Integrating coaching and positive psychology: Concepts and practice

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Coaching to enhance the mental toughness of people learning kickboxing

This pilot study investigated whether combining Positive Psychology Coaching (PPC) and kickboxing would progress the development of mental toughness compared to kickboxing alone. The data were derived from 28 participants who voluntarily took a four-week kickboxing course and completed the Mental Toughness Questionnaire (MTQ48) a week before the course commenced and after its completion. Using stratified randomisation for age and gender, 14 participants received a one-hour individual face-to-face coaching session while the other 14 only engaged in kickboxing. The results suggest that PPC may have a role in developing mental toughness when it is combined with vigorous physical exercise

Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain

ience, this issue p. eaap8757 Structured Abstract INTRODUCTION Brain disorders may exhibit shared symptoms and substantial epidemiological comorbidity, inciting debate about their etiologic overlap. However, detailed study of phenotypes with different ages of onset, severity, and presentation poses a considerable challenge. Recently developed heritability methods allow us to accurately measure correlation of genome-wide common variant risk between two phenotypes from pools of different individuals and assess how connected they, or at least their genetic risks, are on the genomic level. We used genome-wide association data for 265,218 patients and 784,643 control participants, as well as 17 phenotypes from a total of 1,191,588 individuals, to quantify the degree of overlap for genetic risk factors of 25 common brain disorders. RATIONALE Over the past century, the classification of brain disorders has evolved to reflect the medical and scientific communities' assessments of the presumed root causes of clinical phenomena such as behavioral change, loss of motor function, or alterations of consciousness. Directly observable phenomena (such as the presence of emboli, protein tangles, or unusual electrical activity patterns) generally define and separate neurological disorders from psychiatric disorders. Understanding the genetic underpinnings and categorical distinctions for brain disorders and related phenotypes may inform the search for their biological mechanisms. RESULTS Common variant risk for psychiatric disorders was shown to correlate significantly, especially among attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder (MDD), and schizophrenia. By contrast, neurological disorders appear more distinct from one another and from the psychiatric disorders, except for migraine, which was significantly correlated to ADHD, MDD, and Tourette syndrome. We demonstrate that, in the general population, the personality trait neuroticism is significantly correlated with almost every psychiatric disorder and migraine. We also identify significant genetic sharing between disorders and early life cognitive measures (e.g., years of education and college attainment) in the general population, demonstrating positive correlation with several psychiatric disorders (e.g., anorexia nervosa and bipolar disorder) and negative correlation with several neurological phenotypes (e.g., Alzheimer's disease and ischemic stroke), even though the latter are considered to result from specific processes that occur later in life. Extensive simulations were also performed to inform how statistical power, diagnostic misclassification, and phenotypic heterogeneity influence genetic correlations. CONCLUSION The high degree of genetic correlation among many of the psychiatric disorders adds further evidence that their current clinical boundaries do not reflect distinct underlying pathogenic processes, at least on the genetic level. This suggests a deeply interconnected nature for psychiatric disorders, in contrast to neurological disorders, and underscores the need to refine psychiatric diagnostics. Genetically informed analyses may provide important "scaffolding" to support such restructuring of psychiatric nosology, which likely requires incorporating many levels of information. By contrast, we find limited evidence for widespread common genetic risk sharing among neurological disorders or across neurological and psychiatric disorders. We show that both psychiatric and neurological disorders have robust correlations with cognitive and personality measures. Further study is needed to evaluate whether overlapping genetic contributions to psychiatric pathology may influence treatment choices. Ultimately, such developments may pave the way toward reduced heterogeneity and improved diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Bringing joy back into higher education: the potential contribution of coaching

Purpose There are significant challenges facing academics and senior leaders in higher education (HE) institutions internationally. These challenges have led to increasing levels of metrification and managerialism, which has fostered work intensification, reduced professional autonomy, stress and burnout amongst faculty staff. Traditional approaches for supporting and developing staff, such as mentoring and training, do not provide the resources faculty staff need to meet the challenges they face. In contrast, experiences in various other educational and professional settings have demonstrated the effectiveness of workplace coaching in fostering well-being, adaptability, flexibility and sustainable performance. This review argues that workplace coaching could similarly support academics. Design/methodology/approach A critical literature review evaluates coaching interventions across educational and comparable sectors to identify positive well-being and performance-based outcomes. Findings While there is limited research into the efficacy of coaching interventions for faculty staff in HE, research in other educational, as well as comparable professional contexts, identifies significant sustainable improvements in well-being and performance for professional staff. Practical implications The evidence that identifies positive outcomes of coaching in professional workplace contexts is compelling. This critical review uses some of that evidence base to propose an agenda to implement coaching programmes that support faculty staff to improve their well-being and performance. Originality/value While there are published research studies on the positive outcomes of coaching in primary and secondary educational contexts, as well as for postgraduate research students, there is very limited knowledge, practice and research about coaching faculty staff in HE. This article addresses this by critically reviewing a broad range of literature to identify coaching and research initiatives for faculty staff in HE institutions

Ways of working

Ways of working details the development of workshops for primary age children focusing on the giving and receiving of feedback during selected tasks. This is the first stage in work on peer coaching skills with this age group. The paper discusses the rationale for the chosen tasks and the changes made to the workshops through the experiences with different groups of children. The paper ends with reflections on the process by the researchers from different backgrounds and suggests ways of moving forward with this area