Club Athletes: Dietary Supplement Use and How the Registered Dietitian Can Better Serve this Population

Dietary supplements are a booming business in the United States. Currently over half of Americans have taken a dietary supplement in the last year. Collegiate and professional athletes are even more likely to take a dietary supplement to get a competitive edge over their opponents. The objective of this study was to assess dietary supplement use in club athletes at Utah State University. Club athletes are non-scholarship athletes associated with a university. They often do not the same level of funding or resources that NCAA or scholarship athletes have. A survey was sent to all 401 club athletes at Utah State University electronically. 49 club athletes responded to the survey. Of those that responded 65% reported using a dietary supplement in the last two months. The most common dietary supplements consumed were protein, caffeine or energy drinks, Vitamin D, multivitamins, and fish oil. The most common reasons for taking a dietary supplement were to support energy, gain muscle or strength and general health. Both parents and friends were equally selected as the athlete’s source of information about dietary supplement use. Overall, dietary supplement use was less than expected for a collegiate athlete. The supplements consumed and reasons for taking supplements were in line with current research on NCAA athletes. The objective of the second study was to assess how to engage the student athlete. Currently there is limited research on how to engage collegiate athletes in sports nutrition programming. Semi-structured interviews were set up with Division I university sports dietitians. These interviews revealed that physical presence was the biggest contributor to increasing participation in sport nutrition programming. This is due to the athlete will build rapport and trust with the sports dietitian and will be more likely to believe them and come to them when they have a nutritional concern. All universities had similar sport nutrition programming. All universities offered one-on-one nutritional counseling, group talks, grocery store tours, cooking classes or demos, and body composition testing. The most frequent request of service from the student-athletes were body composition testing and one-on-one nutritional counseling. The information collected in this study was used to create recommendations for future effective sport nutrition programming with club athletes at Utah State University

Three religious orientations and five personality factors : an exploratory study among adults in England

In order to explore the power of the five factor model of personality to explain individual differences recorded on measures of the three religious orientations, a sample of 198 adults in England completed established measures of the three religious orientations (intrinsic, extrinsic, and quest) and the big five personality factors (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness). The data demonstrated that individual differences in the three religious orientations were largely independent of the five personality factors, apart from a significant positive correlation between intrinsic religiosity and agreeableness. These findings support Piedmont’s contention that religiosity is largely independent of personality when personality is operationalised in terms of the big five factors

A Review and Clarification of the Terms “holistic,” “configural,” and “relational” in the Face Perception Literature

It is widely agreed that the human face is processed differently from other objects. However there is a lack of consensus on what is meant by a wide array of terms used to describe this “special” face processing (e.g., holistic and configural) and the perceptually relevant information within a face (e.g., relational properties and configuration). This paper will review existing models of holistic/configural processing, discuss how they differ from one another conceptually, and review the wide variety of measures used to tap into these concepts. In general we favor a model where holistic processing of a face includes some or all of the interrelations between features and has separate coding for features. However, some aspects of the model remain unclear. We propose the use of moving faces as a way of clarifying what types of information are included in the holistic representation of a face

Children and Domestic Homicide

In England and Wales, Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs) are completed following domestic homicides. They provide multi-agency accounts of families living with domestic violence and abuse (DVA) and their interactions with services. This study addressed children’s involvement in domestic homicide. We analysed all DHRs where there were children under eighteen among those published in 2011–16. This yielded a sub-sample of fifty-five DHRs from a total of 142 reports. The extent of children’s exposure to homicide varied, with some directly witnessing the homicide, viewing the aftermath or calling for help. DHRs provided limited information on children’s needs or their future care and children were only rarely involved in the review process itself. Nearly a third of reports identified that children had previous experience of DVA and contact emerged as a means of sustaining control and intimidation. There was evidence of blinkered vision among professionals who missed indicators of DVA and failed to engage with perpetrators or listen to children. Practitioners need training and assessment tools that direct their attention onto children and knowledge of resources that enables identification of need and appropriate referrals. Law and practice should address children’s involvement in the DHR process and the risks embedded in child contact

