CONCLUSIONS: The extent of absorption was similar for T and R, but the rate of absorption was slightly lower for T. While such differences are not considered as clinically relevant, formal bioequivalence criteria were missed. A possible, probably indirect role of the MTHFR genotype in pharmacokinetics of capecitabine and/or 5-FU should be investigated in further studies