The Role of Repression in the Incidence of Ironic Errors

The role of repression in the incidence of ironic errors was investigated on a golf task. Coping styles of novice golfers were determined using measures of cognitive anxiety and physiological arousal. Following baseline putts, participants (n = 58) performed a competition putt with the opportunity to win UK£50 (approx. US$100). Before completing the competition putt participants were instructed to “land the ball on the target, but be particularly careful not to over-shoot the target.” The distance the ball traveled past the hole formed the measure of ironic effects. Probing of the coping style × condition interaction, F(2, 41) = 6.53, p < .005, revealed that only the repressors incurred a significant increase in ironic error for the competition putt. This suggests that the act of repressing anxiety has a detrimental performance effect

Disordered eating in male athletes: A meta-analysis

We examined the propensity for male athletes to exhibit symptoms of disordered eating. Using meta-analytic techniques, we examined overall effect size, individual effect sizes for specific sport types, standard of athletic competition and diagnostic tools from 31 studies. When all studies were considered as a homogeneous group, male athletes did not have symptoms of disordered eating that were significantly different from non-athletic controls. However, significant moderator effects emerged for sport type and measurement: (a) wrestling reported a greater incidence of disordered eating; and (b) studies that reported data from the Eating Attitudes Test yielded a significantly greater incidence of disordered eating in male athletes compared to non-athletes. Although some sports seem to present a higher risk of disordered eating compared to others, the effects are weak and heterogeneous. We make suggestions for the development of the research area, which has been severely hampered by the diagnostic tools that have been available for the study of men

Differentiating risks to academic freedom in the globalised university in China

Academic freedom in China is unquestionably under threat from various quarters. Yet the assumption that only the logics of authoritarian Communist Party power shape the terrain in which scholars operate provides us with a limited perspective on these threats. The Chinese academy has become deeply entangled with transnational forces, and is increasingly driven by similar business logics to those in play in universities around the world. We argue that these forces too contribute to the context for the exercise of academic freedom and its restriction. As is the case elsewhere, discourses around developing the national ‘knowledge economy’ and related logics of securitisation around knowledge production create conditions in which some forms of academic research are prioritised over others. Echoing the ‘culture wars’ plaguing the academy in many other countries, the research agendas most under threat in China are ones that connect to transnational movements and struggles, especially those focussed on labour and class, gender and feminism, race and ethnicity and human rights. In this article, we outline what we see as the key forces shaping the landscape for academic freedom in China, with a concentration on areas of research and teaching in the social sciences and humanities that are most at risk in the current conjuncture

Authors' Reply to Hill: Comment on "The Great British Medalists Project: A Review of Current Knowledge on the Development of the World's Best Sporting Talent".

This letter refers to the original article available at: doi:10.1007/s40279-016-0476-2; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs40279-016-0476-2; http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/23120

The Role of Athlete Narcissism in Moderating the Relationship Between Coaches’ Transformational Leader Behaviors and Athlete Motivation

Leadership research that examines follower characteristics as a potential moderator of leadership effectiveness is lacking. Within Bass’s (1985) transformational lead­ership framework, we examined follower narcissism as a moderator of the coach behavior–coach effectiveness relationship. Youth athletes (male = 103, female = 106) from the Singapore Sports Academy (mean age = 14.28, SD = 1.40 years) completed the Differentiated Transformational Leadership Inventory (Callow, Smith, Hardy, Arthur, & Hardy, 2009), the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Raskin & Terry, 1988), and indices of follower effort. Multilevel analyses revealed that athlete narcissism moderated the relationship between fostering acceptance of group goals and athlete effort and between high performance expectations and athlete effort. All the other transformational leader behaviors demonstrated main effects on follower effort, except for inspirational motivatio

Don’t miss, don’t miss, d’oh! Performance when anxious suffers specifically where least desired

We present two novel tests of Wegner�s (1994) theory of ironic processes of mental control using a hockey penalty shooting task (Study 1) and a dart-throwing task (Study 2). In Study 1 we aimed to address a significant limitation of ironic effects research in a performance setting by differentiating non-ironic performance error from specifically ironic performance error. When instructed not to miss in a specific direction, anxious performers did so a significantly greater number of times; importantly, there was no difference in non-ironic error, which provides the first specific support for Wegner�s theory in a performance setting. In Study 2, we present the first examination of the precision of ironic errors. When anxious, participants performed not only more ironically but also performed more precisely in the to-be-avoided zone than when they were not anxious. We discuss the results in the context of the importance of specific instructions in coaching environment