Constructions of Social work: The Writing Stories Project

Social work is a complex phenomenon. At a time when individualistic models of practice dominate the profession, it becomes difficult for students, practitioners and educators to link the problems of the service-users to wider perspectives of gendered, racialised and classed structures. My interest in this comes as a practitioner of social work education. It has grown out of teaching social policy to social work students. Social policy as a discipline tends to take explicit political positions and is concerned with the practicalities of politics. Making sense of the politics of social work is a challenging task (Powell, 2001). The role of social policy within social work education is to enhance the delivery of social justice in part through an understanding of structures and policy upon service-users. This thesis starts by setting the context for social work and social policy teaching within social work education. It then moves onto discuss the search for a methodology and approach to analysis that could support the central aim of the thesis, bridging the gap between experience and learning to improve the engagement of social work students with social policy. This became the Writing Stories Project in which, following the example of Haug et. al.’s (1987) feminist project of Memory Work, social work students on a BA in Social Work were asked to write personal stories expressed as third person accounts to a series of cues relating to social policy within social work. Words such as need, protection, risk, etc. were used to provoke memories which could then be interrogated by the groups and myself for their relevance to social work education. This work took place over the academic year 2008 – 2009 and involved 34 students, who produced 94 stories. The thesis then examines the stories produced by the student cohort and uncovers the subject(s) of social policy discourse in relation to social work and social welfare. Analysis uncovers a subject who is primarily a consumer, with few mutual bonds, tasked with the surveillance rather than support of others. However, this subject can also resist attempts to be categorised and reduced. Gender and nation in particular are both policed and resisted within the texts. In concluding my focus is on my practice as an educator in social work and methods and content for social policy teaching. However, I am also concerned with the epistemological limitations of social policy as a discipline and how the project can add to current debates around methodological approaches and knowledge production and development

Is Domestic Abuse an Adult Social Work Issue?

Within a global profession with a stated definition that includes ‘promoting social change and development, social cohesion and the empowerment and liberation of people’ (online), it would be expected that the issue of domestic abuse would be integral to the training and role of all social workers. This article reports on research, which highlighted both a lack of understanding of the role of adult social worker within cases of domestic abuse and also a desire for further training around the issue. However, this article sets out how the current UK (in particular, English) context of social work marginalises the issue of domestic abuse within practice with adults. This marginalisation has been achieved through the construction of domestic abuse as a children and families issue and limited duties, powers and resources within statutory work to support victims/survivors in their own right, rather than as ‘failing’ parents. However, the article argues that the role of social work education should be wider than teaching to the current policy or procedures and instead encourage a wider appreciation of the social, historical and political context. The article concludes with tentative suggestions for how domestic abuse could be considered within the social work curriculum for adult practitioners. This is in acknowledgement that social workers can be well positioned for the detection, investigation and support of those experiencing abuse

Unfamiliar faces engaged in non-rigid motion are processed holistically

Paper presented at the Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference 2015, 8-11 April 2015, Sydney, Australia

White sharks exploit the sun during predatory approaches

There is no conclusive evidence of any nonhuman animal using the sun as part of its predation strategy. Here, we show that the world\u27s largest predatory fish-the white shark (Carcharodon carcharias)-exploits the sun when approaching baits by positioning the sun directly behind them. On sunny days, sharks reversed their direction of approach along an east-west axis from morning to afternoon but had uniformly distributed approach directions during overcast conditions. These results show that white sharks have sufficient behavioral flexibility to exploit fluctuating environmental features when predating. This sun-tracking predation strategy has a number of potential functional roles, including improvement of prey detection, avoidance of retinal overstimulation, and predator concealment

The movement advantage in famous and unfamiliar faces: a comparison of point-light displays and shape-normalised avatar stimuli.

Facial movement may provide cues to identity, by supporting the extraction of face shape information via structure-from-motion, or via characteristic patterns of movement. Currently, it is unclear whether familiar and unfamiliar faces derive the same benefit from these mechanisms. This study examined the movement advantage by asking participants to match moving and static images of famous and unfamiliar faces to facial point-light displays (PLDs) or shape-normalised avatars in a same/different task (experiment 1). In experiment 2 we also used a same/different task, but participants matched from PLD to PLD or from avatar to avatar. In both experiments, unfamiliar face matching was more accurate for PLDs than for avatars, but there was no effect of stimulus type on famous faces. In experiment 1, there was no movement advantage, but in experiment 2, there was a significant movement advantage for famous and unfamiliar faces. There was no evidence that familiarity increased the movement advantage. For unfamiliar faces, results suggest that participants were relying on characteristic movement patterns to match the faces, and did not derive any extra benefit from the structure-from-motion cues in the PLDs. The results indicate that participants may use static and movement-based cues in a flexible manner when matching famous and unfamiliar faces